SINGLE WHITE FEMALE 1992

The great granddaddy (grandmother?) of “roommate from hell” movies is director Barbet Schroeder’s (Reversal of Fortune) masterfully creepy Single White Female. Sheer perfection in its straightforward simplicity, Single White Female is a splendidly taut and entertaining thriller of escalating dread and suspense built upon two basic, highly-relatable human anxieties: sharing a living space with a total stranger, and wondering whether it’s possible to really know another person…even those to whom we are closest.
Fashioned as an intertangled character drama masking a mordant feminist critique—it can be argued that the entirety of the lead character's troubles arise out of the way society conditions women from an early age to harbor a fear of and resistance to being "single"; Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female pairs the Roman Polanski urban paranoia thriller (Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant) with the Robert Altman personality-theft psychological melodrama (3 Women, Images) to chilling effect.

Bridget Fonda as Allison Jones

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedra Carlson

Steven Weber as Sam Rawson

Peter Friedman as Graham Knox

When an 11^th-hour betrayal results in software designer Allison Jones kicking live-in fiancé Sam Rawson out of her rent-controlled apartment, our despondent, titular SWF hastily places a classified ad (against the better judgment warnings of friend and neighbor Graham Knox) for a roommate.

Enter Rizzoli Bookstore clerk Hedra Carlson; timid, sweet-natured, and studiously amorphous; she’s like a substance incapable of reflecting light, only absorbing it. Girlish and diffident in the face of Allison’s easygoing poise, resourceful where Allison is self-doubting and insecure, indistinct and shapeless to Allison’s urban sleek, the women are less an odd couple than strangely analogous opposites. Indeed, Hedra sees in Allison an image of a life she’d very much like to have. Literally.

Allison and Hedra
From the Greek, Hedra is a word used in geometry to signify many faces

In short order, roommates blossom into girlfriends (Hedy! Allie!), girlfriends bond as sisters, and sisterhood evolves into a kind of free-form female family unit into which the only male allowed is Buddy the dog. Sure, Hedra’s a little clingy, a tad furtive, maybe even a little too watchful (“(It's) like she's studyin’ ya. Like you was a play, or a book, or a set of blueprints!” – All About Eve); but for a time, each woman finds in the other what they are individually lacking. Allie gets a companion to help stave off her fear of being alone, Hedy finds someone who fills a deep, unarticulated emotional void.

The disruptive reappearance of Allison’s ousted fiancé evokes D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox (an impression reinforced by the lupine features of Steve Weber) in that the intrusion of the male has an abruptly poisonous effect on the friendship the two women have thus far forged. Feeling subtly edged out (even the dog prefers Allie's company), Hedy makes a desperate, fumblingly inappropriate attempt to insinuate herself into the relationship of the reconciled twosome, a move which only serves to further drive a wedge. As she watches her prominence in Allie's life diminish, Hedy's already troublingly possessive behavior and obsessive interest in Allie begins to manifest itself in increasingly psychotic ways.

Family Portrait
Playing on the TV set behind them is the 1957 Rita Hayworth film
Fire Down Below, about a friendship torn apart by romantic jealousy

Although Single White Female features an abundance of intriguing subthemes: urban fear, feminine identity, lesbianism, sexual harassment, duality, women's tendency to invalidate female friendships in deference to men—Schroeder's uncluttered approach to the material and the film's familiar, easy-to-identify-with premise serves it extraordinarily well. The intelligent screenplay (adapted by Don Roos from John Lutz's 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same) simply lets the worst-case-rental nightmare scenario play out in accordance to the well-worn tropes of the classic stalker/suspense thriller, leaving plenty of room for the actors to fully and dimensionally inhabit their characters. The result is that instead of having the characters moved along by the demands of the plot, the characters themselves, as realized by the fine performances of Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, dominate Single White Female.

As the film is structured, we know from the outset that the roommate situation will be problematic, just as we also know, this being a Hollywood thriller, that the central conflict must resolve itself with a sufficiently over-the-top, crowd-pleasing payoff: usually either cathartic (payback) or ironic (surprise twist). Thus, it's all the more appreciated that Barbet Schroeder manages to successfully subvert the plot's predictability by giving emphasis to the relationship between Allison and Hedra, making it feel authentic, while at the same time oddly discordant. The chemistry between these two women, vacillating between friendly, sororal, co-dependent, and adversarial...is the propulsive, compelling source of the film's suspense and considerably well-played chills.

