Movie Knights - Excalibur!

I've matured a bit since I first saw it on the big screen in 1981 but Excalibur at that time was a mighty movie which was filled with rough and rugged knights knocking the stuffing out of one another and hot chicks often in mostly nothing at all. A young man does not forget the first time he got see Helen Mirren's boobs. 

The acting in this one was a bomb burst of over-the-top and no one did it better than Nicol Williamson as Merlin who said his lines like no one else and I didn't know that at the time he and Mirren were arch foes which gave their performances an added heat. Lots of faces show up for the first time in this one for me such Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart, both of course actors who will go on to dominate the pop culture. But through and through this movie is the vision of one man, and that's John Boorman. 

Boorman took Le Morte D'Arthur and hammered out a bold and virile rendition of the Camelot myth. His Uther as played by Gabriel Byrne is an utter villain, a ruthless rapist who is commanded by his passions with no thought of the future. Later the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere will echo this lack of control, though with softer tunes and with a greater sense of shared compassion. Excalibur is a movie that shows man rising up from lustful and violent barbarism and barely making it by the end. It takes the death of King Arthur (Nigel Terry) himself to bring about the transformation, he like Moses having brought his people to a circumstance he cannot and will not be able to share in.  

Excalibur is far from a perfect movie. I've always had a nickname for the Knights of the Round Table as the "Knights of Alcoa", their armor shining so very brightly it reminds me of the aluminum foil. The storytelling is disjointed in places and while I've adapted to that on subsequent viewings it left me a little confused in the beginning. All in all Excalibur is a potent movie that left a firm impression even after forty years. 

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