My 15-year-old daughter, EtherealFreakOfPinkness has gotten interested in the Arthurian legends of late. I’d like to put a good movie in our Blockbuster queue for her, but there are a ton of them.
So, which ones are really good? It would help (from her POV) if it wasn’t in black&white.
I loved the “Merlin” TV film with Sam Neill.
And Blockbuster.com has it! Thanks!
I think one is obliged to start with Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, followed by Lancelot du Lac (if she’s OK with subtitles). I didn’t see Merlin, but I did see Camelot and the movie is not particularly good though it might be worth checking out to have another take on the Arthurian legend.
I really can’t think of any others that I’ve liked (of the ones I’ve seen) or heard generally good things about (of the ones I haven’t).
Then get her reading Peter David’s Knight Life, and Roger Zelazny’s The Last Defender of Camelot.
Knightriders is an underrated modern take on the legend, set amongst motorcycle-riding “knights” who have a traveling tournament.
I’m a big fan of King Arthur, but most movies are disappointing.
For kids, The Sword i the Stone is a lot of fun, if a bit dated, and it might encourage her to read T.H. White’s book of the same name (It’s also the name of the first chapter of his much longer Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. But beware – he extensively rewrote the kids’ book when he incorporated it into TOaFK. He took out Madame Mim!) The movie’s been Disneyfied, of course, but it’s not awful, by any means.
**Camelot[/B[ is disappointing to me – it doesn’t feel like the Broadway Show, and neither the stage show nor the movie feel the same as T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which they’re supposed to be based on.
John Boorman’s Excalibur has the right feel of Arthurian adventure – thoroughly anachronistic knights in armor dealing with sixth century concerns, but it looks great. And it has the right sense of bombast, even in the music – they lifted from Wagner’s “Parsifal” and from “Carmina Burana”. But some of it’s probably a bit heavy for a kid – adultery, some nudity, violence. Sit by with the remote to zap through some astuff if you watch it.
The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ought to be first-rate Arthurian storytelling, and there have been several attempts to transfer it to the screen. I’ve seen part of Sword of the Valiant, and some of it is very good (Sean Connery as the Green Knight!), but a lot of it is awful (Why does Gawaine have to look like the kid on Dutch Boy Paint cans?)
I haven’t seen First Knight (Connery again, this time as Arthur. And Richard Gere), so can’t comment. It’s Lancelot and Guinevere. I’ve seen some French film on Lancelot, but can;t recall the title, and I didn’t much care for it anyway.
There was a SciFi Channel movie Merlin starring Sam Neill, ith Martin Short. Avoid this.
The Crystal Cave is Mary Stewart’s take on Merlin, which isn’t canonical Arthur, and it was slimmed down for TV. I don’t recommend it.
The TV movie of The Mists of Avalon was pretty much disliked by fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s book, and it’s pretty far ftrom Canonical Arthur, too.
Of course, you’re light years from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory with Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, but it’s one of my all-time favotrite books. Unfortunately, not one version of it (and I’ve seen quite a few) is at all faithful to Twain, let alone Arthur.
The recent movie King Arthur is a very, very weird item. It tries to flesh out a very odd theory that a lot of Arthurian mythology owes itself to traditions brought by and stories of East European cavalry briought to England as part of the Roman forces. It’s centuries too early for the nominally 6th century events of Arthur, and there really isn’t any source for Merlin and Lancelt that early – but they try to shoehorn them in, anyway, and they make Guinevere a Boudicca-like warrior queen. At least it’s different. The movie looks pretty good, and has a feel like the current HBO series Rome, but it’s farther from what most people would think of as “the real Arthur” than even “The Mists of Avalon”.
And there’s always Monty Python and the Holy Grail…
(At least it looks more realistic than the others)
So – Not much by way of recommendations. See The Sword in the Stone, maybe an edited Excalibur. Ignore most of the rest.
Just my two minae.
I have seen First Knight, & quite like it. It’s worlds away from conventional Arthurian myth, so no guarantees on whether the girl will like it.
First Knight barely qualifies as Arthurian. It has no magic, no Merlin, & a sort of stripped-down approach to presenting the court of Camelot. Also, there’s basically one major female character, & it’s pretty much about loving one man while being betrothed/married to another & trying to be a good Christian wife about it. Further, the climactic scene is largely Arthur & Malagant in a sort of an argument about God.
As I said, worlds away.
I really like the Camelot film with Richard Harris (and I probably saw it when I was around the OP’s daughters age). I thought his boyish Arthur did a good job of recalling TH White’s Wart. It and Excaliber are the only Arthur movies I can recall liking (not counting Monty Python, of course), but as others have said, Excaliber doesn’t necessarily recommend itself as well to a 15 year old girl, even if you don’t mind the R rating.
All the good movies have been taken, but if your daughter is a reader, I have a recommendation. I just finished this, and it was superb: The High Kings, by Joy Chant.
It tells the story of pre-Arthurian Britain from the perspective of a bard telling it at court.It begins with the founding of Britain by Trojan refugees, and culminates with King Arthur, and has all sorts of fascinating historical and linguistic notes interspersed between the individual stories. Plus, the art inside is plentiful and spectacularly well done.
The Arthurian movies being pretty much covered, there’s Camelot 3000, which is a comic book. It’s about the prophecied return of King Arthur in the hour of England’s greatest need. Specifically, during an alien invasion. I loved it when I was fifteen, and it still holds up pretty well now that I’m twice as old.
It helps the understanding of that movie tremendously, once you realize that it isn’t a movie about King Arthur. It’s a movie about Kiera Knightly fighting gymnastically in skimpy leather thongs. Once you realize that, the movie is greatly improved. Unfortunately, there’s about a 90% chance that this means it also won’t have much appeal for your daughter.
Maybe I should add The Holy Grail to our queue? 
This might not interest your daughter, but according to the Blockbuster site, there are actually 4 versions of Wagner’s opera Parsifal you can rent. As Wiki says, the opera “is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the medieval (13th century) epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for The Holy Grail.”
So Arthur and his court don’t show up, and it’s pretty much just tangentially related to that part of the legend.
Metropolitan Opera: saw it on PBS, okay
Placido Domingo: haven’t seen it, but probably okay.
2006 version: no idea. From the picture it appears to be minimalist, I’m guessing from Bayreuth. If so, okay, but will be visually very spare.
1982 version: expressionist/surreal (?) version, interesting, but not good for an introduction.
Does “Arthurian in theme(s), if not in content” count?
If so,
The Lion King.
The Natural.
The Fisher King.
Without knowing your daughter, I think the Sam Neill ‘Merlin’ miniseries might appeal to her, though I didn’t much care for it.
If it doesn’t require Arthur as a main character, there’s last years Tristan and Isolde (starring James Franco) which wasn’t terrible, but didn’t really stand out either.
I’m not sure if Excalibur uses stuff from Parsifal (probably it does), but the “Tristan and Isolde” theme (‘Liebestod’) is the most prominent bit of Wagner’s in it.
Arthurian, huh? Try this.
How about the cartoon Gargoyles? I learned all I know about the Arthurian legend from that
Oddly, this is probably the best (non-book) recommendation in this thread.
Gargoyles is good of course, but that’s still somewhat sad…
Steven Lawhead’s Pendragon cycle had a bunch of extra stuff (I guess that one could call it fanwanking) in terms of characters’ backgrounds and tying Atlantis in, and is also a bit dense, but I suspect that it’s also about the closest there is to a real King Arthur treatment in modern English.
He did an execellent job describing the Fisher King and his wound which wouldn’t heal, though. That’s still an image I have years later.