The Happy Couple

When an arthouse darling like Barbet Schroeder (More-1969, The Valley Obscured by Clouds- 1972) makes a genre film, watching it is a little like seeing your sensitive, intellectual nephew running with the “wrong crowd”: there's concern as to which will exert the greater influence over the other.

Happily, I think Barbet Schroder’s arthouse sensibilities fairly dominate the first two-thirds of Single White Female, effectively drawing the viewer into the psychological drama before the melodrama and genre predictability of the final third takes over. He successfully turns both the city and apartment building into participating characters in the story, stressing the film's duality themes and appearances-can-be-deceiving angle by making both New York City and Allison's apartment building look simultaneously inviting and sinister.

"At least there's never a problem with privacy!"
Single White Female plays with the idea of strength and weakness, independence and helplessness. By all appearances, Allison is the character who has her life together, but the film allows her to be the one to harbor some of the more deep-rooted flaws. She is the first roommate to invade the other's privacy, yet she's made uncomfortable by Hedra's at-ease-with-herself informality (specifically, when she undresses in front of her). In the end, the women bond over the affectionate gesture of exchanged housewarming gifts. 

Barbet Schroeder displays such a sure touch with his handling of both the characters and the more rote aspects of the suspense thriller that the film’s third act, wherein Schroeder or the producers bow to the pressure to provide the ticket-buying public with the mayhem they crave, strikes the film's sole false note. While I have to concede that the violent conclusion is well executed and effectively delivers exactly what is expected of it (suspense, jeopardy, jump cuts); there's no denying that it's an improvement over the sprawling, drawn-out ending of the source novel; I nevertheless can't shake the feeling that it is an ending more genre-mandated than organic to the subtle, insinuating menace characterizing the rest of the film. I enjoy the ending for what it is, but it wouldn't surprise me were it revealed one day to be the work of another director entirely.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Single White Female combines two of my favorite film genres: the psychological suspense thriller and the identity-crisis/mind-meld melodrama. Perhaps because I looked to movies in my own quest for some kind of identity parallelism during my youth (I grew up a bookish, introverted, black gay male, living in a predominantly white neighborhood and attending a private Catholic boys school, the only boy in a family of four girls, with a hardworking but emotionally reserved father), I harbor a particular fondness for movies about people grappling with their sense of self. Even the first student film I ever made (a deservedly lost Super 8mm masterpiece that served as my admission application to the San Francisco Art Institute) was a movie about a man haunted by his doppelganger.

Single White Female is a thriller first and foremost, a genre nail-biter calculated to deliver consistent chills. But in the way it seriously cranks up the fear factor by delving into the dark side of duality and the elemental search for self, it reminds me a great deal of so many of my most beloved identity-merge films: Persona (1966), Dead Ringers (1988), Les Biches (1968), Performance (1970), Mulholland Drive (2001), Vertigo (1958), and Black Swan (2010).

When Imitation Ceases To Be The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

To varying degrees, twinning is a natural by-product of intimacy, a normal part of all close relationships. You see it in long-term couples who begin to look alike and adopt similar mannerisms. You witness it in best friends who copy and adopt identical modes of dress. It's evident in noxious "bromances" in which entire groups of male friends attend the same gym, tanning salons, and share the same can of Axe body spray.
But no matter how extreme the mirroring, each of us relies on the existence of subconscious boundaries of individual identity to prevent us from ever completely losing ourselves to, or getting completely lost in, others. No such boundaries exist in Single White Female.

Femme Fatale

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

An innovative director with a strong visual style and a comprehension of cinema language is a boon to any film, but such gifts are especially welcome in a genre flick. While there are many directors who’ve distinguished themselves through their association with a particular type of film: Ernst Lubitsch (comedies), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (suspense thriller), and John Carpenter (horror); most would contend that plot-driven, trope-reliant films, whose structures require conformity to brand, don't always leave a lot of elbow room for artistic expression.

Skeletons in the Closet
Allison discovers something scarier than wire hangers
 in Hedra's closet: a wardrobe duplicate to hers

Premise and setup are the stars of the suspense thriller, the director earning accolades only to the extent to which their talents contribute to the successful realization of the narrative’s requisite “payoffs”: surprise, scares, intensity, suspense, etc. Mind you, this isn’t easy, and any director capable of pulling off an effective thriller deserves credit, but the thrillers that tend to stick with me are the ones that manage to follow the genre dots while still bearing the imprint of a director’s unique world view and artistic perspective. 

