sir_guinglain

Last night's dramatic entertainment was King Arthur the Young Warlord, a TVM assembled in the 1970s from episodes of HTV's Arthur of the Britons (1972-1973). I'd only seen one episode of the latter, when it was repeated on ITV during the 1980s, and not been greatly impressed, as the episode consisted of a series of weapons trials which seemed to show that the cast had enjoyed themselves on a sunny afternoon in the West Country and not a lot else. I bought this compilation from the US several months ago, before I realised that the whole series was being released on DVD by Network this month.

The compilation, despite the lack of a plot (there was a linking narration which fought valiantly to simulate one) was largely watchable, although it could have stood more editing, even though one episode, about a confrontation with Picts, was cut down to about a minute of clips. The series raided the British legendarium freely - Arthur's foster brother is Kai, for example, but their foster-father is not Ector but Llud the Silver-Handed. Arthur's rivals include Ambrose, a Mithras-worshipping tribal chief who wanders around in a simulacrum of Roman dress and is mocked for it; a priest of Nodens; and Mark of Cornwall, played by Brian Blessed and of interest to Blessedologists as an early example of the characterisation brought to Vultan in Flash Gordon, Richard IV in The Black Adder and Yrcanos in Doctor Who's Mindwarp. Early on Blessed is provided with a slightly-built peasant to pat heartily; peasant duly falls over. He still can't remove the stone from the sword, though (yes, stone from the sword, not the other way round) - that takes Arthur's team leadership skills.

The only speaking female character was Rowena, performed by an actress only credited in the titles as 'Gila' but actually Gila von Weitershausen, whom I'd not seen before, but she appears to have been prominent in Germany and was here making a rare foray into English-language work. Rowena works hard, as she represents the Rowena of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Guinevere, and Isolde all at once. She and Arthur have a backstory which contributes to the last-minute failure of her betrothal to Mark, of which we hear little but it involved her fighting alongside Arthur and then taking off her dress so it could be ripped up into bandages to bind his wounds. However, this is a children's series and especially a boys' one, so all Arthur can do is puzzle over why he's so possessive about Rowena, and trot off in denial back to his encampment. It's probably a sign of how online fandom has corrupted me that when Arthur's narration refers to his attempt to "have his way" with Mark, in a later sequence where Mark is tricked into helping with a rescue mission, my eyebrows are raised, though I am sure that there is much in this edited compilation from which others with more, shall we say, creative minds than mine would derive great amusement.

There's no writing credit on the film, which speaks volumes, and no closing scroll of actors other than the so-called leads. Peter Firth as Corin, 'son of Mordor' - someone had been reading their Tolkien - appears in one sequence, while sometime Maigret, Rupert Davies, as Cerdig appears in two and is more relevant to the ongoing series theme, but Firth's star was rising when the compilation was made in 1975, probably explaining why he appears in both the opening and closing titles. The film is valuable mostly as a concise edition of the television series, one of the first of the many in which HTV took their cameras out around their ITV franchise area of Wales and the West, and dramatised the 'identity' of their region by appealing to and embellishing British mythology, all but making legend their property within the bounds of ITV during the 1970s and 1980s. I will see if I can get my hands on the unedited DVDs in some form.

Last night's film at Lady Alysande's was meant to be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Bing Crosby version, which I'd ordered from the US a few weeks ago, and left at Lady A's other half Q's porter's lodge, only to find that it disappeared. Lady A subsequently borrowed Beowulf and Grendel from a film reviewer friend, with Q frantically reformatting it for his home-made projection system as VC and I arrived.

Lady A and VC had been apprehensive about Beowulf and Grendel, largely thought the knowledge that St Brendan appears in it. I don't know the stories but I learned from both that Brendan and Beowulf don't fit well. As it happens neither had anything to be afraid of - Brendan here is a personification of the Christian voice in the Beowulf poem, apparently, introduced at the point in the story where critics are agreed Christian themes are introduced, and done away in a casually brutal fashion by a hitherto sidelined major character towards the end. My main issue with the film was the dialogue, which lurches clumsily from the heroic, to pub closing time talk, to the 'hood. I took a little time to get used to Gerard Butler's Scottish Beowulf, who surfaces - literally - in such a way that I expected him to say that he's been walking along the sea bed and all he knows is that he's two days out from Inverness.

In this version Grendel's motivation is textbook stuff - as a bearded, blond child he saw Hrothgar kill his father, and since has nursed the mummified head in his cave - and a new character, Selma, a witch who lives outside the Danes' settlement, in her person (a slightly underfed Sarah Polley) negotiates what becomes an equilibrium between Beowult and Grendel, even though realisation comes too late. The production has a homespun feel, as if the cameras have just been set rolling without any great effort to compose actors and scenery into an image that tells a story. Sturla Gunnarsson's picture could thus be a useful corrective to anyone feeling that they have been exposed to too much of Peter Jackson's vision of Tolkien's middle earth. There were some striking pictures, though, such as the Geats'  ship sailing through a frozen landscape in search of Grendel's lair, that spoke to my sense of personal location. I thought of Britain as an island suspended between the north and the west, and I come from a part of the country where that tension is most felt. I live in a 'western' territory, but watchign the film made me yearn for the north; the Christmas visit to Northumberland will be insufficient, I think. I need a visit to northern Scotland, Iceland or parts Scandinavian.