The story itself, of course, recounts the collapse of King Arthur's idealistic reign, but it also is one of the last of the big-budget Hollywood musicals, and it was the last film produced by legendary mogul Jack Warner for Warner Bros., the company he founded with his three siblings in 1918.
Theatergoers had embraced the Tony Award-winning play starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet when it premiered in 1960. But the whimsical movie â€" released amid the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests â€" came at a time when audiences were attracted to gritty realism in films. Chivalry was indeed dead.
Still, the Joshua Logan-directed movie had its charms and is showcased in the new Blu-ray release Camelot 45th Anniversary (1967, Warner Bros., not rated, $36). The cash-strapped studio â€" which had had a huge musical hit three years earlier with My Fair Ladyâ€" spent an exorbitant $13 million on lavish sets, sumptuous costumes and stunning vistas of eight Spanish castles. Musical numbers like the upbeat theme song, libidinous The Lusty Month of May, yearning If Ever I Would Leave You and fanciful What Do the Simple Folk Do? made Camelot seem the perfect place for "happy ever-aftering." It won Academy Awards for best adaptation of musical scoring, art direction and costume design.
The new release comes in a 40-page hardcover book with photos, essays, bios and trivia. Extras include the feature, Camelot: Falling Kingdoms, footage from the world premiere in New York, commentary by film critic Stephen Farber and theatrical trailers.
The Arthurian legend has been told on film many times, but the tragic love triangle between the visionary Arthur, the radiant Guenevere and the gallant Lancelot du Lac as portrayed by Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero may be the m ost memorable.
It begins with Arthur, readying for his fateful battle with his former friend Lancelot, asking Merlin how all the good he had striven for had brought him to this point. Merlin advises him to just remember, and the story unfolds as a long flashback.
Arthur recalls how he unwittingly fell in love with the woman he was obliged to marry, his inspiration to unite a fractured England with the Knights of the Round Table, the arrival of the brave French knight Lancelot, and the disastrous affair between Lancelot and Guenevere that caused everything to unravel.
In the end, a despairing Arthur finds reason to hope in a young boy who believes in the tenets of honor and justice embodied by the Round Table. He wistfully sings in the last line in the closing musical number: "Don't let it be forgot/That once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment/That was known as Camelot."
After President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, his administration came to be regarded as a "brief shining moment' in American history. That phrase came from an essay written by political journalist/historian Theodore H. White, who is best known for his The Making of the President series of books that analyzed the elections of 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972.
In an interview with White a week after the shooting, Jacqueline Kennedy suggested the parallel between Camelot and Kennedy's 1,000-day presidency. She pointed out that the soundtrack to the play was a favorite of her husband's. While the connection was more mythic than fact, the reference still endures.
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