Barbet Schroeder approaches Single White Female as though it were a character study in which one of the characters just happens to be a psychopath. The time and care spent on defining the relationship between Allie and Hedy, shading it with a comfortable intimacy and credible eccentricity (Allie accidentally catches Hedy masturbating, but instead of turning away, she lingers, watching) lends this film the stamp of quirky distinction.

Mirrors feature prominently in Single White Female, a film
exploring the dark side of identity, duality, and self-image

A similar attribute is Barbet Schroeder’s use of mise-en-scène to amplify Single White Female’s themes. For example, the internal life of Allison, a character whose anxieties are fueled by insecurity (fear of being alone) and betrayals (her former business partner, her fiancé, and her client), is reflected in her external environment.

Allison’s apartment—spacious but just cramped enough to convey urban confinement—is in a building whose derelict condition signals neglect and inattention. The rooms of the apartment all face a circular foyer, which, once the roommates’ lives and likenesses begin to merge, creates an element of disorientation and distortion. Meanwhile, privacy (or rather, its lack) is vividly dramatized by the many angles, doorways, and alcoves people use to conceal themselves or suddenly pop into view from behind; air vents that serve as sound amplifiers to neighboring apartments; and telephone answering machines that either divulge too much or are too easily erased.

Troubled Waters
Beginning with the malfunctioning faucet that precipitates Allie getting to know her better, Hedra is associated with water throughout the film. Frequently shown bathing, showering, or in some way cleansing herself (shades of Lady Macbeth), water also figures significantly in Hedra's shadowy past.

PERFORMANCES

High-concept premise aside, the performances of Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh are the prime reason Single White Female endures for me, and why it continues to be such an enjoyable thrill ride after numerous rewatchings, long after its surprises have grown familiar.
When I think of actors who have good onscreen chemistry, my mind goes immediately to the similarities those actors share and the traits they have in common. But when I watch Single White Female I'm reminded that the most explosive onscreen chemistry comes from personalities with contrasting strengths that blend with symbiotic ease.

Who Is She?

The pairing of Fonda and Leigh—two actors who don't look alike; whose rhythms and acting styles contrast intriguingly; who exude self-restraint vs. barely held-in-check-- seems to draw out the inverse best in both. Fonda has never registered stronger, Leigh (in another lived-in departure for the versatile actress) is terrifying in her vulnerability.

The film uses both so well that, as with an ensemble piece, it's difficult to assess the work of one independent of the other. Suffice it to say that both actors inhabit their characters in marvelously realized performances that are so natural, that they manage to buff out the rough edges of the melodrama, making the formulaic feel fresh.

Occupational Hazard
Stephen Tobolowsky as Mitchell Myerson

As the film progresses, we learn that both Allison and Hedra have the same problem of repeating mistakes. It's revealed that Hedy is in the habit of attaching herself to people in an attempt to recapture and/or recreate a seminal relationship from her childhood. Meanwhile, Allie shows signs of being a serial bad-decision-maker. She bounces from one disloyal relationship (a failed business partner) to another (a faithless fiancé) to another (hastily opening her apartment to a woman she knows nothing about) to another (a business client whose intentions she misreads). 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I love scary movies, especially those rooted in the kind of mundane, everyday anxieties we all share. Alienation, urban paranoia, trust issues...the more the horror emanates from the basic insecurities that make up the human personality, the more intensely I relate to what is going on on the screen.

The Ansonia Apartments
Barbet Schroeder's homage to Rosemary's Baby

Like most kids, I loved to be frightened by monster movies. The worlds of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolfman were so alien to my own existence that no matter how spooky things got, the essential "otherness" of what I was watching reinforced my subliminal safety-net reminding me that what I was watching was fantasy. Movies like these were capable of giving me a shudder, a shock, or a jolt of surprise, but they were too remote in context to ever really get under my skin. All that changed in 1967 when Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho had its broadcast television premiere. Suddenly the monster was human, the weapon a familiar household object, the victim undeserving of her fate, the violence not "safe" and bloodless, and the site (most horrifically) a personal safe haven of privacy.
My 9-year-old mind was blown. The kindertrauma spectacle of Janet Leigh’s shower murder opened a veritable Pandora's Box of everyday horror in my young life.

