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.

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, Emma Thompson, John Lynch, Mark Sheppard, Don Baker, Corin Redgrave, Beatie Edney, Marie Jones, Daniel Massey, Paterson Joseph, Gerard McSorley. Screenplay: Terry George, Jim Sheridan, based on a book by Gerry Conlon. Cinematography: Peter Biziou. Production design: Caroline Amies. Film editing: Gerry Hambling. Music: Trevor Jones.

Reality doesn't come neatly packaged, so films based on "true stories" always have to lie to us. The trick is not letting the lies get in the way of what truth remains in the story. Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father was attacked for too much fictionalizing, too many departures from the facts, and the best that Sheridan could do was to claim that the film was not so much a story about Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four -- falsely arrested for terrorism and imprisoned for 15 years until the verdict was overturned -- as it was about "a non-violent parent." And if Sheridan's film had been that, if it had focused more intensely on the relationship between Gerry and Giuseppe Conlon, it would have been a different film entirely. But Sheridan and co-screenwriter Terry George yielded to the temptation to stray into more dramatically conventional territory: the efforts to exonerate the Conlons and the others, and the courtroom showdown that resulted in their release. With the blurring of the facts, the film shifts into melodrama. But it's a very well-acted melodrama. Daniel Day-Lewis resorted to Method techniques -- spending time in jail and speaking with a Belfast accent even off-screen -- to get into Gerry Conlon's mind, and it's a wholly convincing performance, following Conlon from layabout to victim to victor. What there is of the troubled relationship of father and son is beautifully presented in the scenes with Pete Postlethwaite as Giuseppe, and Emma Thompson makes the most of the part of Gareth Peirce, who was not in fact so much the lone heroic defender as the script makes her out to be. In the Name of the Father holds the screen well -- if not as well as it might have if the fictionalizing choices hadn't been so obvious and conventional.