The Furniture: Reframing the Legend of King Arthur
Monday, August 28, 2017 at 11:30AM "The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.
King Arthur, the character, is listed by IMDb as appearing in 149 films and TV shows. That’s more than Dracula. I’m not going to go through all of them, obviously. But circumstance has given me a good excuse to compare two examples: Knights of the Round Table (1953) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). The latter just came out on Blu-ray. The former will serve as a bit of a tribute to Mel Ferrer, whose centennial was this past Friday.
The most obvious difference is between Ferrer’s version of Arthur, noble and even a bit meek, and the ever-hulking Charlie Hunnam. But this isn’t a physique column. Instead, I want to take a brief look at how Hollywood’s presentation of the loosely defined Arthurian Age has changed...