A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968)

"Lord, what fools these mortals be..."

I never knew before tonight's random looking through Amazon Prime that this odd little Peter Hall film existed- associated with the RSC although unconnected with the many screen Shakespeare plays made a decade later.

As a production it's... odd. There is much use of location and visuals, yet this is very much in the style (and with the necessary attitude to realism) of a stag play- I suspect the budget would not allow otherwise. The make-up for the fairies, in particular, I can imagine working well on stage, but their look falls very flat here.

The fun of this production, though, is not in the visuals; it's in seeing this splendid cast of unfeasible young actors (Helen Mirren is in her early twenties here, and none of the leads are over thirty- five) perform one of Shakespeare's plays with which I'm most familiar. And Ians Holm and Richardson, in particular, are truly sublime as Puck and Oberon respectively. Most striking though is a young, sensual Judi Dench as she frolics erotically with Paul Rogers' Bottom... and yes, I know: that's quite a sentence.

Even a flawed production of Shakespeare such as this can showcase some individual performances worth seeing, and this is the case here. And I must admit that this particular version of Pyramus and Thisbe is the funniest I've seen. On the whole, then, a mixed bag- but it was always going to be a joy to see this play with this cast.

The Madness of King George (1994)

"We consider ourselves blessed in our constitution. We tell ourselves our Parliament is the envy of the world. But we live in the health and well-being of the sovereign as much as any vizier does the Sultan."

This is scripted by the great Alan Bennett and stars the great Nigel Hawthorne (who, sadly, only graduated from the excellent Yes, Minister to a glorious film career at the end of his life), so obviously it's superb. It's as historically accurate as it's sensible for a play-cum-film to be (Alan Bennett did this period when he read History at Oxford, you know), full of heart, and funny. Cyril Shaps' poo-obsessed doctor is a particular delight.

We begin with a few scenes establishing where we are. Greville, the King's new equerry, is our POV as an audience, and we establish what the King is like as a person- pretty damn eccentric, what what? This is essential: before he goes mad, we need to see what he's like when he's sane. We also see his loving (but probably sexless) relationship with the Queen, his traditional Hanoverian hostility to the profligate and indolent Prince of Wales, and the political context of all this. Cold fish and budding alcoholic Pitt the Younger relies on the King's survival and sanity for his career and that of his faction of Whigs. If the King is replaced by Prince George as Prince Regent, then Charles James Fox is waiting in the wings with a somewhat more radical bunch of Whigs, which could mean a load of extremist nonsense like the abolition of slavery. Heavens above.

(The Tories are, incidentally, in no position to form a government: it was they who lost America and they will be out of contention for a generation.)

It is, of course, as popular culture always shows us, extremely dull at the court of George III. Versailles this is not. Nor, thank heavens, is it the awful Brighton Pavilion. But things soon become interesting as the King's behaviour takes a turn for the bizarre.

The film concerns the progress of his madness- mercifully brief, this being his first lapse in 1788: he would not recover, alas, from another attack in 1810, long after the film ends. The film seems to adopt the prevailing theory that the King's malady was, in fact, porphyria. A caption at the end reminds us that this is hereditary. Ha!

The meat of the film consists of the battle of wills between the King and Dr Willis, a man who is now able to exercise his authority over no less than a King ("No, Sir! You are the patient!"), if only for a little while. The Prince Regent will not have his way. Yet.

These scenes are fantastic, but the whole film is so damn watchable. It's brilliant. I mean, it's Alan Bennett. Just go and watch it now.

Excalibur (1981)

“The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent.”

There’s just so much to talk about with this film. Just so much juicy subtext. I love it when that happens.

The whole Arthurian legend is a bit of an odd one, isn’t it? Everybody tends to think of it as the quintessentially English body of myths, yet it isn’t really English at all. The earliest texts tend to indicate that Arthur, if he existed at all, was a native Briton who fought the invading Anglo-Saxons whose culture would become English culture. And once those rather unpleasant Norman chaps invade England then we get Normans like Geoffrey of Monmouth (part-Welsh, part-Norman) using the Arthurian legends as a sort of propaganda vehicle, to remind the English that they’re invaders too. Personally, I’m just Cornish enough to be on the fence when it comes to all that stuff.

But come the 12^th century we get the Troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes and all that stuff, including a rather large amount of new stuff (the Grail, Lancelot, etc) and removing the rather awkward Celt vs. Saxon ethnic conflict, to the point that the stories which form this film belong more to French literature than to English or Welsh.

