Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)

Helen Mirren and Nigel Williamson in Excalibur

Cast: Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Nicol Williamson, Robert Addie, Gabriel Byrne, Keith Buckley, Katrine Boorman, Liam Neeson, Corin Redgrave, Niall O'Brien, Patrick Stewart, Clive Swift, Ciarán Hinds. Screenplay: Rospo Pallenberg, John Boorman, based on a book by Thomas Malory. Cinematography: Alec Thomson. Production design: Anthony Pratt. Film editing: John Merritt. Music: Trevor Jones.

John Boorman's Excalibur may be the best of the many movie versions of the Arthurian legend, or perhaps just the most faithful to the traditional stories as told from Malory to Tennyson to T.H. White. It doesn't go for spoof like Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975) or for hipness like the BBC-TV series Merlin. It's content to be straightforward sword-and-sorcery stuff with an underlying motif that traces the decline of magic,  represented by Merlin (Nicol Williamson) and Morgana (Helen Mirren), as Christianity takes hold in mythical Britain. Most of all, the film makes clear how much Arthurian legend -- with its undercurrents of incest and of political treachery -- underlies more recent excursions into the realm of fantasy like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones series. That said, Excalibur is beginning to show its age: Trevor Jones's score is pieced out with heavy dollops of Wagner leitmotifs from the Ring and Tristan und Isolde and the now over-familiar borrowing from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, the special effects are creaky, Alec Thomson's cinematography leans too heavily on fog filters, and the costumes are a little too spangly and cheesy. I wouldn't be surprised to see a remake on the horizon, but it should stick fairly closely -- while eliminating some of the clunkers in the dialogue -- to the screenplay by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, which has a solid and consistent take on the characters. Meanwhile, it's fun to spot some up-and-coming actors like Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson in smallish roles.

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Ronny Cox, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance

Ed: Jon Voight
Lewis: Burt Reynolds
Bobby: Ned Beatty
Drew: Ronny Cox
Old Man: Ed Ramey
Lonnie: Billy Redden
First Griner: Seamon Glass
Second Griner: Randall Deal
Mountain Man: Bill McKinney
Toothless Man: Herbert "Cowboy" Coward
Sheriff Bullard: James Dickey

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: James Dickey
Based on a novel by James Dickey
Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Art direction: Fred Harpman
Film editing: Tom Priestley

I haven't read James Dickey's novel Deliverance, but I think I can see why Dickey grew so angry at director John Boorman's revisions on his screenplay version of the book. The film never quite decides what it wants to be: an adventure story, an environmental fable, or a story about a clash between cultures. It works best as an adventure story, which is in the nature of film, and somewhat as a clash of cultures. The four suburban hotshots who arrive in the backwoods of northern George for a weekend adventure are from the outset rude and condescending to the people who live there year-round, and of course they get their comeuppance in extreme ways. The irony is that the one man in their company who sympathizes with the locals is the one who fails to survive: Drew brought along a guitar, not the bows and arrows that Ed and Lewis bring with them, and he interacts musically with one of the supposedly "inbred hillbillies" in the celebrated "Dueling Banjos" sequence. Drew is also the only one who tries to hold out for facing justice after Lewis kills one of the mountain men who attack them. Lewis argues that if they stood trial for killing the man, they'd face a jury of the man's peers; Bobby doesn't want the story of his being raped to get out, and Ed passively goes along with them. Better backgrounding on the four adventurers might have given more substance to their characters and their ideas, and the villainous mountain men are monsters out of nightmares rather than actual human beings, so the debate over justice seems a little out of focus. But it's mostly the environmental issue that falls by the way: There's little sympathy shown for the people who face seeing their homes flooded -- one of them even says it's the "best thing that ever happened to this town" -- an almost no feeling for the wilderness that will be sunk beneath the man-made lake. Boorman would later make The Emerald Forest (1985), a more environmentally conscious film also about the construction of a dam, set in the Brazilian rain forest.

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank

Walker: Lee Marvin
Chris: Angie Dickinson
Mal Reese: John Vernon
Lynne: Sharon Acker
Yost: Keenan Wynn
Brewster: Carroll O'Connor
Frederick Carter: Lloyd Bochner
Stegman: Michael Strong
Hit Man: James Sikking

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse
Based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark)
Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop
Art direction: Albert Brenner, George W. Davis
Music: Johnny Mandel
Film editing: Henry Berman

Stoner noir. With its non-linear storytelling and audaciously post-realist tricks of style, Point Blank clearly shows the influence of the great French and Italian filmmakers of the 1960s, but even though its director was a Brit whose only previous non-documentary film was Having a Wild Weekend (1965), an attempt to do for the Dave Clark Five what A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1963) did for the Beatles, it's unquestionably an American movie. Its loner antihero, Walker, is straight out of American Westerns, and the two cities it shifts between, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are the American final frontier. That any studio, let alone MGM, would allow John Boorman and Lee Marvin to make Point Blank what it is -- an eccentric spin on a familiar genre -- shows how the Hollywood studio system had imploded. It's a film full of outrageous moments: Walker bursting into Lynne's apartment and emptying his revolver into an unoccupied bed. Walker fastening his seat belt -- in the days before shoulder belts and mandated buckling up -- and embarking on a one-car demolition derby with Stegman in the passenger seat. Walker dumping a naked Reese from a penthouse balcony. Chris pummeling an immovable Walker with her purse and her fists before collapsing in exhaustion. It has showoffy tricks: The pock pock pock pock of Walker's heels as he strides down an airport corridor, a sound that's carried over even after he's left the hallway. The often psychedelic color effects, like Chris's day-glo wardrobe or the closeup of the multicolored perfumes in the bottles that have shattered in the bathtub after Walker swept them from the shelves. Its plot stretches credibility to the breaking point: How did Walker survive being shot at, yes, point blank range and then get away from Alcatraz? This alone has served as the focus of countless attempts at interpretation: Is Walker a ghost? Or is what happens after he's shot the revenge fantasy of a dying man? In short, Point Blank is a glorious mess, made into an enduring work of fascination and puzzlement by wonderful performances, particularly by Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Is it a great film or just an enduring cult movie? I tend to the latter view, but it's bloody fun in either case.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies