Starring Who…?

I came across the strangest movie the other day. Apparently, in 1954, Alan Ladd made an Arthurian swashbuckler called The Black Knight. Who knew?

The first thing that strikes one about such a film, is how ridiculously misplaced Ladd is in the lead. For those who don’t know, Alan Ladd is mostly known for stalking about in 40’s film noirs, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora, generally while wielding a firearm. So, going into The Black Knight (which was played on TCM as part of an Alan Ladd day) I tried to keep up the hopes that maybe he was able to play such a part. The result, regrettably, was akin to Kevin Costner’s miserable attempt at playing Robin Hood; a mumbling, modern American bumbling about in medieval England… and unlike that terrible Robin Hood, in which everything is too modern, in The Black Knight everything else is old-fashioned swashbucklerism (if that’s a word) while Ladd just looks bizarre by contrast. Not to mention that Ladd’s baby-face did not age well, and even though he looked fine in Shane a year previous, his features appear awfully strange in The Black Knight–as seen above.

But, unfortunately (or, for humor’s sake, fortunately) The Black Knight isn’t a passable swashbuckler with a dud lead… it is a ludicrously bad, stupid, and hilarious film all around. Thankfully, however, it did teach me the truth about Vikings. More on that later.

The dubious plot revolves around peasant sword-maker John, who, in order to win the woman he loves and prove that certain forces within King Arthur’s Court are plotting against the crown, becomes the ill-conceived Black Knight and rides around picking fights. Or something. I dunno, honestly I ended up fast forwarding through a good deal of it.

Our villain is a Saracen who, for some reason, is also a Lord in Arthur’s Court. Um, what? He’s played by Peter Cushing, who spends the movie looking like Basil Rathbone from greatest-swashbuckler-ever The Adventures of Robin Hood if he had been dipped in mud… you know, to affect an “evil and ethnic” look. Bleh.

In a hilarious little disregard of any sort of sense, near the end of the movie, when the villain is planning his attack on King Arthur, he consults a map. On this map we see a pretty blank English countryside, with a huge drawing of a castle emblazoned with “Camelot.” But a few inches from this on the map is another huge castle upon which is written “Saracens” in big letters–this, of course, represents the huge, Norman castle in which our villain resides. I was not aware of the Saracen castles on English territory. Said villain is plotting along with an English Lord, and his forces are shown on the other side of Camelot as an army on horseback with “Cornishmen” written across the center.

As though all of that weren’t strange enough, quite possibly the weirdest part of the whole movie is that this strange Saracen/Cornish alliance has one other contingent who cause a good deal of trouble in the movie: Vikings.

The apparent breadth and frequency of Norse raids upon Arthurian England was news to me. Early in the movie a castle is sieged and sacked by Vikings–and when I say “Vikings” I mean Anglo looking men in matching chain mail and gray uniforms wearing helmets with the most perfectly silly and erect horns upon them. I really am crushed that I can’t find a picture of them somewhere online for you good people.

But as if these strange Vikings working within England, along with Saracens and Cornishmen, isn’t enough, they also grant us by far the most surreal scene of the film. When the Vikings kidnap the female lead (who, of course, is ever being kidnapped by someone) they take her to… their secret lair beneath Stonehenge.

Oh yes, you read right. Beneath Stonehenge is a nice spiral stairway leading to a dungeon whose walls are decorated with women’s skulls, each still wearing its hair. There’s a crazy old crone and a gaggle of young women in loose-fitting white dresses who look on as the heroine is, for no reason that I could discern, made to wear the blonde hair of one of the aforementioned skulls. Everyone then goes above and Stonehenge is used for some sort of pagan Viking ritual in which the ingenue is to be sacrificed by some crazy priest, the girls dance around in some sort of not-quite-sexual way, while the Vikings carouse with them, and captured Christian Monks are held in wooden cages that dangle above fires.

I am not joking.

So apparently the idea of English pagans was too much for the screenwriters to wrap their heads around, and so Stonehenge was originally used for Viking/Saracen ritual. That’s strange enough, but the real kicker is when, after having routed the Vikings, the heroic knights of King Arthur proceed to tie their horses to many of Stonehenge’s structures and victoriously pull them over! The fuck? I was quite incredulous by this time. In fact, at that point I was on the phone describing the movie’s events, and I ended up loosing sputtering exclamations of disbelief. It really is insane.

While that is definitely the most out there part of the movie, it’s pretty lackluster all around… but thankfully, hilariously so. The only thing that I liked about it was the American sensibility that let the hero be a plain old peasant. No sudden discovery of nobility, just a peasant who’s perfectly competent. Too bad that’s the only praise I can give the thing, and there are better places to find that sentiment.