clanciai

I saw this film 60 years ago and could never forget it, as the impression it made was a deep impact. As I watched it again 60 years later all the overwhelming impressions of 60 years ago were renewed with a vengeance. This is a masterpiece of Norwegian film, and there is no other film like it. There was a remake almost ten years ago, but the impression of that does not quite amount to that of the original. It's not just the story and the excellent actors and direction, but there are several other elements raising this film to another level, especially all the expressionist elements as he lies more or less buried alive in the snows way up in the mountain running out of food and drink and having nothing but his own hallucinations to deal with. The music, very Norwegian, modern and expressionistic, adds to this extra dimension of a life running out but still persisting just to challenge destiny. This is a film that will permanently remain a vital testimony of that no life live was ever lost.

No one knows what really went on there at the legendary castle of Camelot in King Arthur's court with the round table, if it all really happened in reality or if everything was just a fairy tale, but there can be no smoke without fire, so it is likely that there was some reality behind it all. It is also not known where this fairytale castle was located, tradition has it located in the Glastonbury area in the west of England, but there are many indications that it was in fact in Colchester, England's oldest city northeast of London. On the other hand, the characters, with their passions and tangled relationships, have been so hysterically rewritten that they have become too alive to be denied. This film is a major contribution to the legends. It is three hours long and thus extremely extensive, and these three hours are packed with romance and costume splendor like no other, and all are extremely qualified actors, especially Richard Harris as King Arthur himself who makes a virtuoso show of reveling in his role. He is also fully believable in his characterization, Vanessa Redgrave is almost as magnificent as the liable Queen Guinevere, Franco Nero makes a consummate Lancelot, David Hemmings is just as rudely cheeky and despicable as Mordred should be, and all the others are also excellent. Director Joshua Logan is content here with just making the best of the script, and the music by Frederick Loewe does not reach his level in "My Fair Lady", yet there are some unforgettable elements, most notably Lancelot's great love song about the four seasons and the very moving finale. The musical was President Kennedy's favorite musical, and he liked to make his court in the White House appear like a new Camelot.

This was Joshua Logan's last film, but as a musical it makes a great difference from "South Pacific" and "Camelot" although love is also the leading theme here. The lady is the beautiful Jean Seberg, who is married to two men: Clint Eastwood and a drunk played by Lee Marvin. The action takes place in the 1850s in the Wild West when the gold rush in California has started in earnest and things get wild. Lee Marvin makes an excessively crude portrait of an old drunken old man even though he was only 45 when he made the film. He insisted that all the whiskey drunk in the film, and it is heavily consumed all the time, for his part, should always be the real thing, so he was basically drunk throughout the extensive shooting. Still, he survived the film by 15 years. All the others consistently drank apple juice or tea. The movie is hilarious all the way. It is a burlesque display of rich and drastic American humour. The comedy just rolls on all the time. Joshua Logan makes a lot of use of the unleashed humour and imagination non-stop, and one instant is constantly funnier than the other. Jean Seberg is the only one who doesn't think this chaos of fights and drunken orgies isn't very funny, but when she finally smiles, it's like a sunrise. Clint Eastwood doesn't pull the trigger here at all, but surprises all the more by providing some of the musical's finest songs. The very finest, however, is the first real song, which starts the film in earnest when it is windy and stormy and one of the gold diggers sings about the wind Maria ("We call the wind Maria"). No other melody in the musical gets through right away, but this one does.

The question is what most qualifies the film, is it the music, the actors, the story, the setting or something else. The answer is the whole concept, the fantastic pioneer gold-digging society ("No Name Town", with first only male inhabitants and later only drunks) is just the ideal scene for a magnificent comedy, and the question is whether this is not the best Western film ever made, even if it is just a wildly cheerful and senseless comedy, where everyone has fun or makes fun of each other. And even though the lawlessness is total, there is a deep humanity, and tenderness, as when the rough-and-tumble gold diggers want to pay anything just to watch a newly arrived woman with her infant child, whom they all want to pay to be able to hold just for a moment. Thus the film, with all its crudeness, all its coarseness, all its excessive drunkenness, is a very human story, which, however, finds dizzying expression in comedy and sumptuous comedy.