Once again, musicals aren't my favorite genre

I've stated several times here how musicals aren't my favorite genre, in part because of how artificial they can be compared to Hollywood movies in general. A good example of why I don't always look forward to musicals is Camelot, which is coming up on TCM tomorrow, October 7, at 5:00 PM.

Richard Harris stars as King Arthur, and as the movie opens -- or, at least once the obligatory flashback takes place -- it doesn't seem to be that long since he's taken the throne at Camelot with England still being divided among a bunch of small competing kingdoms. But Richard soon meets Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave), and marries her, although it's an arranged marriage so neither of the two is certain they'll like the other, something that's important for actions later in the movie.

Arthur's desire is to unite England, and to do that he envisages the idea of the Round Table which will bring together all the "good" and "noble" knights in England, as if anybody who is openly aspirational of such power is really good or noble. But it's a new and revolutionary idea, which means that the existence of the idea at least is going to spread like wildfire. It's even going to spread all the way to France, where Lancelot Du Lac (Franco Nero) lives. He hears of the idea and figures he's just the thing to join the Round Table, so he heads off to England.

The English knights don't necessarily care for Lancelot for a bunch of reasons, and in their defense some of their reasoning has to do with Lancelot's personality making things more difficult for himself. He just knows that he's more noble than everybody else, and a better jouster too. At least he's able to prove that latter point objectively in the jousting competitions. Along the way Lancelot and Guenevere fall in love.

Now, part of uniting England and bringing about the Round Table includes more bringing about the rule of law as opposed to the rule of one king. Arthur's plan involves reducing the power of the king to amnesty people. This is going to come back to bite him when Lancelot and Guenevere start having an affair. There's all sorts of political infighting in the court, instigated in part by Arthur's illegitimate son from a previous relationship, Mordred (David Hemmings). They make the Lancelot/Guenevere relationship public, forcing a trial that results in Lancelot fleeing into exile while Guenvere faces burning at the stake.

There's not much plot in Camelot, although in this case that doesn't mean that Camelot is a plotless movie. Instead, it means that the story has enough plot for an old programmer of the 1930s. In the case of this musical version of Camelot, however, the movie is bloated out to nearly three hours. And boy do I mean bloated. It's slow, and frankly, the music doesn't particularly sparkle either. Musicals were really losing their popularity by the mid-1960s, and with an outdated film like Camelot, it's easy to see why.

The Gull

With me already having written one post for today, my next post is going to be a bit briefer of a review than normal, although that's also in part because it's a movie based on a classic work of literature: a 1968 international production of The Sea Gull.

The movie is of course based on the play by Anton Chekhov, which probably should have been originally translated as just The Gull since the movie isn't set anywhere near the sea. Instead, it's set at a country estate somewhere not far south of Moscow where bureaucrat Sorin lives. His sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret) visits; she's a successful actress whose son Konstantin (David Warner) would like to be a writer but is writing more daring stuff that the public doesn't care for.

More successful with the public is Trigorin (James Mason), but he doesn't much care for the sort of stuff that sells commercially; he's also carrying on an affair with Arkadina. And then, living over on the next estate, is young Nina (Vanessa Redgrave). Konstantin has been pursuing her, but she meets someone successful like Trigorian and she's immediately smitten with that achievement. The various characters see each other and philosophize a lot, to the point that the whole proceedings get boring.

Eventually, it comes time for everyone not living in the area to go home, except that Nina goes off with Trigorin to become his mistress. Two years pass, and most of the same characters return to Sorin's estate because he's getting to the age where everybody expects him to die soon. There's more philosophizing, and then an ending that's a bit shocking.

Apparently the first performance of the play back in the 1890s was a critical failure and it wasn't until a few years later when a new production was an artistic breakthrough. I'd never seen any version of the play, nor read it, before seeing this version of the movie. All I can say is that having seen this movie, I can understand why the original stage play was a failure. The one thing that the movie has going for it is the settings; the movie was filmed in Sweden with lake areas just outside Stockholm substituting for country Russia, and doing so rather beautifully.

However, I think Signoret is miscast as a Russian actress, while director Sidney Lumet didn't do anything particularly imaginative in the direction. The actors mostly declaim their lines, as if they're not on screen together, and since the movie is slow and talky, none of this really helps the production.

Agatha

I watched Agatha over the weekend, having DVRed it back during the autumn or maybe even Summer Under the Stars. (Edit: I just looked it up, and I recorded it on September 11. Yeah, I've got a backlog of movies on my DVR. I think I'm down to about three dozen now.) It's coming up on TCM this afternoon at 4:00 PM, and is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The title refers to Agatha Christie (played by Vanessa Redgrave), the famous British mystery writer. And, it deals, at least peripherally, with a real incident in her life. In late 1926, as her marriage to Col. Archibald (played by Timothy Dalton) was disintegrating, Agatha disappeared for 11 days. She was eventually found at a spa (well, at least, one of those old European-style spas, of the quality of the seaside resorts in movies like The Entertainer, not the resorts of today), and the explanation given for her disappearance was "amnesia". To this day, nobody knows what really happened. This movie comes up with a fanciful guess at what might have happened, or at least something that would have made for an interesting story.

In the movie, Agatha just before her disappearance is invited to promote her new book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which was published in June 1926). Obviously the press wants a piece of her, including an American in London, Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman). However, she realizes that her husband has a mistress Nancy (Celia Gregory) and even sees her. Archie is in love Nancy who is his secretary and doesn't love Agatha (their divorce would become final in 1928), which is why Archie tells Agatha their marriage is finished and what drives Agatha to do what she does. She goes to Harrogate and checks in as Nancy's cousin.

Wally goes to the Christie home outside London, talks with one of the servants, and puts two and two together, so he shows up in Harrogate, claiming to be a patient too. And then Nancy shows up, which was apparently part of Agatha's plan. Meanwhile, she's taking an interest in the new electrostimulation techniques the spa is using, taking notes on them as if she's going to use those notes as part of her next book. Wally, for his part, falls in love with Agatha, or at least acts like he's falling in love with her; it may just be a ruse to get the story of Agatha's disappearance. And back in the south of England, the police are searching for Agatha with Archie caring suprisingly little about the search.

Agatha has an interesting (if probably utterly fictitious) story, although I felt that it began to go off the rails in the final third or so of the movie, with the ultimate climax being faintly ridiculous. I also had some problems with the way Wally's character was written. He's a self-absorbed, overbearing jerk, and for some of the things he does in the movie he should have been thrown out of the spa. I don't think you can blame Hoffman for this, however, as he's only doing what the script asks of him. Redgrave has a more complex character to play and does well with it.

Overall, I think Agatha will be pleasing to fans of Agatha Christie as well as to people who like movies set in interwar Britain. I don't think the production values are quite as high as we'd get a few years later with Chariots of Fire and then all the Merchant-Ivory productions, but they're more than good enough.