OVP: Camelot (1967)

Film: Camelot (1967)

Stars: Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings, Laurence Naismith

Director: Joshua Logan

Oscar History: 5 nominations/3 wins (Best Cinematography, Art Direction*, Scoring*, Costume Design, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Franco Nero: click here to learn more about Mr. Nero (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Franco Nero looked like a Hollywood movie star with his flawless bone structure and ocean-blue eyes, and after the success of Django, he was afforded the opportunity to be one.  But Nero's first language was not English, it was Italian, and when he came to Hollywood to play the role of Lancelot in the big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Camelot, he wasn't exactly an obvious choice.  Then again, nothing about Camelot came together easily when it came to casting.  The original intent was to reunite the two original Broadway leads, Richard Burton & Julie Andrews, but Burton priced himself out and Andrews was filming another movie, so director Joshua Logan had to go with backup plans, eventually settling on Richard Harris & Vanessa Redgrave, the latter a future screen-legend doing her only true big-screen musical.  The result was a mixed bag, as we'll discuss today.  The film made a fortune in 1967, the rare studio musical of the era to actually turn a profit, but it was given a lukewarm reception by critics, and reappraising it from decades later, I think the critics might have had the inside track over audiences of the time when it came to assessing Camelot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is in many ways a bare bones look at the Arthurian legend, though starting largely in Arthur's adulthood.  We get the King (Harris) courting the beautiful Guinevere (Redgrave), a flighty young woman whose beauty & charm show no bound.  We occasionally get glimpses of Arthur's childhood tutelage from Merlin (Naismith), a figure that is so mythical the only person whom he speaks to the whole film is Arthur himself, but the real-world stakes of having a democratic rule of law (albeit one with an anointed king) start to come to a head later in the film when it's clear Guinevere is madly in love with Arthur's most devoted night Lancelot (Nero), something the king's illegitimate son Mordred (Hemmings) wants to take advantage of in hopes of disrupting Camelot (and giving himself a chance at the throne).  The film ends with Camelot as a concept ending, but Arthur bringing its ideals forward through a young boy he makes a knight before his impending death, his principles of justice and right before might carrying onward.

The movie is way too long.  This is true of a lot of musicals of this era, where they needed a full plot and a full set of musical numbers, and weren't able to trim in the way they had in the 1950's (this is probably because there were examples of over-long, highly-successful musicals at the time such as My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music whose box office receipts justified testing an audience's patience).  It is not helped that the score isn't as universally hummable as those two.  Camelot today has two songs that still exist in the lexicon: the title song, sung by Harris, and "If Ever I Would Leave You" (sung here by Gene Merlino, who dubbed Franco Nero's singing though Nero does his own speaking in the film), though it doesn't have the same resonance as Robert Goulet's cast recording does (he was the original Lancelot on Broadway).  The film isn't necessarily bad-bad.  There are moments it kind of works, like when it's trying to wrestle with the complicated legacy of doing right but having people take advantage of it (the Kennedy administration was called "Camelot" in large part due to the politics of this play emulating that of the late president, who was a fan of the show), but the cast is not strong enough to carry it in its weaker moments.  Harris & Redgrave can sing, but they don't have enough chemistry (Harris, in particular, feels miscast...the studio should've sprung for Burton who would've given the film more gravitas).  Nero is hard to judge here.  He seems like the kind of guy you'd risk getting burned at the stake for to have an affair with (he looks divine), but his acting is pretty stilted in English, and he doesn't do his own singing.

The film received five Oscar nominations and won three.  Of the bunch, the Art Direction & Costume Design nominations make the most sense.  The Art Direction, with its towering castles and in particular the very fun forest where Merlin resides, are ornate and while they aren't as spectacular as it might've been with full-on location shooting (they attempted it in Spain, but heat at the time made it impossible), it still works well.  Redgrave looks glorious in the film, particularly her gold-diamond pattern dress that is maybe the film's most recognizable look, and it offsets that most of the maidens-fare in the background all wear the same dress in different colors.  The sound & scoring nominations I'm ehh on...this isn't a great musical, but it's also one of the better ones in a field of bad musicals (i.e. there's a decent chance I give this film the Scoring OVP statue even if I'm in the middle, largely because there's not much else to go with).  And the cinematography nomination feels fine too-again, it's hurt by being too long, and by not having enough location shooting when you're competing against major steps-forward in the field ala Bonnie and Clyde.  All-in-all, one of the bigger musical gaps in my filmography probably was that way for a reason.