Bob Peak’s poster art for Camelot I’ve been planning to watch Camelot ever since I started this review of Arthurian films , but I kept putting it off. It didn’t really appeal, to be honest. I think I was expecting it to be something like Merrie England epic Knights of the Round Table , but even longer, and with songs. Well, it is long, and it does have songs, but nothing I’d heard about Camelot had quite prepared me for how visually splendiferous it is. Adapted from Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway musical, and directed by Josh Logan, it opens in the pre-dawn mist outside the walls of Joyous Garde, where Arthur’s army is besieging Lancelot and (we assume) Guinevere. Arthur (Richard Harris) is thinking back on the sequence of events which led to this sticky situation. The story begins properly with a flashback to his first meeting with Guinevere (Vanessa Redgrave) in the snowbound forest outside Camelot. The snowbound forest is a studio set, and an absolutely gorgeous one: completely ...
Reviews and ruminations by Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines series, the Railhead trilogy, Here Lies Arthur, Goblins, and The Legend of Kevin, Pugs of the Frozen North, etc, with Sarah McIntyre.