Ken’s Domestic Terror Timeline:

1967- Rosemary’s Baby published, In Cold Blood and Wait Until Dark released in theaters, and commercials for 1965s Return From The Ashes (in which a woman is murdered in her bathtub) appear on TV. 

Ken’s Social Terror Timeline:

1968- Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated. San Francisco (where we lived) terrorized by The Zodiac Killer. I see Rosemary’s Baby at the movies and have the holy hell scared out of me.

1969 to 1971- The hippie movement gave way to scare-a-thon news coverage of the Manson killings, and The Doors' "Riders on the Storm" terrorized me from radio playlists.

All this happened over the course of a few years, but to my psyche, it felt as though it had happened overnight. Suddenly the illusion of safety that family and home provided was shattered by the realization that not even bathrooms are safe havens, human beings are the real monsters, and violence can sometimes be cruelly random. 

Single White Female taps into all these still-fresh-to-me horrors: Apartment buildings are genuinely creepy places that thrust you into close contact with total strangers; anyone alone is justified to feel vulnerable in a big city; and what is more mysterious and labyrinthine than the human personality? 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018

CAMELOT 1967

One of my favorite Maya Angelou quotes (one which paraphrases an earlier quote by Carl Buehner) is: "People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel." I like this quote because not only have I found it to be true in my life, but it also summarizes what I've always maintained to be my own experience of film: I'll forget what a movie made at the boxoffice. I'll forget whether critics deemed it a hit or a flop. I'll forget if it won any Oscars. But I never forget how a movie made me feel.

A great many things go into making a motion picture: acting, direction, screenwriting, cinematography, mise-en-scène, etc....simply a host of creative and aesthetic contributions by artisans and craftspeople in collaboration. But I always contend that unless you're discussing measurable, fact-based elements such as whether or not a scene is in focus, or if a boom mike popped into frame; the act of ascribing value to a film (to classify it as either a "good" or bad" movie) is not an act of objective appraisal, but an act of subjective evaluation. In other words, to express an opinion based on individual interpretation, firsthand point-of-view, and personal taste.

I love movies. I've loved movies for as long as I can remember. I get a kick out of reading about them, discussing them, analyzing them, and especially writing about them. But one of the risks of being a devoted cinephile and immersing myself so (too?) deeply in film theory and fandom minutiae is that I can occasionally forget what made me fall in love with movies in the first place: they're a great deal of fun. To be able to watch a large number of films throughout one's lifetime and yet remain connected to the pure, sensual, escapist thrill of movies has always been a goal of mine. Something easier to tap into with some films more than others.

Academic essays about films I chiefly respond to emotionally can be enlightening, often enriching my enjoyment by encouraging me to look beyond a movie's more accessible virtues. In such instances, I'm gratified to find both my heart and head affected by a film. But every now and then, I fall in love with a movie so voluptuously visual, so lyrical, so ardently impassioned in its sensibilities that I simply surrender myself entirely to its sensual charms and (for better or worse) wind up leaving my analytical brain at the door.
For me, Camelot is such a film.

Richard Harris as King Arthur

Vanessa Redgrave as Guenevere

Franco Nero as Lancelot Du Lac

David Hemmings as Mordred

The mystical legend of King Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, and the knights of the round table is tunefully romanticized in Camelot, Alan Jay Lerner's (lyricist & librettist) and Frederick Loewe's (composer) follow-up to their wildly successful My Fair Lady. I was but 3 years old when Camelot opened on Broadway in 1960 with a cast featuring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet, and Roddy McDowall. I was ten when Warner Bros. released its heavily publicized, three-hour, 70mm, $13-17 million (depending on the source) big-screen film version in 1967. In other words, as a child, I had no real memory of a world without Camelot in it.

Lionel Jeffries as King Pellinore

When I was very young, I linked Camelot to dull, suitable-for-parents-only entertainment, associating it exclusively with Robert Goulet crooning the ballad "If Ever I Would Leave You" on TV variety shows (as I had Barbra Streisand and the song "People"). Following that, the show's title tune became married to sad memories of President Kennedy's assassination after my teacher (per the 1963 Jackie Kennedy Life magazine interview wherein it was referenced as the late president's favorite song) played that paeanistic anthem to our class, resulting in a roomful of first-graders bursting into tears without any of us really knowing why. Not long after this, Camelot became familiar to me as an Original Broadway Cast album that every parent seemed to have in their home, yet never played.

