The Furniture: Camelot, a Silly and Furry Place

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Back in August, I wrote about two dramatically different ways of portraying Arthurian Legend on screen. To recap: the bright silliness of Knights of the Round Table (1953) looks like psychedelic compared to the bland grit of King Arthur (2004) and the gruff, imperial fantasia of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). But even these at least share a mild interest in engaging with English historical design. Camelot (1967), on the other hand, is a flighty fantasy of utter nonsense.

Of course, this is why it’s such a delight to watch. It’s a furry, oversexed epic that sends its glamorous cast out into magical forests to sing Lerner and Loewe songs at the top of their extravagantly-adorned lungs. The film won Oscars for production designer John Truscott, art director Edward Carrere and set decorator John Brown, with Truscott taking home a second statuette for the costumes. Lavishly made and lavishly awarded, it’s a classic of committed inspiration.

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Fontaine Centennial: Mrs de Winter in "Rebecca"

For the next few days we'll be celebrating Joan Fontaine's Centennial. Here's Eric on her most famous picture...

David O. Selznick, Joan Fontaine, and Alfred Hitchcock at the Oscars for Rebecca. The film won... but Fontaine and Hitch didn't.

One of the best things about writing for The Film Experience is the chance to open up windows of your film history you haven’t explored before.  For some reason, throughout all the years, I had never seen a movie with Joan Fontaine.  Just one of those black holes.  And because she stopped acting before I was born, I have zero frame of reference for her (unlike, say, sister Olivia de Havilland)... 

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Happy 50th to The Jungle Book (1967) -- Who is your avatar within?

by Nathaniel R

Rudyard Kipling's collection of stories "The Jungle Book"  was first published in 1894. It's been adapted so many times now, you always have to specify which version you're talking about. The most famous and widely seen is surely Disney's 1967 animated version which opened in movie theaters 50 years ago on this very day. It's been a childhood staple for decades now with Disney only just barely trying to replace it with that inferior but wildly successful live-action CGI hybrid replica. When I was a wee toddler it was my favorite Disney movie (it's long since been replaced but holds a special place in my heart).

Today's crucial reader survey / comment party:
Which character do you most relate to... and which do you wish you were a little more like?

Let's hear from the lot of you for a wide sampling of our particular online jungle here at The Film Experience. Your options, in order of their appearance, are...

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100 Years Ago Today... Mata Hari's Execution

by Nathaniel R

Sorry to begin your day with something so grim but it's actressy. Today marks the centennial of the execution of exotic dancer Mata Hari by firing squad for espionage during "The Great War" (aka World War I)... 

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50th Anniversary: Two for the Road

Tim here. This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the tiny gems in the careers of Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, and director Stanley Donen: Two for the Road. It's a British film that picked up a handful of important awards nominations – writer Frederic Raphael at both the Oscars and BAFTAS, Hepburn at the Golden Globes, Donen with the DGA – and went on to be largely overlooked in the following five decades.

That's understandable; it's not a film primed to appeal to the fandom that it seems like it should have. Donen in the director's seat and Hepburn as the top-billed lead both suggest certain kinds of films, if not necessarily the same kind of film: bubbly comedies in his case, elegant Continental romances in hers (splitting the difference, four years earlier they collaborated on Charade, a bubbly Continental comedy). Two for the Road isn't devoid of humor, but it's not primarily a comedy. Instead, it's a serious depiction of a marriage of some ten years or more, long enough for comfortable familiarity to have settled into tetchy boredom.

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