In short: Ghost Story (1974)

McFayden (Murray Melvin), a product of the British upper class if ever you’ll see one, has invited two former college friends to an old mansion. I say friends, but as a matter of fact, McFayden, Duller (Vivian MacKerrell) – the unpleasant product of the “sportsman” archetype – and the middle-class and clearly still suffering from bad memories of his school days Talbot (Larry Dann), didn’t really run in the same circles way back when. McFayden and Duller, connected by class if nothing else, start bullying and “teasing” Talbot in ways subtle and blunt.

Instead of simply exploding, or going somewhere else where a perfectly nice guy like him might be appreciated, Talbot begins seeing ghosts and visions about the mansion and its past, reliving a tale of cruelty and madness that slowly unfolds and attempts to envelop the man trapped in it whole.

This British film directed by Stephen “I made two movies about the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and they are both terrible in completely different ways” Weeks, with a script by Philip Norman and Rosemary Sutcliff (whom I know as the author of well-regarded historical novels for teenagers like “The Eagle of the 9th”, written before YA existed as a label or the genre it is today) is quite a pleasant surprise to me. Despite its title – and some knowing nods towards M.R. James – this is not a traditional ghost story in the antiquarian – nor the Victorian – manner,  but a film that uses its ghostly apparitions metaphorically to confront the sins of the past, in this case the psychological fall-out of the British class system, colonialism and the repression of women.

I’m not typically a fan of the “ghost as a metaphor” approach, yet the script simply makes it so engaging – if in a somewhat theatrical manner – there’s really no arguing against it. Characters are deeper and more complex than the stand-ins for their class they at first appear to be, and even the more melodramatic elements of the plot always feel organic and absolutely appropriate, earned by the film’s intelligence.

And even though Ghost Story really isn’t so much about the supernatural as the supernatural, and more like someone from the Pinter school of British stage writing trying their hand at a ghost story, there is still room for delightfully creepy moments in it; in a couple of scenes, this even seems to evoke the careful and ambiguous strangeness of British writers of the Weird like Aickman and de la Mare, not something one encounters on screen very often, and certainly not done as well as it is here.

Gawain and the Green Knight (1973)

Things have calmed down a little too much in the realm of King Arthur (Anthony Sharp), so his knights have become rather unknightly over the years. It’s gotten so bad, the old man invites everyone to a Yule feast he then starts with pointedly denying his knights food and going on the beginning of a kingly old man rant that’ll probably eventually talk about knights and lawns.

Fortunately for everyone involved (including the audience), a mysterious Green Knight (Nigel Green, appropriately enough) appears and challenges the King’s men to a knightly game. He will give anyone willing one free strike with his very own axe, and will only afterwards return a strike in the same manner. After much shuffling of feet and, some awkward stares and another hissy fit from the King, squire Gawain (Murray Head, so the jokes really write themselves with this one) steps forward, gets quickly knighted by his King and proceeds to lop the Green Knight’s head off. Unfortunately, that’s not much of a bother to the Knight, who simply puts his noggin back on. He’s rather impressed by Gawain’s courage, though, and so gives the young man a respite from his own, most probably more lethal head-loss, and postpones the return strike for a year. If Gawain should manage to find the Knight and win against him in a duel during this time, all’s going to be okay. Why, the Knight is even going to send our young hero signs and portents to guide him to wherever Green Knights dwell. Which will mostly mean that Gawain and his squire Humphrey (David Leland) will proceed to wander around England and pop up wherever they hear about someone or something being green (seriously), when in doubt trying to kill them.

It’s not a great approach to questing, I believe, but it does quickly provide Gawain with his very own lady love (Ciaran Madden), an absolute must for the questing knight, and certainly keeps him busy for the year.

As David Lowery will probably tell you, one of the problems when adapting the chivalric romance of Gawain and the Green Knight is that its beguiling set-up that so clearly suggests something about the pagan past haunting Christianity’s ideas about knighthood is quickly followed by the author going - to paraphrase – “and many adventures were had by Gawain, but adventures are boring, so let me just list some of them and then jump ahead in time so we can have a really good talk about the fine points of the chivalric code” and then spending most of the poem not on any dramatically potent stuff about the conflict between honour and humanity but on tedious rules-lawyering.

Which is something no post-medieval audience of any kind outside of very specific academic circles will have any time for, leaving the heavy lifting of the main part of any script using the source to the writers of said script: the job of creating thematic connections and perhaps even a plot and not just a tantalizing set-up.

Alas, in the case of Stephen Weeks’s Gawain and the Green Knight, little of that sort of heavy lifting seems to have been done by Weeks in his guise as writer, nor by his co-writer Philip M. Breen. Sure, there are recurring characters, but otherwise, Gawain’s various adventures feel completely disconnected and have little to do with his quest for the Green Knight; nor does the film put any thought into what its Green Knight actually means, to its world, for Gawain, or thematically. Weeks may have understood that himself, for a decade later, he directed yet another version of the same tale in Sword of the Valiant. Of course, having watched that one in all of its cheesy glory, you will be hard pressed to call it an improvement as an adaptation of the material.

The film at hand’s script problems would be more easily acceptable if most of our hero’s adventures were a little more interesting to watch. In part, this is certainly the fault of the movie’s clearly miniscule budget that leads to costumes often looking as if they were put together from the musty stores of some amateur theatre production. Speaking of production design here feels exceedingly optimistic. The action sequences are equally impoverished, with little flair for staging a swordfight on the cheap. That’s not helped by the director’s curious fixation on fights in which our hero is fighting an enemy on horseback while unhorsed himself, something that could be properly exciting if treated well, but just looks particularly amateurish here even the first time around. By fight number four in this style, it’s just tiresome.

The film’s not a total wash, however: there’s certainly joy to be found in its pompous narrator (who never tells anything that needed telling, of course) and the way the equally pompous and VERY DRAMATIC score by Ron Goodwin starts to feel like some kind of sarcastic commentary on the impoverished miming of people in bad costumes through medieval ruins we witness. Every scene that features the seneschal of Fortinbras or the guy’s son is automatically enhanced by their sheer, maniacal overacting, and a supposedly bereft queen changing her mind from killing the knight who bested her husband to marrying him once she sees Murray Head’s face isn’t too bad either, particularly since nobody involved actually seems to understand this to be funny.

That’s certainly enough to keep me awake and mildly entertained for ninety minutes. Sane peoples’ mileages may very well vary.