Visualizing Camelot at the Movies

There is perhaps no better way to visualize Camelot than through the movies. For more than a century, filmmakers have reinterpreted important Arthurian literary texts and retold the Arthurian stories in a wide variety of cinematic formats and genres. At times faithful to their sources, at times original in their retellings, those Arthurian films have fascinated and entertained audiences and introduced them to the world of Camelot.

Early silent Arthurian films were based on Richard Wagner, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Mark Twain. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1921), for example, a young man falls asleep after reading Twain’s novel and dreams that he travels back to Camelot, where he outsmarts his foes with his very modern inventions. Retold in later films such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) with Bing Crosby and Rhonda Fleming and in telefilms such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1989) with Keshia Knight Pulliam and A Knight in Camelot (1998) with Whoopi Goldberg, that trope of time travel to Arthur’s day remains a perennial audience favorite.

The sound era brought even more interesting and innovative cinematic treatments, such as the fifteen-part Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), which looked back to the serial format so popular in the silent era. With the title role played by George Reeves in his pre-Superman days, the serial presented the Galahad tale as a suspense thriller with cliffhangers at the end of episodes, but it curiously omitted the Grail that was typically the object of Galahad’s quest.

Some Arthurian films retold the familiar stories in other interesting ways. Knights of the Round Table (1953), starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner, borrowed motifs from the popular Western, using knights instead of cowboys as the heroes, while Prince Valiant (1954), starring Robert Wagner and Janet Leigh, had the feel of the comic strip on which it was based. Other films were made as musicals, like the Bing Crosby Connecticut Yankee (1949) and Camelot (1967), starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. Still others, like the irreverent Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), have become often-quoted comic classics.

Of course, some Arthurian films like The Sword of Lancelot (1963) and First Knight (1995) emphasized the legends’ traditional romance aspect. Yet even those films added original elements. For instance, First Knight, with Richard Gere and Sean Connery, is also a typical rags-to-riches story, in which a roving swordsman becomes Arthur’s most favored knight. And The Black Knight (1954), in which a brave but simple blacksmith (Alan Ladd) earns a place in the fellowship of the Round Table, used a threat to Camelot as a thinly veiled depiction of the Communist threat that was a common fear in the 1950s.

Sword of the Valiant (1984) Movie Poster.

Even when filmmakers turn for inspiration to medieval texts or later literature, they often depart, sometimes radically, from their literary models. John Boorman’s epic Excalibur (1981), for example, professed to be based on the Morte d’Arthur; but it differs from Malory in major ways, such as the identities of the wounded king and the Grail knight. Sword of the Valiant (1984), like an earlier film Gawain and the Green Knight (1973) and the recent The Green Knight (2021), is based on the medieval masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; yet it too takes similar liberties. And the musical Camelot and Disney’s animated Sword in the Stone (1963) retell T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the novel on which they are based, in distinctly different ways. Nonetheless, all of these versions, from the earliest to the most recent, confirm the enduring interest of audiences in the Arthurian legends and in their desire to “visualize” Camelot.

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Three-sheet poster from the film Prince Valiant (1954)

Created by Harold R. (Hal) Foster (1892-1982) and appearing since 1937 in the weekly comic strip Prince Valiant, Valiant is an exiled prince who becomes Gawain’s squire and eventually earns knighthood. Foster’s Valiant, who engages in adventures all over the world, even in the Americas, has been the subject of numerous books, games, toys, an animated television series (The Legend of Prince Valiant, 1991), and two movies: Prince Valiant (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1954; dir. Henry Hathaway) and Prince Valiant (Constantin Film, 1997; dir. Anthony Hickox), which was novelized by Martin Delrio. In both films, Valiant regains his kingdom and wins the woman he loves, Alita in the former and Ilene in the latter. In the 1954 version, as in The Black Knight (1954), there is a championing of Christian values as well as echoes of the McCarthy era: one of the evil Vikings, for instance, tries to get Valiant to name the Christian Vikings at the court of the pagan Sligon. In the 1997 film, Valiant recovers Arthur’s Excalibur, which was stolen by the Vikings (not the Singing Sword that is rightfully his, as in the earlier film). The 1997 film is also noteworthy because Morgan le Fay is in league with the Vikings, who capture and kill Gawain. Both Valiant films take a comic-strip approach to characters and plot; the later film even uses comic strip images to introduce some of its scenes.

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Original door posters from the film Camelot (1967).

CAMELOT (1967)

Original door posters from the film Camelot (1967), portraying the main characters: King Arthur (Richard Harris), Queen Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave), Sir Lancelot (Franco Nero), and Sir Mordred (David Hemmings).