Critical Essay: A Guide to Arthurian Films
Excalibur (1981)
Directed by John Boorman; Screenplay by John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg; Featuring Gabriel Byrne (Uther Pendragon), Nicol Williamson (Merlyn), Nigel Terry (King Arthur), Cherie Lunghi (Guenever), Nicholas Clay (Lancelot), Helen Mirren (Morgana), Robert Addie (Mordred), Liam Neeson (Gawaine), Paul Geoffrey (Perceval), and Patrick Stewart (Leondegrance).
Before the action of Excalibur begins, the viewer sees a title reading, “The Dark Ages. The land was divided, without a king. Out of these lost centuries rose a legend . . . Of the sorcerer, Merlin . . . Of the coming of a king . . . And of the sword of power . . . Excalibur.” The sword of power being given prominence here (as well as the title of the film) reflects Boorman’s overall vision of the legend: His film is a dark, somber, and often violent one, where passions run unrestrained and where power is sought and bargained for at great costs. Unlike White, who often opts for gentle irony and domestic touches, Boorman tells the story as a full epic, replete with dazzling costumes, operatic music, and battle scenes reminiscent of the Biblical films of the 1950s. If his version of the Arthurian legend sometimes lacks the sense that its characters are humans with feet of clay, it compensates for this by making them archetypes of lust (Uther), beauty (Guenever), evil (Morgana), temptation (Lancelot), saintliness (Perceval), wisdom (Merlin), avarice (Mordred), and nobility (Arthur). Boorman’s arranging of scenes in which these characters interact and clash continually reinforces his theme of the human lust for power.
While The Sword in the Stone begins with Arthur as a boy, Excalibur first tells the story of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father who conceives him during a night of deceptive love with Igraine, Cornwall’s wife. (This is where Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur begins.) Boorman stresses the strength of Uther’s lust: After making peace with Cornwall and uniting the land under his kingship, he is ready to forsake all he has won for a single night with his new ally’s wife. He calls upon Merlin to transform him into the likeness of her husband so that she will not know she is being tricked—a proposition to which Merlyn agrees, provided that “the issue” of Uther’s lust shall be his. After Arthur is born, however, Uther attempts to renege on his promise and love his infant son, but Merlin rips the baby from Igraine’s arms. As in White, Merlin knows the future and has made this particular bargain to restore peace to the land; he attempted to do this with Uther, but the king’s passions made him rekindle the very fires that Excalibur (the sword given to him by Merlin) helped him extinguish. Only Merlin, who proves himself a humanitarian concerned with the restoration of order, can help undo the damage caused by Arthur’s father.
Boorman’s Arthur shares many of the qualities of White’s protagonist. As a boy, he is naive and nervous; after he discovers his destiny as king he is embarrassed by Ector’s and Kay’s falling prostrate before him. When warned by Merlin of Guenever’s future treachery, Arthur refuses to heed his tutor’s words, provoking the magician to remark, “Love is deaf as well as blind.” As a king forced to face the adultery of Lancelot and Guenever, he must (as he is in The Candle in the Wind) let his own law be tested on whom he calls, “The two people I love most.” When Guenever asks him to champion her and he refuses on the grounds that he must act as judge, he explains, “My laws must bind everyone, high and low, or they are not laws at all.” When she counters this with, “You are my husband,” he replies, “I must be King, first.” Like his novelistic counterpart, Arthur is pained yet trapped in the snares of his own law, and Lancelot’s rescue of Guenever from shame relieves the king as it does in White’s novel.
As Lancelot, Nicholas Clay strikes a handsome figure, unlike the less-than-perfect Lancelot of The Ill-Made Knight. Both Boorman and White, however, stress Lancelot’s absence from the Round Table as a means for him to avoid his own desires; as White remarks in The Ill-Made Knight, Lancelot’s quests “were his struggles to save his honor, not to establish it.” Lancelot’s longing for Guenever is repeatedly shown to the viewer through many shots of his pining away in the forest, looking out at the castle where his true love dwells; Guenever eventually meets Lancelot in the forest to consummate their affair. This pastoral paradise is toppled, however, by Arthur’s discovery of them, naked and asleep in a grove. He raises Excalibur—but rather than sinking it into Lancelot’s heart, he plunges the sword into the earth. When the lovers awake they know exactly Arthur’s message: “The king without a sword,” Lancelot exclaims. “The land without a king!” Boorman implies that Lancelot and Guenever’s betrayal of Arthur has opened wide the door for evil to enter Camelot—and it is at this point in the film that Morgana seduces her brother by transforming herself into the likeness of Guenever. Her using the same spell as Uther used to lie with her mother suggests the truth of what Merlin remarks early in the film: “It is the doom of men that they forget.” Deception, like history, repeats itself.
Mordred is as sarcastic and spoiled in Excalibur as he is in The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind. Born during a thunderstorm while his mother labors under the pain of her own evil, he is next shown as a giggling and malicious boy who leads Perceval to a tree where Arthur’s other knights hang from nooses, with birds pecking at their faces. As a young man, he threatens his father, who is weakened from the collapse of his kingdom and the inability of his knights to find the Grail, with revolution. His father’s plea, “I cannot give you the land—only my love” is met with, “That’s the one thing of yours I don’t want!” In White’s novels, Mordred’s evil is somewhat explained by the novelist’s portrayal of Morgause, whose demanding yet distant nature makes her sons go to terrible extremes to win her approval; Boorman’s Mordred is motivated by his quest for power. One of the only things the viewer hears him say to his mother is, “When will I be king?”
Ultimately, Boorman’s film, like The Candle in the Wind, ends in triumph. As White’s Arthur reviews his life the night before his death, Boorman’s Arthur regains his strength (through the help of the Grail) and realizes that for much of his life, he has “been living through other people.” He reconciles with Guenever (who has taken holy orders) and tells her, “I was not born to live a man’s life, but to be the stuff of future memory.” Guenever then restores Excalibur (which she has kept for many years) to Arthur’s hand. Like White’s Arthur, who hopes for a day “when he would come back to Graymarre with a new Round Table,” Boorman’s Arthur explains, “The fellowship was a brief beginning—a fair time that cannot be forgotten. And because it will not be forgotten, that fair time may come again.” Although he meets his death soon after this pronouncement (in a graphic duel with Mordred), this cinematic Arthur remains more like a superhero than White’s simple “man who meant well.” His final voyage to Avalon, in the hands of the three queens, is inspiring, as the mist rises and the viewer (like Perceval, the only living witness) wonders when the glory of the Round Table will return to the “modern,” Mordred-stricken world.