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Released during a rough patch for British film production, Excalibur is a
surprisingly lavish epic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, distributors and
financiers were eager to cash-in on the fantasy cinema boom heralded by the Star
Wars franchise and its injection of finance into British studios, producing a
wave of sword-and-sorcery films such as Hawk the Slayer (d. Terry Marcel, 1980) and Krull (d. Peter Yates, 1983).
Unlike its contemporaries, however, Excalibur transcends its generic
trappings by harnessing the structure of myth, the source template of the
fantasy formula. The Grail quest narrative was already a hallmark of director
John Boorman's work, emerging as early as his BBC TV drama, The Quarry (tx.
27/2/1966), which followed an artist called Arthur King. Excalibur would mark
the culmination both of this fascination, and of his fantasy film work that had
begun a decade earlier with an unfilmed adaptation of the Lord of the Rings,
taking in Zardoz (1974) and a maligned sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic (US,
1977), along the way.
With its fantastical sets and striking costume design - particularly the
radiant armour - Excalibur constructs a shimmering mythological realm adrift
from any specific historical era, yet this is unmistakably an ancient England,
drenched in the kind of mud and blood that evokes Monty Python and the Holy
Grail (d. Terry Jones, 1974), an impression reinforced by Nicol Williamson's
almost absurdist performance as Merlin. Overall, though, the treatment is gritty
and serious in intent (verging on portentousness) as illustrated by the calibre
of the cast, many of whom - such as Nigel Terry, Liam Neeson and, arguably,
Helen Mirren - were then better known for their work in the theatre.
Boorman's insistence on condensing the entirety of Arthur's life into the
film upset some Arthurian scholars, who were particularly frustrated by
screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg's poetic licence with some of the story's
traditional elements. Excalibur subverts Star Wars' quasi-Oedipal themes of
intergenerational conflict by portraying rape as both a primordial magical
weapon and a curse upon a king's dynasty. In a departure from his source, Thomas
Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, Pallenberg has Arthur's malevolent half-sister,
Morgana, using enchantment to dupe her brother into fathering the son, Mordred,
who will becomes his nemesis. This distortion, and the dwelling on Guinevere's
betrayal with Lancelot, exposes the film to accusations of misogyny, but
Excalibur remains perhaps the most successful and convincing screen rendering of
Arthurian mythology.
Stuart Heaney
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