MovieChat Forums > Camelot (1967) Discussion > Wonderfully beautiful and incredibly dat...

Wonderfully beautiful and incredibly dated.....

posted 13 years ago by Mandyjam
4 replies | jump to latest

Oh, those were the sixties! Long medieval princess locks, brown and orange woollen boucle, chunky Spanish-style furniture, hammered metal, dripping candles, gold glass, drifty bits, swirling smoke, animal skin rugs, chains of flowers. Liberated by pot smoking and free love, but still awaiting Germaine Greer!

The poster, the superb poster, says it all!

The movie is all and every beautiful thing that has been said about it .... and it is also one of the most extraordinarily sexist pieces of drama ever made. It is a musical which acknowledges over and over the weakness, the foolishness, the vapidness, the fickleness of the female nature!

It is telling to compare this musical masterpiece with My Fair Lady, which is based closely on the play Pygmalian written about 60 years earlier. How George Bernard Shaw sends up the arrogance of the man who imagines he a superior creature to the woman! But in Camelot, the superiority of the male in all things is simply taken for granted and Guinevere never questions it for an instant.

Watching this movie provides an incomparable opportunity to study the way in which gender roles and attitudes have changed in the last forty years.

"great minds think differently"

[–] kelly-527 12 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Great movie to meld the contemporary with the medieval look. Guinevere's costumes are to die for.

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] singjohn 11 years ago

I love all the earth tones and fabulous costumes in this. It's my understanding that the stage musical had a very storybook look about it. The movie does the same but not in a Mother Goose storybook way, more like a Tolkienesque way. Redgrave's 60's hairdo's are a little distracting.

Both are reflections of their time. Even though they are only a few years apart, the world had changed greatly. The stage version is a reflection of a Kennedyesque version of Camelot. Whereas the movie has a more hippyish/Renaissance Faire feel.

[–] ciprianl 9 years ago

It's not necessarily (or at least not altogether) about the foolishness of female nature. Remember the song about The Lusty Month of May? It sings about sexuality as being natural and that it shouldn't be shackled by the repressive conventions of society. What ultimately dooms the political utopia that king Arthur tried to build in Camelot was not her betrayal, but men's reaction to the betrayal.

Even Arthur, who still loved her (accepting to close his eyes so as not to see what many of his knights saw clearly), and was torn apart by the conflict between his love, her betrayal, and his duty to his ideal of law, nevertheless was willing to allow her to be burned alive, in order to support the law and his system of power that upholds it and in which he saw the meaning of his life. This begs the question if such a law is worth upholding. He did hope that Lancelot will show up and rescue her, although when that happened, it proved to be just another blow against the Round Table. And next, his own knights compelled him to go and make war on Lancelot, wanting revenge (instead of saving their strength to use it against Mordred), a motive incompatible with his utopia.

Guenevere foolishly fantasized (but it may be considered simple youthful foolishness, similar to Tom of Warwick's fantasy at the end, to become a knight and heroically kill many enemies), at the beginning, about men spilling each other's blood over her. But weren't the men who did that in fact more foolish?

Wouldn't it have been more fun for the main characters - and more wise (although possibly less legendary) - if that instead of going to war, they chose to make a sandwich?