A Knight in Camelot (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS167 ornithopter. The knights appear, smiling in silent celebration as the awkward but determined little contraption makes its way into the sky. Lacking sex, violence, and profanity, The Mighty may not become a popular film. It is, however, a wonderful one for family viewing. BERT OLTON Palmyra, New York A Knight in Camelot, roger young, dir., Disney Television, 1998. Network premiere date: November 8, 1998. Among the most popular American Arthurian films are those based on the most American retelling of Arthurian material: the Connecticut Yankee transported to King Arthur's court, where he (and, more recently, she) must employ a remarkable degree of inventiveness to survive the adventure. Drawing, often very loosely, on Mark Twain's classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), cinematic versions (discussed in greater detail in Kevin J. Harty's excellent on-line bibliography of Arthurian film at http:www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/acpbibs/harty.htm) have included the popular silent film, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (Fox, 1920); the sound picture, A Connecticut Yankee (Fox, 1931), starring Will Rogers; and the 1949 musical remake, A Connecticut Yankee in KingArthur's Court (Paramount), with Bing Crosby. Just as numerous have been the television interpretations, from Westinghouse Studio One's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1952) and Kraft Theatre's A Connecticut Yankee (ABC-TV, 1954) to A Connecticut Yankee (NBCTV , 1955), a restaging of Rodgers and Flart's 1927 musical, and Tennessee Ernie Ford Meets King Arthur (i960). Recent Yankees have included former Cosby-kid Keshia Knight Pulliam, transformed—in a 1989 made-for-television Christmas special— into a saccharine and precocious Connecticut kid, Karen Jones. Knocked off her horse during an after-school equitation class (this is, after all, Connecticut) and revived in Camelot, she uses a Polaroid camera, a Walkman, a tape recorder, and the other contents of her backpack to save the kingdom from the machinations of Merlin and the evil Mordred (bowdlerized for a younger audience into Arthur's nephew) before returning home via a hot air balloon that her friend Clarence has copied from one of her textbooks. More than any other srudio, Walt Disney Productions has turned to Arthurian themes, particularly the theme ofthe return to Camelot. In UnidentifiedFlying Oddball (1979), released in Britain as The Spaceman and King Arthur, for instance, a NASA malfunction sends robotics engineerTomTrimble (Russ Mayberry) to Arthur's court, where he uses his 'magic' (including a flame-retardant space suit, a lookalike robot named FIermes, and the thrusters and magnetic fields of his spacecraft) to win a seat at the Round Table and to facilitate his return to the present. A much younger traveler makes a similar journey in another Disney production, A Kid in KingArthur's Court (1995). Thirteen-year-old Calvin Fuller (Thomas Ian Nicholas) falls through an earthquake crack during a Little League game and ends up in Camelot, where Merlin l68ARTHURIANA has need of a 'Knight' (the name of Calvin's team) to defeat the evil Belasco and to restore Camelot to its former glory. (The Arthurian story, however, is far better told in another 1995 Disney film, Four Diamonds, a made-for-television cable release about Chris Millard, a young boy whose story about a squire in Arthut's coutt parallels his own life; using, as Kevin Harty noted in a review of the film in this journal, 'one of the key tropes ofthe Arthurian legend, the return to Camelot—a return, in this case, for healing,' the film follows Chris's attempts to earn the four diamonds ofthe knight— courage, wisdom, honesty, and strength.) In the most recent version ofTwain's novel,/! Knight in Camelot (DisneyTelevision, 1998), the Yankee is Dr. Vivien Morgan (Whoopi Goldberg), a dreadlocked, fasttalking physicist from West Cornwall, Connecticut. When an experiment with gravitational particles sends her back to Camelot, she is captured by Sir Sagramour (Robert Addie); brought before the king (Michael York); and thrust into adventures both familiar (a sentence to burn at the stake—averted, in this case, by reference to the 'Scientific Fiistory/Natural Disasters' file on her laptop computer) and original (the tortures proposed by a jealous Guinevere [Amanda...