By 1967 my family had settled in San Francisco, and it's then that I recall first catching sight of Bob Peak's colorfully alluring artwork for the movie poster. Still one of my favorite movie posters, I responded strongly to it because it resembled the then-popular psychedelic/Art Nouveau-style of San Francisco rock and roll concert posters that I saw posted all over the Haight/Ashbury district where we lived.

With Camelot's artwork staring out at me from the poster display case in front of the Coronet Theater (where Camelot had its exclusive, reserved-seat, $3 a ticket, roadshow engagement) and from the cover of the Columbia Record Club mail-order soundtrack LP that arrived at our door one day because my mom forgot to send back the "not interested" card the month previous; suddenly this stodgy, must-to-avoid, middle-aged entertainment became the movie I couldn't wait to see.

Laurence Naismith as Merlin

Of course, in the days when double and even triple features were the norm, the idea of paying $3 (75¢ to $1.50 was average) to see just one movie didn't sound all that appealing to my young mind. As it turns out, the idea sounded even less so to the more mature minds of my parents. Both of whom were of the opinion that taking me with them to see Camelot was- "Out of the question. I'm not going to shell out that kind of money for the privilege of watching you fall asleep!" That's what drive-ins were for.

So, until Camelot became available at "popular prices" and made its way to our neighborhood theater, I had to content myself with listening to the soundtrack album.

And listen to it I did. Constantly. Persistently. Rapturously.

I fell in love with the sound of Camelot before I ever saw a single frame. 

I finally saw Camelot sometime in late 1968; by then, the film's flop* status was common knowledge, and some 30 minutes of footage from the roadshow version had been excised in an effort to speed things along, so to speak.

*A huge bone of contention among retro film fans is the word "flop" ascribed to a beloved favorite. Hollywood has long held to the unwritten rule that a movie needs to make at least two to three times its production costs to begin to show a profit. Thus, while Camelot saw out the year as #11 on the roster of top-grossing films of 1967 (meaning it was reasonably popular with the public), with its $15 million production budget, a domestic boxoffice return of $31 million translates as genuine flop material. The same holds true for many other "popular successes" that simply cost too much to promote and distribute. One of the most notable is Hello, Dolly! which came in as the #4 top-grosser of 1969. But budgeted at a whopping $25 million and marketed to the skies at a cost of at least half that amount, the $33 million it took in at the boxoffice proved that it may have been popular with the public, but, from a financial standpoint, was nothing short of ruinous for 20^th Century-Fox.

Perhaps the most curious application of the word flop is attributed to 1967's Valley of the Dolls. Budgeted at a modest $4 million, VOD ranked #6 at the boxoffice and raked in an astounding $44 million, making it a significantly profitable hit for the studio. However, the film proved such a critical disaster and so devastating to the careers of those involved, the label of "flop" has clung to it, largely in reference to its quality (or lack, thereof), not its profitability.

In any event, once the theater lights started to dim that Saturday afternoon in 1968 (I can't remember whether it was at the Amazon or the Castro theater), none of that made any difference, because no one else's experience of Camelot mattered but my own. I grew up with very little interest in most of the age-appropriate movies of the time (I was an adult before I saw The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, or Doctor Dolittle), so at age eleven, I hadn't much exposure to fantasy or magic in movies. Camelot, which looked to me like a fairy tale come to life, captivated my imagination from start to finish.

There in the dark, before this enormous screen, came a vision of opulent, extravagant fantasy that seemed to shimmer with an almost otherworldly luster. The scope, the color, the lush orchestrations, the pageantry…this creation of a world both magically artificial and hyperreal so overwhelmed my senses that I've no memory of what I actually thought of the story itself; only the sense memory of feeling totally and absolutely transported by a movie.

It was aesthetic overload. I was absolutely floored by how gorgeous everything and everyone looked. Even those enormous, incessant, Panavision closeups that drove so many critics to distraction were positively swoon-inducing for me. All I knew is that. at the time, Camelot was the most "movie" movie I'd ever seen. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Clearly, most of what's recounted above is a young film fan's response to the candy-store charms of old-fashioned Hollywood movie-making. Too young to sense the dissonance so many found (and continue to find) in having a mystical, musicalized wisp of romantic lore mounted as a massive, grandiose epic; I simply fell under the spell of cinema's unique ability to give corporeal life to sublime fantasy.

