![]() While his approach to the songs is breathy and unmelodic compared to Burton on the original cast recording, he's clearly invested in the role, throwing himself headlong into the passionate moralism that dominates this particular version of the Camelot story. In honesty, calling Harris a "liability" is a bit unfair. All three are liabilities, though not to the same degree, and not for the same reasons. In every case, the movie trades down: Richard Harris comes on to play Arthur (Burton turn down the role), Vanessa Redgrave takes over Guenevere (Andrews was too expensive, and Logan didn't like her anyway), Franco Nero - and the singing voice of Gene Merlino - jumped in as Lancelot. It boasted a holy trinity in the lead roles, with Richard Burton playing the idealistic King Arthur, Julie Andrews as the lustful Queen Guenevere, and Robert Goulet as the brave, deeply conflicted knight Sir Lancelot. The 1960 show is one of the peaks of Lerner & Loewe's career, not quite up to the level of My Fair Lady, but good enough to hold its own. The point being, anyway, is that Camelot's pretty lousy. Warner was forced to leave his own company, the last of the Warner brothers to survive just long enough to see the birth of a brand new American film industry. For so flagrantly misreading the tenor of the culture, as Bonnie and Clyde proceeded to be a massive hit that saved the studio from plunging off a cliff in the wake of the Camelot overruns, Jack L. When he did encounter that movie, his response was unmitigated hostility and an attempt to bury Bonnie and Clyde alive at more or less exactly the time that Camelot was failing to impress anybody. At any rate, he fussed over the movie closely, allowing the budget to get quite out of hand, and generally ignoring the rest of the studio's production most notably, he remained largely indifferent to the creation of a super-violent crime picture influenced by French art cinema under the Warner name, Bonnie and Clyde. Presumably, the three-year-old success of Warner Bros' film production of Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady was also at the forefront of Jack's mind. Kennedy) was just the panacea that the country needed. Warner himself, with Warner-the-man convinced that in the uncertain times of the 1960s, marked by social upheaval and war, this kind of spectacular family entertainment (with its famous connection to the late, lamented President John F. The film's notorious historical position started with being produced by studio founder and namesake Jack L. Camelot fell squarely into the latter camp, but where 20th Century Fox was able to bully Doctor Dolittle into the vague appearance of success thanks to nine of the least-deserved Oscar nominations in history, Camelot's failure effectively broke Warner Bros. Some, like Camelot's fellow 1967 release Doctor Dolittle, were absolutely not. ![]() The 1960s were an age of bloated super-musicals: some, like The Sound of Music, were major successes. Even then, Camelot might be the more disappointing movie - it wastes much better material than Paint Your Wagon - but at least it's not humiliating.Īt least, it's as not-humiliating as possible for the film that essentially killed off Old Hollywood by virtue of being such a misbegotten production. The competition, after all, is his merciless butchery of South Pacific in 1958, turning one of Rodgers & Hammerstein's finest collaborations into a grisly butcher shop of color filters and incompatible performances, and the famously dire 1969 Paint Your Wagon, clumsily staging musical numbers in the Oregon woods and forcing Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin to cough-sing their way through indifferent new songs wedged into Lerner & Loewe's score. ![]() When I declare that the 1967 film version of Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe's Camelot is the best of director Joshua Logan's cinematic musicals, I want it be clear what a hugely relative claim that is. It gives me great pleasure to spend a full week delving into some of the many other flavors of King Arthur films that have preceded Ritchie's contemporary stab at the material. This week: director Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reminds us of the wide range of approaches that filmmakers have taken towards staging the Matter of Britain across the decades. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.
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