FIRST KNIGHT. Directed by Jerry Zucker; written by William Nicholson; produced by Jerry Zucker and Hunt Lowry for Columbia. Starring Julia Ormond, Richard Gere and Sean Connery. Rated PG-13.
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First Knight is a first-class romantic epic of the kind Hollywood used to churn out with regularity, but which have become rare events these days.
It has a wonderful cast, splendid production design and a blithe disregard for both history and earlier versions of its story. This last point is important; you need to forget all you have previously known about the King Arthur story to really enjoy First Knight. If you keep waiting for it to conform to Camelot or The Once & Future King, you'll just get frustrated and miss out on the entertaining twists it puts on this old, familiar tale. And, if you consider those stories sacred, you will not like the movie.
The basics of the story are intact. Guinevere (Ormond) marries Arthur (Connery) even though she and Lancelot (Gere) have a fatal attraction for each other. Here Guinevere doesn't just respect and admire Arthur, though, she needs him to help protect her homeland from the bloodthirsty Malagant (Ben Cross) a figure who doesn't appear in any Arthur story I can remember, but whose "Black Knight" persona is familiar.
Lancelot's story is slanted a little differently than usual here, too. At the beginning of the movie he's a vagabond fighter/entertainer, moving from village to village and taking on all comers with a broadsword for whatever the locals are willing to wager. It turns out he lost his family to someone like Malagant, and isn't eager to put down roots again.
Most moviegoers would agree that Sean Connery was born to play King Arthur. When Connery strides up to the Round Table, it's easy to see how Arthur's people were so devoted to him, even before he does any talking of the Camelot ideals of freedom, peace, and justice.
Gere as Lancelot is a more problematic casting decision, but he does an admirable job. Wisely choosing not to attempt an English accent, he makes Lancelot believable as a Camelot outsider, and is terrific in the action sequences. Maybe a little less so in his conversion from self-absorption to true selfless knighthood, but the rest of the portrayal is so good that you might be willing to overlook this weakness toward the end.
The heart and soul of the movie, though, and its main point-of-view character is Guinevere, and Ormond is just perfect. She is strong, principled, passionate and simply drop-dead gorgeous in her period finery. Singlehandedly disposing of several bad guys and generally proving to be difficult to carry off in the traditional manner (she's the object of several kidnap attempts and daring rescues), she's an enormous improvement over the usual damsels in distress.
On the villainous side, Cross is appropriately creepy as the evil Malagant, a former knight of the Round Table now determined to bring Camelot down. And he lives in what has to be the best outlaw hideout since Hole-in-the-Wall. It's supposed to be an abandoned castle, but was filmed in a Welsh slate mine, complete with dark, dank walls, underground rivers and bottomless pits—terrific!
Camelot, on the other hand, has a lived-in Disneyland look about it that is very appealing. It's a great place for "happ'ly ever-aftering," or at least for just spending a couple of summer hours.
July 26, 1995