Looking at Camelot today (I watched it over the Christmas holidays) I'd like to report that my adult self finds the film's pacing to be sluggish when it should be lilting; the thin singing voices of the leads ill-serving of the score's lovely melodies; the overall tone wavering unevenly between farce, romance, and drama; the film's length interminable; the self-serious performances deadly to the story's wit and humor; the sets artificial and stagey.

I'd like to, but I can't.

I acknowledge these things and recognize them to be sound and justified criticisms leveled at the film by friends and loved ones (my partner, a man of unyielding good taste and intelligence, cannot abide a single frame of this movie); but they're flaws visible to me only when I look at Camelot through the eyes of others. When I look at Camelot through my own two eyes, it's a little like the scene where Arthur, extolling the virtues of Camelot to Guenevere, gives a brief lesson on how perspective can change perception: "When I was young, everything looked a little pink to me."

Because I can't separate the film from my experience of first seeing it, Camelot still shines with a kind of pinkish glow to me. I don't kid myself that Camelot is a better movie than it is, but my adult perspective—the belief that one can derive perfect pleasure from an imperfect film—guides my youthful perception of it as a magical, majestic, utterly charming musical...in spite of its flaws.

Due to having fallen in love with the music first, Lerner & Loewes' magnificent score will always be my favorite thing about Camelot. Preferring the movie soundtrack to the Broadway version (sorry, Julie Andrews), I adore the film's human-sized interpretation of Arthur and Guenevere (Jenny, as he calls her) and never found fault with the smaller, more emotive voices of Redgrave and Harris, which achieve such a lovely, amatory quality in the duet "What Do the Simple Folk Do?" (my absolute favorite song in the entire show). Perversely perhaps, the one trained voice in the film—that of singer Gene Marlino, dubbing Nero's vocals—I find to be hollow and generic in the dubbing style of Marni Nixon and those disembodied, Doodletown Piper-style vocals they used in Hello, Dolly! and Lost Horizon.

As big-budget musical epics go, Camelot, with its glorious Oscar-winning costumes and production design is nothing short of a dream; the film's vast scale is emblematic of Arthur's full-to-bursting idealism. I suspect it was director Joshua Logan's intention to use so many close-ups as a stylized means of creating emotional intimacy, but while this device is sensually effective in the romantic and dramatic scenes, when the principals are required to break into song, it offers too many opportunities to ponder the wonders of medieval dentistry.

PERFORMANCES

If you've ever seen an Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian movie or any of those straight-to-DVD action films featuring the likes of Dolf Lundgren, one can easily understand why mainstream superhero films have often found it more advantageous to hire an actor and pad his suit (Michael Keaton, George Clooney), rather than try to coax a performance out of an athlete or bodybuilder. I've always assumed a similar mindset was behind the Hollywood custom of purchasing Broadway musical properties, and, instead of hiring individuals who can actually sing and dance, they engage the services of actors with minimal proficiency in either. Perhaps it's easier to teach an actor to sing (dubbing!) than find song and dance entertainers who register effectively on the big screen.

I could devote an entire essay on both the soundness (Ethel Merman, Carol Channing) and folly (Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood) of this practice; but confining myself exclusively to Camelot, I have to put forth that I find Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris and Franco Nero are all exceptionally well-suited to their roles. 

They are certainly the most visually stunning Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot I've yet to come across (Nicholas Clay's virile Lancelot in 1981's Excalibur being the exception). Harris, a commanding and compassionate Arthur, Redgrave (Camelot's most valuable player) looking like a fairy princess and bringing a touching wistfulness to her character; and Nero, abysmal lip-syncing aside, gives an engagingly robust, sensitive performance.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

An unanticipated pleasure in having seen Camelot when it was first released, and then having the opportunity to revisit it some 50 years later, is to revel in the degree to which it embodies the attitudes and trends of the past, while simultaneously commenting upon (with depressing acuity) our country's current "situation."

