Word: lancelot
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...film slows down and Boorman's pacing remains erratic for the next two hours. Boorman gives us almost the entire legend: young Arthur's gaining Excalibur: Merlin's education of the young king: Arthur's courting of Guenevere: the establishment of Camelot: the love triangle of Arthur. Guenevere, and Lancelot: the search for the Holy Grail: the power struggle between Arthur and his half-brother/son (through incest) Mordred. Alas, the film stumbles between episodes, failing to connect the careful pattern of events coherently. The numerous battle scenes--exciting, if a bit gratuitously gory--always run too long. Even...
...performers fail to find Williamson's easy balance of comic and serious. Nigel Terry, as Arthur, is solemn throughout, and never believable as the inspiration of a people. As his wicked half-sister. Morgana, Helen Mirren is appropriately fiendish. Cheri Lunghix is a competent Guenevere, but Nicholas Clay's Lancelot is a semi-comatose pretty...
...Arthur, Guenevere and the Knights of the Round Table. He has a millennium of tough acts to follow: Malory and Tennyson and Tolkien, Wagner and Lerner and Loewe. On screen in the '70s, George Lucas set the story in space (Star Wars); Robert Bresson made it austere (Lancelot of the Lake), and six English cutups made it funny (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) But Boorman has never been cowed by precedent or expectations. In Point Blank (1967), he twisted the gangster genre into a psychedelic ghost story. In Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), he torpedoed The Exorcist...
...that immortality can be won only through a fatal joust with his son and slayer. Cherie Lunghi too closely resembles a Covent Garden flower child to bring Guenevere to mature life, but her callow modernity wreathes Excalibur in later ideals of post-courtly love. Nicholas Clay makes an athletic Lancelot: he could be a dashing soldier of fortune or a knight in stainless steel...
...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...