Review: Knights of the Round Table (1953)
I love the legend of King Arthur, so why don't I love this movie?
1953's Knights of the Round Table is an MGM spectacle of the highest scale and has pretty much everything one could ask for when it comes to a rousing swashbuckler: sword fights, massive battles scenes with hundreds of people hacking away at each other in bloodless letterboxed carnage, and a varied cast of characters to either cheer or boo.
The pieces are all here for classic storytelling. After all, the tale of Arthur and his Knights remains one of our oldest myths, with the earliest known reference of Arthur dating back to 1136. Knights of the Round Table cites Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur from 1485 as its primary source. this is a tale that's been adapted over and over again in every single art form that exists. MGM reportedly spent $2.6 million on the picture, and the massive scope of the film, with it's lavish color cinematography, huge cast of extras, and with proven stars Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner anchoring the film.
Unfortunately, the film lacks momentum and doesn't really give us much reason to invest in any of these characters on a personal level. From a screenplay perspective, the film seems more concerned with the spectacle of the battles and the grandeur of the sets than in delivering characters that we actually want to watch. Mel Ferrer does a decent job as Arthur Pendragon, but it's a stoic performance that requires little emotion and largely consists of delivering very important lines about the responsibilities of kingship and kingdom. The real problem, at least for me, is Robert Taylor as Sir Lancelot. This is the third and final film in a Robert Taylor action hero triptych that started with Quo Vadis in 1951, continued with Ivanhoe in 1952, and concludes here in 1953. Frankly, Robert Taylor isn't up to the task and seems wildly miscast as Lancelot. There's something distinctly midwestern about Taylor that makes him more suited for cop roles, detectives, and even western gunslingers. A great swordsman of medieval English folklore is simply too much of a stretch, and when he's supposed to share sparks with Guinevere (Ava Gardner, who doesn't appear in the movie until nearly 40 minutes in), we have to take the plot's word for it, because there's no chemistry. It's worth noting that Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner had appeared together in 1949's The Bribe, a film that far better suits them both. Of course, the audiences of the time would disagree with my assessment about Robert Taylor being miscast, since Knights of the Round Table was a big success upon its release.
Another problem is that the story of Arthur is one of the great romances. While I am referring to the love triangle at the center of the story, I'm also referring to the literary genre romance in the broadest sense of the term. The story of Arthur is a romance between a ruler and his people. It inspires us and makes us believe in things larger than ourselves. Arthur was chosen by fate itself to lead his nation, and for a time, Camelot was a shining pinnacle of peace and prosperity before collapsing into tragedy. Yet, when needed the most, Arthur is promised to return again, the Once and Future King. But Knights of the Round Table isn't interested in the romance of the tale, and the events play out more like a history lesson told with no sense of importance, or even with any emotion. When Arthur charges Lancelot to go north to defend England from the Scots, Lancelot basically says "Yep, I'll go do what you want. Okay, bye now." Taylor is so flat, he brings the same energy to his scenes as if he were ordering a salisbury streak from a diner. Ava Gardner is supposed to be devastated that her secret lover is leaving and may not return, but all she conveys is a look of constipation. There's no dramatic tension whatsoever. The human elements here simply don't work for me.
For a movie that cites such a classic of English literature as its primary source, Knights of the Round Table seems unconcerned with some of the more fantastic elements of the story. To be fair, this is partly because Sir Thomas Mallory's account of the story is far less embellished than the versions that would develop later through authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Howard Pyle, T.H. White, and Mary Stewart. As such, we have Merlin, but no magic. We have the Sword in the Stone, but little sense of Arthur being chosen by England herself. We have knights, but almost no scenes involving the Round Table (despite the film's title). We have the quest for the Holy Grail, but the knights seek the chalice because it symbolizes the majesty of Christ, not because Arthur has fallen away from his mission, and therefore his faith. But then, surprisingly, the movie will occasionally throw in something completely fantastic, which feels out of place in such a straight-forward historical drama.
There are some interesting bits of information around the film's production. For instance, a month-long labor dispute brought filming to a complete halt. Later, there was a lawsuit against MGM alleging that the studio had made the film from a screenplay first delivered to the studio back in the 1930s. The movie credits no color process for the film (i.e. Technicolor or Eastmancolor) , though the color cinematography was a major marketing point.
MGM was certainly a master of the musical and the high-concept fantasy film, but Knights of the Round Table frequently feels like a Shakespearean adaptation with a cast that's not quite up to the challenge and a screenplay that isn't quite complete. It's not a bad movie, but it's not a particularly great one either. Still, some of the scenes are great--I'm thinking of the climactic sword fight between Lancelot and Mordred on a hill overlooking the English countryside--which makes it frustrating to think of what might have been if the whole picture had been up to the same level. Nevertheless, when we have so many movie versions of this story to choose from, Knights of the Round Table is a reminder of the grandeur that existed during The Golden Age of Hollywood--but perhaps also of the limitations that existed at the same time.
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