Camelot takes place in a fictional kingdom in the Middle Ages, but (as was common of period films in the days of the studio system) it has late-1960s written all over it. The casting, opting for up-and-coming talent over established stars, reflects who was hot at the time: Redgrave and Hemmings, fresh from cavorting nude in Antonioni's Blow-Up; Harris recently having bashed in Franco Nero's head in John Huston's 1966 film The Bible. The sound of Camelot may be traditional Broadway, but its look is that of the world's most well-funded Renaissance Pleasure Faire. This Camelot carries a decidedly flower-child, hippie-commune, love-in vibe.

Guenevere (with her mod bangs, cascading falls, and teased hair bump…all color-coordinated with the castle and furnishings) is the world's first flower-child; while Arthur—whose quixotic anti-war soliloquies sound like a Berkeley campus lunch-hour messiah—sports a groovy pageboy haircut and adorns himself with furs, capes, boots, and abundant eye shadow worthy of a Fillmore rocker. Not to be outdone, the villainous Mordred struts about in a leather outfit that looks to have been borrowed from Jim Morrison.

Alas, with Camelot's dark second half, quaint '60s nostalgia gives way to harsh contemporary relevance. As Arthur's humane ideals crumble under his own hypocrisy (he decrees unpleasant facts he dislikes—talk of Guenevere's infidelity and Lancelot's betrayal—to be "fake news" and banishes from the kingdom those who dare speak of what he actually knows to be true), Mordred, Arthur's vainglorious illegitimate son, tweets…I mean, boasts, "I've been taught to place needs ahead of conscience. Comfort ahead of principle. I find charity offensive and kindness a trap," while making ready his plot to Make England Uncivilized Again.

When Arthur laments, "Those old uncivilized days come back again. Those days…those dreadful days we tried to put asleep forever," he could be speaking of a dark day in Charlottesville, Ga. in August of 2017, or, more accurately, the United States every day since November 8, 2016.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Time has been kind to Camelot, which is ironic, since complaints about its abuse of time (even devoted fans tend to find it overlong) have dogged the film since its release. No longer denounced for being out of step with the changing tastes of the '60s, Camelot now belongs to the forgiving rear-view gaze of Classic Hollywood. The up-and-coming stars in its cast are now revered film industry veterans. The traditional style of filmmaking employed, one lambasted for being creakily old-fashioned during the youthquake '60s, now is revered for its scope and grandeur...all devoid of CGI enhancement. And its melodic score now hearkens back to an era when a timeless traditionalism defined what we came to know as musical theater.
Yet, Camelot remains unique in that it is one of those films whose dividing line of opinion never seems to shift. I've never known of anyone who hated the film to ever come around to a more favorable opinion over time, similarly, those who started out loving it (as I do) can't be talked down from our cloud no matter what detractors say.

I can't speak for everyone, but I guess back when I was 11-years-old, maybe I just took it to heart when Arthur said at the end of the film, "What we did will be remembered."

BONUS MATERIAL

King Arthur's Camelot took on the role of a Himalayan lamasery in the 1973 musical Lost Horizon

Camelot was revived on Broadway in 1980 with Richard Burton recreating his Tony Award-winning role as Arthur. When Burton succumbed to ill health in 1981, Hollywood's King Arthur—Richard Harris, then 51-years-old—stepped into the role. Harris would go on to purchase the rights to the stage production and toured with Camelot for six more years. This production, co-starring Meg Bussert as Guenevere and Richard Muenz as Lancelot, was broadcast on HBO in 1982 and is available on YouTube. 

Richard Harris passed away in 2005, nearly as famous then as he was at the time of Camelot thanks to his role as Dumbledore, the Headmaster at Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. But a real-life fairy tale romance played out for Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero who fell in love during the making of Camelot, had a child out of wedlock, made a couple of films together, separated in 1971, reconnected some thirty years later, and ultimately wed in 2006. In 2017, when she was 80 and he 75, they waltzed together on the Italian TV dance competition program Strictly Come Dancing.

Richard Harris had quite the recording career, releasing several albums throughout the '60s and '70s. His biggest success came with 1968's Grammy-nominated album A Tramp Shining, which featured the #2 Billboard hit, the talk-sing version of MacArthur Park. I never owned that now-rare curio, but a particular favorite I never tire of listening to is Harris' guest stint as "The Doctor" (talk-singing his way through Go To The Mirror with Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey) on the 1972 studio recording of Tommy, The Who's double-LP collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and a host of guest artists.

Don't let it be forgot 

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment 

That was known as Camelot. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018