This film is loosely based on the Morte d’Arthur, a selection of certain Arthurian myths by Sir Thomas Mallory in the 1470’s. How loosely I can’t say; I’ve not read the book since uni and that was a good while ago. But it’s interesting that the armour and general look of the thing seems to reflect the time of the book rather than the actual 5^th or 6^th century setting of the original legends. Then again, the historical basis of Arthurian myth is so vague that there’s no point in attempting anything like historical accuracy. It’s also interesting to note that Mallory was a highly dodgy sort and a convicted rapist. It’s interesting to bear this in mind when we consider how the film deals with sex, which we’ll come to in a bit.  

This movie is so postmodern and metatextual that I had a massive grin on my face through most of it. The characters aren’t one-dimensional by any means (the whole Guinevere / Lancelot adultery subplot proves that) but they’re very much characters from myth, larger-than-life people who belong in epics, and necessarily so. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to have such a fast pace and cram so much in. There’s a bit of fun to be had within this, though. Uther, for example, is as thick as two planks in exactly the way that many characters from myths would be if fleshed out. He makes a great contrast with Merlin, who is the only character with a modern sensibility and clearly an audience identification figure, right up to the point that he's conspiring with the audience in seeing these mediseval  personalities as a little absurd. Nicol Williamson portrays his wit, cynicism and delicious irony perfectly. He’s a slippery, postmodern individual who seems completely out of place in this genre and this, of course, makes him perfect as a wizard.

The nature of his “magic” is interesting, too, quite aside from the fact that he’s shown to be a druid-like figure, one of the last of an older, pagan age. All this talk of “The Dragon” seems very similar to the Force, and that strange dream sequence with Arthur and Merlin in the forest glade seems suspiciously like a slight mickey take of the similar scene with Luke and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, the whole take on mythology here seems to owe quite a lot to Star Wars, although always with a slight hint of the tongue-in-cheek.

Everything looks great, with lots of fog, stone circles, Cornish landscapes, and an interesting mix between Mediaeval grottiness and a more romantic take, with the knights all having very shiny armour indeed until it symbolically all seems to dull after the funny business starts between Lancelot and Guinevere. There are some nice scene juxtapositions, too. Uther rapes Ygraine at the exact moment that her husband dies (by being impaled by a massive phallic symbol!), and we constantly switch between scenes. Both events are extremely violent, and the Duke dies at the exact moment that Uther orgasms, and Arthur is conceived.

Different Arthurian tales almost trip over each other in this bizarre portmanteau of a film, so fast is the pace, but things take a turn for the dark once Lancelot and Guinevere get naked and Merlin is trapped by Morgana (Helen Mirren looks disturbingly young). Without Merlin, things start getting very, very surreal, and the Holy Grail stuff is extraordinarily weird. Percival’s being asked questions about the grail, and his temptation in the castle, have got to be a deliberate nod to the then-recent Monty Python and the Holy Grail, while the sight of a knight surrounded by peasants with plague can only be a nod to The Seventh Seal. This film may play it straight on the surface, but you don’t have to probe deep to find lots of metatextual fun.

Of course, the main point of all the subtext at this point is to demonstrate that Mordred is a right little shit.

Oh, and we were talking about sex earlier. Well, it’s rather interesting to look at the character of Morgana from a feminist perspective. We first encounter her as a little girl, watching her own mother being raped. Merlin is clearly an accomplice to the rape- in fact, arranging it seems to be the biggest and most draining act of magic he’s ever performed! Oh, and Uther (with Merlin’s help) has arranged a civil war in which loads of people die purely so that this can happen. All in all, it’s rather difficult not to see Morgana’s character as the revenge of the feminine against all this male violence. She entraps Merlin by asserting her feminine sexuality. She shuns the male world of fighting and turns to magic. She symbolically deceives Arthur and has sex with him to produce Mordred a rather symbolic act of revenge of Arthur who, as king, is the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Oh, and if magic is feminine, what does this say about Merlin? He certainly seems to show no interest in women! I’d better stop there. I do have a y chromosome, after all. I wonder how much of this, if any, is intended as a commentary on Mallory’s own history as a rapist?

Oh, and all this stuff with the lady of the lake is fascinating. It seems to hark back to old Iron Age habits of leaving bits of treasure in lakes and rivers as offerings to the gods, something which possibly continues in Britain today with coins and fountains. Is this “lady” a goddess, part of Merlin’s world, and soon to vanish, just as Arthur vanishes, across the sea to the west just like the end of Lord of the Rings?