Excalibur (1981)

John Boorman's Excalibur arrives from 1981, a sprawling script compressed into something leaner, and it treats Malory's Morte d'Arthur as ritual. The sword comes out of the lake, the king is wounded, the land sickens in sympathy, and the Grail restores both. Boorman shot it in Ireland with a cast of unknowns and near-unknowns, set Wagner and Orff's O Fortuna against the battles, and let the whole thing play as an allegory of birth, decay, and restoration. It took a prize at Cannes for artistic contribution and an Oscar nomination for its cinematography. The enterprise is solemn, muddy, and sincere.

For our purposes the ledger comes back empty. The cast is uniformly European, drawn from Irish and British stages, with no attempt to redistribute roles along contemporary lines. Helen Mirren's Morgana and Cherie Lunghi's Guenevere move through a medieval world of sorcery, adultery, and dynastic ruin; their fates are tragic, not instructive, and the film advances no argument about their station. There is no same-sex longing, no commentary on race, no environmental sermon dressed as a wasteland. The blighted kingdom here is a spiritual condition, the wounded king's body made geography, and it owes nothing to carbon accounting.

Nor does the film reach for the purse. Its concerns are crowns, oaths, and the Charm of Making, spoken in a reconstructed Old Irish that linguists have described as inventive. Bodies in this film are armored or bare, never discussed. Merlin's strangeness is wizardry, not diagnosis. The film adapts legend instead of revising history, and it never stops to explain itself. It tells a myth and trusts the audience to keep up. Zero, across the board, offered without complaint. A clean vintage.