Arrow Video: Excalibur (1981) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

British film director John Boorman had been thinking about the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, loosely based on Thomas Malory’s 15^th century Arthurian text Le Morte d’Arthur, as far back as his 1972 breakout commercial and critical success Deliverance.  Featuring a key image of a hand rising out of water which was then repeated in his 1974 science-fiction fable Zardoz with a hand rising out of sand, the timeless vista of the magical sword Excalibur rising out of the water held firmly by the hand of the Lady of the Lake was in Boorman’s DNA from the very beginning.  Boorman’s track record was strong but some began to wonder whether or not Zardoz was too eccentric for its own good and it seemed to come to a head in 1977 with his failed and much ballyhooed sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic, a film that should’ve all but ended his career in one swift stroke.  Despite the damage done to The Exorcist franchise plans, Boorman still maintained a pretty good relationship with Warner Brothers and after dabbling in fantasy lore as well as teasing at the recurring Lady of the Lake image, the filmmaker finally decided to make good on what ultimately became his dream project with the 1981 fantasy action epic Excalibur.

 
The story of King Arthur, Merlin and the knights of the Round Table are familiar to many thanks to Disney’s The Sword in the Stone and later parodies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but few have ever seen the medieval fantasy epic text taken deadly seriously with the same reverence a faith based filmmaker has for portraying the Messiah onscreen.  From the opening frames of Dark Aged warfare as cloaked and shielded figures do battle, Merlin (Nicol Williamson) helps to retrieve the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake for Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) in exchange for his unborn son to be named Arthur.  Before dying in the heat of battle, Uther plunges Excalibur into a stone while Merlin declares any who can withdraw the sword from it will be King. 
 
Years pass until Arthur (Nigel Terry) is a teenage boy and the fateful day comes when he decides to college try pulling out the sword from the stone.  To his initial horror, he succeeds before retreating into the woods asking for Merlin to find someone else to be King but gradually finds the strength and courage to live up to his vocation and he swiftly forms allegiance with Uryens (Keith Buckley) and later Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) to create the Round Table of knights.  However, this alliance is threatened when King Arthur’s Queen Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) begins an affair with Lancelot as the nefarious succubus Morgana (Helen Mirren as a sultry femme fatale) tries to influence the breakup of King Arthur’s reign.  Following an injury via a bolt of lightning, Arthur sends his knights out on a quest for the Holy Grail not knowing Morgana’s secretly moving her own chess pieces into place.

 
Maybe the quintessential film of Boorman’s career, clearly his most ambitious undertaking up to that time and an important building chapter in the Irish film industry where the film was shot and launching the careers of many then-unknown Irish and British character actors.  Featuring Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds, the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table comes to the screen in a blood, sweat and tears covered epic reminiscent of the Earthy rains and mixture of splendor and squalor glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth.  Muddy and messy but also painterly and loaded with staggering vistas of mountainous landscapes in Ireland, the world of Excalibur is mystical and magic spells and metaphysical powers are as naturally ordinary as the sun and water.
 
Sumptuously photographed in 1.66:1 (presented by Arrow on home video for the first time) by Ridley Scott’s Legend cameraman Alex Thomson and arresting production design by Anthony Pratt of Return to Oz and a rousing mixture of preexisting classical pieces mixed in with new renderings by Trevor Jones, on a budget of $11 million the film feels like a fantasy world that’s lived in and not necessarily cleanly or pristine.  Supposedly this was originally coming together as a The Lord of the Rings adaptation but Boorman steered the project back to Excalibur so they say.  While there’s a lot of splendor on display, Boorman and his camera stage the scenery realistically as though it existed in the real world at one point.  Adapting the text with the reverence of gospel, co-adapted by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, the mammoth film sort of takes the Star Wars approach to Arthur’s transition from meek young lad to bearded armored warrior thanks to the casting of The Lion in Winter actor Nigel Terry in the titular role.

 
Terry’s turn in the prior Peter O’Toole starring film featured the actor as a nebbish nerdy dorky boy type character and to some extent that carries over into his portrayal of a young budding Arthur unaware he’s about to be King, and the terror in his eyes and the tone of his voice when he realizes the gravity of responsibility being placed on his shoulders is authentic and palpable.  Seeing his transition into King Arthur as an accomplished warrior is exciting and extraordinary and again feels like the real genesis of what would or wouldn’t become the character of Luke Skywalker.  Intentionally casting mostly unknown actors save for Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, the film also sports a then-unknown Liam Neeson in one of his earliest roles and years later Patrick Stewart would point to it as ‘the first important film’ of his career.  Mostly though, the star of this show is Boorman himself who clearly reverently passionately adores this material and adapts it to the screen as a distinctly adult fantasy replete with violence, gore, sex and nudity (a rarely seen PG version was edited together and included for posterity in the extras).
 
Opening at number one in the spring of 1981, going on to take in $35 million against its $11 million strain-filled production, Excalibur was something of a comeback for John Boorman both critically and commercially following the humiliation of Exorcist II: The Heretic.  While some complained rightfully the film isn’t a dialogue or character driven saga so much as a series of happenings and events chronicled in a medieval compendium disinterested in meaning and rather trying to portray the fantastical and imaginary as completely on film as possible, it is nevertheless painterly and beautiful with some of the most luminous imagery of Boorman’s filmography.  Nigel Terry and Nicol Williamson are great, Helen Mirren is a seasoned veteran who knows the kind of femme fatale caricature she’s tasked with playing and fans of British cinema and modern mainstream movies will relish in the early turns from Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart. 

 
Now, whatever your feelings are or aren’t about the movie are secondary to what the boutique label Arrow Video have cooked up here.  Released on both Blu-ray disc and 4K disc, Arrow have assembled a mammoth three-disc set of the film including an original on-set documentary by none other than Neil Jordan of Interview with a Vampire as well as newly rendered featurettes and commentaries.  As aforementioned, for the sake of completion for fans keen on all the nooks and crannies surrounding the release of Excalibur Arrow Video have included the 120-minute television cut of the film which is twenty-one minutes shorter.  Also included is the original mono track as well as the 5.1 DTS-HD mix that was on the previous Warner Blu-ray.  And the box itself comes housed with reversible sleeve art, a collector’s booklet, reversible poster art and six postcard-sized lobby card reprints.  If you already were a fan going into Excalibur this is a no brainer upgrade but also if you were, like me, initially lukewarm on the film this Arrow Video collection will bring you a little bit closer to the essence of the project and perhaps leave you with an even greater understanding of what its idiosyncratic, sometimes offbeat auteur really had in mind.

--Andrew Kotwicki