CINEMA
Knights of the Round Table. (Empire.)
FOR all its sincere efforts to "make blossom the flowers of chivalry and to spread them in sweet-smelling profusion across a cinema- Scopic screen, Knights of the Round Table is a weedy affair, a splendid failure of a garden in which everything colourful, moving, exciting and appealing has been planted only to perish on the verge of blooming. King Arthilr, as played by Mel Ferrer, is about as inspiring as a glass of milk, as pure and insipid as that beneficial drink and equally unstimulating. At all times his inflexible goodness makes him look completely miser- able. Robert Taylor's Lancelot is very Much more spirited, and he not only looks gallant but has a fiery quality which makes his brother knights, weighed down by excessive virtue or vileness, not to mention tons of armour plating, seem like puppets. Ava Gardner, lattice-bound and wimpled, is painfully restricted, histrionically speaking, Stanley Baker and Anne Crawford as the villains of the piece appear to have stepped straight from a Victorian melodrama, and only Felix Aylmer as Merlin conceals the poverty of the script based, but surely only lightly, on Malory's, by speaking his lines with sonorous solemnity. So much for the players, poor things. As to the battle scenes, they are, when on a large scale, fairly effective, although the cavalry charges cannot compare with those in Henry V, and the melees are half-hearted. Still, they are not too bad. The individual combats, however, though admittedly hard to handle, are merely hilariously funny. Two armoured men slashing at each other with broadswords, every successful blow sounding like the clash of one of the cheaper brands of saucepans, rouse memories of the Crazy Gang, and not all the plumes flying and the banners waving can ennoble the sight of a rider getting pushed, wham, off his horse to fall with a noise like a.whole batterie de cuisine collapsing. Produced by Pandro S. Berman and directed by Richard Thorpe, the film has its moments of visual beauty and it tries hard to distil the essence of the period by giving us every legendary cliché froth ye faire ladye in her bower to the Holy Grail made of perspex; yet, though
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
Previous page
