The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 350

CALENDAR MOVIES Nigel Terry portrays King Arthur in the John Boorman film, AN ANTHEM TO ARTHURIAN ENGLAND BY SHEILA BENSON The knights of "Excalibur" are almost never out of their armor or when they are, they're down to the pink, glowing buff. They struggle up and down steep river banks in their armor, wade about streams in it, somehow make love in it, and, heavens knows, fight clangingly in it. For the first few minutes your mind worries about this. About rust. Squeaks and rattles.

How cold the armor must feel against a woman's body. What the men do if they tip over and lie like great tin turtles. But before long you're used to these clanking armadillos. Director John Boor-man's vision of 6th -Century Britain, opening Friday at selected theaters, is so engulfing that sensible thoughts drop away. The men acquire a particular jointed grace.

You enter utterly into a world of magic and history. The vital thread of the film is Merlin, cunningly written (by Rospo Pallenberg and Boorman) and magnificently played by Nicol Williamson. Under his silver skullcap with its deep widow's peak, Merlin is a formidable collection of contradictions. He is visionary but not all-seeing the turns of the world can still astonish him. He has amazing powers but he can deplete himself like a marathon runner using them.

And he is ruefully aware that the time of magic is a little past the mark. "The days of our kind are numbered," he says as he watches a Christian wedding ceremony. "A great God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It is the way of things." As we first see him, Merlin is peering with the nearsighted gaze of a seer, through sulphurous battle smoke.

At the edge of the forest of Tintagel the world seems to be on fire. Horses breathe like smoky dragons. Ignorant armies are indeed clashing by night: clashing, butch- ering, lopping and hacking with 20- pound broadswords and flame -tipped lances and an awful blacksmith's ring of 2 metal on metal. It is the Dark Ages in all their horror. (The dull armor reinforces the animalistic image: The helmets have snout-shaped face pieces, not barred windows through which to see the world.) Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne), strongest of this dark, bestial lot, reminds Merlin that the magician has promised him a sword.

In exchange for a truce, Merlin growls, "To heal, not to hurt," but he grumbles off to fulfill his part of the bargain: a sword for a truce. 2 The next scene seems to heal your eyes -j after the opening scenes of carnage. 5 Striding through the restoring greens and misty grays of the Irish countryside (Ireland ironically doubling for Saxon Britain), Merlin arrives at a hillside and a crucial moment in the film's magic. From oo the lake, held by a woman's hand, the mystical sword Excalibur leaps up from the water like a silver trout, like all the violent forces of nature and man's un Gypsy Baron," with ankle-laced slippers and a side -tied head scarf. Guenevere aside, "Excalibur's" costuming by Bob Ringwood is fascinating.

As a young squire, Nigel Terry as Arthur looks loutish and crude in bulky quilted jackets. As the King, a beard slimming his face, he looks aristocratic, even taller in his robes and armor. The previous highwater mark in Arthurian costuming was "Camelot," whose designer, John Truscott, co-designed its art direction as well. He created dresses from natural fibers which felt as though they had been woven or spun or crocheted right there in Camelot's courtyards. "Excalibur," more indefinite in period and closer to magic and sorcery, sometimes goes in for sequins for its women.

Cloth of gold, yes; sequins, no: They feel more like "Lady in the Dark" than the Lady of the Lake. As Boorman weaves his story, he uses not only myth and Malory d' but fairy tale, opera, legend and a treasure hunt from other films. There is the magnificence of a medieval Kurosawa battle scene against a blood -orange moon and a flash from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" as Sir Perceval (Parsifal) walks down a drawbridge in his armor looking for all the world like Michael Rennie's spaceman walking onto earth from his ship. The fight at the bridge between Lancelot and Arthur is Robin Hood and Little John, and Igrayne's dance before the knights is like Tilly Losch's pulsing table-top dance of seduction from "Duel in the Sun." And, finally, there are hints of Darth Vader in the primordial battle scene which opens the film. Jt was Boorman's wish, after going to the Beyreuth Festival two years ago, to incorporate the excerpts from "Tristan und Isolde" which punctuate the film.

Considering the fact that he wanted actors with no strong previous audience identification for his knights, it's strange that he chose this music. Almost every audience has a visual or an unconscious response to Wagner and I doubt many of them connect it with medieval Britain. Considering the limitless imagination that marks the rest of the film, it's a shame "Excalibur" couldn't have had its own score. Trevor Jones, who did what original music there is, seems to have had some marvelous ideas, better by far than this melange of Wagner, and Carl Orff's familiar pounding rhythms of "Carmina Burana." The actors are led by Williamson's witty, perceptive Merlin, missed every minute he's off the screen. Nicholas Clay makes Lancelot a gentle, handsome quarterback, in contrast to Nigel Terry's regal, tortured Arthur.

(Terry looks so different over Arthur's age-span it was difficult to know it was the same actor. Helen Mirren is a splendid foil for Merlin as Morgana; she and Williamson are the same sort of actor, rich and juicy. Paul Geoffrey, who as Perceval must carry the film's saintlike image, is excellent; and as Ector, Arthur's foster father, Clive Swift has the right sort of gentle British bluster. The director's honey -haired daughter Katrine Boorman is electrifying as Igrayne, and his son Charley is the venomous young Mondred. The film's truly spectacular production design is by Anthony Pratt and its lyrical photography is by Alex Thomson.

It is difficult not to be affected by "Ex- From fet, Cherie Lunghi portrays Guenevere, Nicholas Clay is Lancelot and Nicol Williamson is Merlin the Magician in "Excalibur," opening Friday. conscious given one graceful, gleaming form. This deeply symbolic level of "Excalibur" is Boorman's finest creation. He mixes Christian legend, Jungian metaphor, a dash of Ken Russell kitsch and a recurring Boorman theme: man's loss of the "natural" world (and its magic) in the birth of the civilized one. Boorman's "Deliverance" and "Zardoz" held variations of the same message.

"Excalibur" has four acts: The first follows the magical conception and birth of Arthur; the second covers his adolescence and the sword in the stone, his ascension to the throne, the creation of the Knights of the Round Table and Arthur and Guenevere's marriage; in the third act is Lancelot and Guenevere's fall from grace, and the fourth is the search for the Grail and the concluding battle, with its healing apotheosis. For the most part, in any number of staggering visual settings, Boorman pulls it off. But at the heart of a great love story you need to feel great love. The musical film of "Camelot," whatever else it had, had a very real sense of sexual power pulling Guenevere away from honor to Lancelot's side. And it had, in Vanessa Redgrave, a Guenevere who was both regal and sublimely innocent.

Cherie Lunghi is a perky, coquettish Guenevere (as Boorman spells it), who overacts as though she were in silent films, making every gesture count. Without a regal Guenevere, a whole necessary balance is missing. And in one of the early scenes she's been costumed like one of the corps de ballet out of "The 'EXCALIBUR' An Orion Pictures release. Executive producers Edgar F. Gross and Robert A.

Eisenstein. Director and producer John Boorman. Screenplay Rospo Pallenberg and Boorman. Adapted from Malory's "Le Morte D' Arthur" by Rospo Pallenberg. Music Trevor Jones.

Production designer Anthony Pratt. Director of photography Alex Thomson. Editor John Merritt. Featuring Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey and Nicol Williamson. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes MPAA rating:.