Movie Review: Knights Of The Round Table (1953)

I will be mostly reviewing movies that are available on DVD/BluRay from Netflix.  I don't feel the need to review current movies.  I recently watched "The King's Speech (2010)", "Secretariat (2010)," "Inception (2010)" and "The Fighter (2010)"... All recent Oscar nominated and Oscar winning movies...  Those are all excellent movies, so I'd recommend them.

I joined Netflix in February 2001, before I had set up my home movie theater.  I grew up watching movies on TV: Channel 2 - Dialing for Dollars & Bob Wilkins' Creature Features.  Also every Saturday afternoon at the El Cerrito Theater.  I've watched a lot of movies—good & bad.

I love movies, so I'm going to review & recommend movies that you might not know about and also give you some extra fun things to look for in these movies.  Sometimes I will warn you about a bad movie.

My first movie review is:  Knights Of The Round Table (1953)

Knights Of The Round Table in CinemaScope! All the glory and splendor of King Arthur's Court!

I can just imagine the audiences back in 1953 going to see this on the giant CinemaScope screen and being amazed by the huge battle scenes with hundreds of horses all dressed up with horse dresses and galloping into the opposing army—lots of shiny armor. Yowza! No special effects, no cloned horses and knights, just lots of horsies and men running around some golf course in Ireland and a couple of castles. Crank up the sound for the thunderous charge! The special effects they do have are very funny—lots of sort of invisible ropes & strings, ropes to yank people off their horse and strings to move the arrows into an apple on the top of a knight's head.

The music is fantastic and every action and character had their own musical voice. I loved the poison music when Morgan La Fay (played by Anne Bancroft) got rid of the nosy Merlin.

I watched it with my friend Lee-Anne, who's from New Zealand, and I wasn't sure she was going to like it, but with some commenting back and forth, we made it way fun.  That's the advantage of watching movies at home—you can comment all you want and back up the DVD if you miss something and also nobody kicks the back of my chair!

There was just one chicken, but about four of the Holy Grail bunch o'Knights run off to chase it down, cuz they were big time hungry. I didn't expect that. (Remember, chickens are always funny!) There were also some hot medieval bongo drums.

There were some funny groups—they had a big meeting in a Stonehenge like rock circle and the Picts were kind of like cave men in furry outfits and then there were some guys with big Horn Helmets who liked to fight with hammers & axes. King Arthur is giving a big speech and his horse takes a giant extremely loud whiz, which made us laugh!  I guess they didn't have a budget for another take.  Be sure to listen for it!  Also when they have the hand-to-hand combat battles, don't watch the main characters in the foreground, check out the extras in the background.  Some are really into it and some are just phoning it in.  Much more interesting.

I'm adding a new thing to look for in movies - the extremely rare quicksand, which I never figured would show up in a movie about King Arthur, but when Lancelot goes over the cliff into the quicksand, he calls for his 'orse, Eric. I think it's really Barrick, but if you make it Eric and also yell for Eric the 'orse, the movie is a lot funnier!  Start yelling at Eric the 'orse! (Eric makes more sense if you know your Monty Python, but go ahead and yell anyway)

Ava Gardner as Guinevere and Robert Taylor at Lancelot (excellent beard) steam up the place—well, not really, this was, after all, 1953. There wasn't a kiss until 3/4 of the movie was over, but they did hold hands and they look great together...  I'm swooning!

This is a fun movie and I highly recommend it. You should move Monty Python & the Holy Grail (1975) to the top of your Netflix list along with it. It will be a great contrast!