And One Sword To Rule Them All: "Excalibur" (1981)

directed by John Boorman
Starring Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nigel Terry, Liam Neeson, Corin Redgrave, Cheri Lunghim with newcomers Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne, Neil Jordan and Ciaran Hinds

Excalibur, the Sword Of Power.

I watched Excalibur last night. I've seen it a handful of times since it was first released and it's one of those flicks where if it's on, I gotta watch it to the end. So involving and detailed is its whole mise-en-scene that I get swept into that world and have a hard time coming back out. It's a weird movie with its own distinct mood. Still, I'm never ready for it to be over.

I'd been fascinated by the King Arthur myth since I was a kid, beginning with Disney’s The Sword In The Stone, in which the kid Wart is tended to by a daffy Wizard and a talking owl (the same Disney universe of woods where, apparently, Aurora is being seen to by three daffy fairies before meeting her spinning wheel fate the next glen over, and beyond the next clutch of trees Snow White is tending to her dwarfs). In the animated fable, Wart falls into a river and is transformed by Merlin into a fish in order to learn a few life lessons before resuming his human form.

I loved that sequence as a kid; the idea that a poor anybody could experience magic and then be transformed into a king was transfixing for a fantasy-minded kid from the Bronx. The boy-as-fish scene -- in fact the entire Disney movie and title -- is taken directly from the first book of T.H. White’s opus The Once and Future King, a thoroughly detailed and deeply researched rendering of the King Arthur tale that I read in high school. The book gave me a deeper understanding of all the players in the Arthurian legend, their motivations, and the ultimate tragedy that befell them all.

Excalibur pulls from that source but more directly from the 15th century Thomas Malory classic Le Morte D'Arthur, which I have never read. In my estimation, Excalibur is one of the best contemporary screen adaptations of that story. It retains both the folksiness and the grandeur of the legend, but also the abiding sadness of a world lost through the folly of man himself. All of that is due to the off-kilter but brilliant world view of director John Boorman. But while I live for this kind of artsy approach, the critics panned Excalibur when it arrived in theaters.

I saw Excalibur soon after its April 1981 release in Boston with a Cape Verdean guy I had just begun seeing. We were crazy about each other. We were young and there was a desperate, star-crossed lovers aspect to our relationship since I was graduating from college within the month and returning to New York, while he had no plans to go to college or ever leave Roxbury. Every moment we spent together had a dramatic urgency and perhaps this lent to the initial romantic impact of the film on my senses.

The spellbinding Excalibur is a cinematic dirge, mourning the loss of a world that was both more magical and more noble than ours. There is a pageantry about the film, a surreal, distant quality to it that is the embodiment of myth. Each shot is gorgeously composed in exquisite, painterly detail to serve as an eternal tableau. The film has its excesses, to be sure: the lighting of the titular sword and the outre musings of Merlin can be over the top. But the story is not to be imagined as taking place in the natural world as we know it. History has already shown us that things will not end well; Arthur will be betrayed and outwitted even as he establishes the roots of a democratic thought system that remains the bedrock of the British and American judiciary today. Excalibur is impressionistic art. It's high opera captured on film.

Excalibur also features a number of British stars we will come to know well later in their careers – Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Ciaran Hinds – but for the most part, they are all unknown to us and are treated as an ensemble. Even the actor who portrays Arthur (Nigel Terry) is an unknown quantity to Americans, so this adds to the sense that the viewer is being plunged into a strange history in which there are no star turns (none of that “with Sir Laurence Olivier as Uther Pendragon!” crap). The plunge is also enhanced by the fact that Boorman uses “Siegfried’s Funeral March” by Richard Wagner in the opening and throughout the film, to give the whole a distinctly operatic atmosphere, and by the fact that Excalibur has no opening credits other than title and a few lines about the setting. The audience is dropped front and center into a medieval land-rights battle between the armies of King Uther Pendragon and the Lord of Cornwall, mud and spittle flying, armor clanking, broadswords hefted, grunts and curses and horse whinnies fogging the night air.

Merlin: "I wish I didn't already know what's going to happen here (sigh)."


Merlin the magician is adviser to Uther. He is the fulcrum from which the storyline swings, as he knows all that will happen before it does and can summon otherworldly powers to his and Uther’s aid. Uther forms a truce with Cornwall after hours of bloody night clashes, and Cornwall invites him and his men to his castle for a celebration where Cornwall’s wife Igraine is bidden to dance for the throng. Mistake. Within hours of forging the truce, Uther is rudely salivating over Igraine and announcing his lustful intentions toward her, which gets him and his men thrown out of Cornwall castle. As Cornwall plans to take his battalion into the forest to dispatch Uther et al once and for all, Uther prevails on Merlin to aid him in his quest to screw Cornwall’s wife. Merlin does so against his better judgment, magically transforming Uther into the image of Cornwall so he can slip into the palace unchallenged and bed Igraine. As Uther sates his lust, the real Cornwall meets his death in battle with Uther’s men. (“He came, and he went,” said my witty date.)

Thus is the story set in motion, for Uther takes the now widowed Igraine to wife as her young daughter, the necromantically gifted Morgana, watches. Igraine gives birth to a son, but Merlin shows up to collect the child as part of the bargain he struck with Uther to bring him to Igraine in the first place. Baby Arthur is secreted away and give to Sir Ector to raise alongside his son Kay.

We next see the teenaged Arthur at the jousting tournament where the misplacement of Kay's sword leads to the pulling of the Sword In The Stone. Lines among the local knights are quickly drawn between those who believe that with the sword Excalibur in hand, Arthur is the rightful king of England, and those who think its hooey, and new battles are fought. Tutored by Merlin in wisdom and the natural magic that is dying out with him, Arthur proves to be an apt pupil and a harmonizing force among the different factions. But as soon as Arthur claps eyes on Guenevere (Lunghi) he's a bumbling goner, and though Merlin tries to get him to cool his jets the two are eventually married.

The story is well known by now. The only notes left to add are that Lancelot is here played by hot stuff Nicholas Clay, and it would be tough for any Arthurian chick to ignore him. Lance's armor is highly polished so as to appear blindingly white on the screen, thus telegraphing the goodness of his soul. He appears truly tortured over his love of Jen.

Boorman's own son Charley plays Arthur's wicked son Mordred, spawned when Arthur was tricked into laying with his own evil sister Morgana (Mirren). The film takes a truly icky turn when Mordred shows up, and also when poor Percival is tortured by Morgana on his quest for the Holy Grail.

Excalibur is not a perfect movie. But its images, musical moments, and ideas about justice, peace, faith, and the destiny of Man will haunt you afterwards. It goes to show why the story of King Arthur and the ideal of the Round Table has endured for generations.