The Boorman Kids

The other thing about Excalibur is the Uther-Igrayne shagging scene at the beginning. What with the grinding and tit-sucking and all, as a kid it used to turn me on and freak me out in equal measure. (Dude, this is King Arthur. But I shouldn't be watching this! Etc.) Uther, it just so happens, was played by the aforementioned Gabriel Byrne. But it's only when one bears in mind that the Igrayne in question was actually Boorman's daughter that the real freakiness of the scene starts to emerge.

And just to, er, top that, here's beautiful Charley Boorman (who appears in Excalibur in his undies, being oiled up by Helen Mirren) in The Emerald Forest.

It's a fairly recognisable syndrome - doting dad decides that his kid (female or male) is the most gorgeous thing in the world and gets her or him a plum part in some little remembered movie (or, in the case of Excalibur, in a well remembered one). Danny the Champion of the World, for example, is actually a sweet enough film, but it's still little more than an Irons family home movie.

Boorman's home movies would presumably have been along the lines of not just Hope and Glory (which really is glorious) but also I Dreamt I Woke Up (which is weird and interesting, but not quite so interesting as I wanted it to be). Taken together though, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest make Robby seem positively normal.

The Once and Future Ring King

The real genius of Excalibur, as with any proper modern rendering of a classic work, is that John Boorman picked up Malory's dog-eared, 500-year-old blockbuster and steadfastly refused to admit that it was boring. Yes, there are lots of boring bits in it. Yes there are hundreds of footling minor characters, the plot goes hither and yon, and the author probably didn't know very much about ancient British mysteries or Jungian mythic archetypes. But hey! It's got wizards, magic swords, magic forests, magic caves, magic castles, handsome knights galloping to battle in shining armour, damsels in distress (and various states of undress), lots of violence... and lots and lots of SEX. Throw in a bit of mumbo-jumbo about the King and the Land being one, and with a pinch of Carl Orff and lashings of Wagner you've got yourself a pretty sharp movie.

Yes, arguably Excalibur only really wins because the overwhelming majority of King Arthur films have been rubbish. Hollywood, sadly, tends to be scared of things they think people won't know about. So re-packaging Arthur, Merlin and Guinevere and the rest as a sub-sci-fi genre piece was a smart move. It wasn't even meant to be King Arthur in the first place. It was meant to be Tolkien (according to Boorman himself in a recent Indie interview). And of course Tolkien was another one of those things that Hollywood used to be scared of.

But then the lesson of every superhero movie made in the last three decades is that a pop cultural phenomenon (such as Superman or Spider-Man) really has to have been around for forty years or more before Hollywood is comfortable enough with it to allow a "proper" film to be made. Why else did we have to wait until the late '70s for the Man of Steel? Why did we spend the '80s enduring drivel like Legend and Willow and Krull and Dragonslayer and God-only-knows-what, when what everyone really wanted were hobbits and High Elves and Mordor and the One Ring? (To be fair, Conan was a pretty good film-version of Conan, who by then had more than done his pre-Hollywood four decades: famously poorly reviewed by Time with a single line - 'Star Wars... as done by a psychopath!' - it's hard to imagine that the original psychopath Robert E Howard himself would have disapproved.)

Well, for better or for worse, the Jackson films (as I feel compelled to refer to them) have most likely burst Hollywood's fantasy dam once and for all. In the long term Middle-earth itself seems likely to become one of those gifts that just keeps giving. (Personally in my lifetime I'm predicting Turin and Lúthien and bloody Gondolin. But never mind!)