The Black Knight (1954) is even sillier than last week's outing. A British Arthurian fantasy of the 1950s, it proves two things: that the British can create even bigger train wrecks out of their own history than the Americans ever could and that Alan Ladd couldn't act.
In The Black Knight, a lowly blacksmith named John (Ladd, of course) falls in love with Linet, the daughter of an earl. The feeling is mutual, though Linet acts like a complete cow toward him at the drop of whatever bit of nasty gossip about her true love is going around court. Never will you see a better demonstration of how shallow Golden Age Hollywood (though in this case, it's a British facsimile) thought women in love were. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, indeed. To gain (and regain, again and again) this fickle beauty's love, not to mention fight the treacherous Knights of the Round Table, John puts himself through a series of truly horrendous tests to win his lady love. Naturally, this includes impersonating the Black Knight of the title. You all know how this ends.
There are the usual blatant historical inaccuracies that you can expect from a film set in Camelot. Fifteenth-century plate armor, for example, has become a standard in the tales since Malory's Le morte d'Arthur, this week's book review. And never mind that Arthur was supposed to have lived a millennium before that. But The Black Knight is notable for adding a few scary wrinkles to the anachronistic mess that the Arthurian sagas have become.
Consider the inevitable kidnap and rescue of our Silly Heroine. She is carried off to Stonehenge-which looks remarkably intact before the rescuers knock it down into its current configuration. It's also remarkably crowded. Is there some New Age celebration going on? Hardly. The Heroine has been kidnapped by Vikings. Here the writers show the dangers of a little knowledge. They seem to have some vague memory that the Vikings who raided Britain in the 9th-11th centuries were pagans. Further, they also somewhat remember that Arthur lived in late Iron Age Britain. So, they conflate the two into a mess of drunken Vikings partying among the stones, while talentless starlets tandem-dance around and cackling crones prepare the maiden for human sacrifice-which wouldn't have occurred in late Iron Age Britain, anyway, but who's counting?
What is scariest about this film (aside from its being dull even for a popcorn matinee) is that some people probably got some of their "knowledge" about Medieval History from it.
