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Touches You

Excellent but underrated film

Boring

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

(Possible Spoilers) As a fan of the eye-filling costume spectacle, I don't expect deep thoughts and careful characterization. I can even tolerate minor anachronisms. However, the story and the actions of the characters still need to make some sense, and that is where "The Black Knight" begins to fall apart.Several enormous castles are shown in this story, which implies a violent society requiring serious defenses. However, the castle of the hero's amour is invaded by Viking cavalry—horned helmets and all!—who ride in without significant resistance. There do not even appear to be any sentries watching for trouble; everyone is chowing down at the dinner table.The Vikings trash the place, and upon their retreat, the hero pursues their leader a few fields distant…to Camelot. In fact, all of the locations seem to be a horse-gallop away from each other, which is convenient, and easy on the horses.Returning to the ruined castle (thehero does a lot of to-ing and fro-ing along the same wooded trail. The horses must know the way.) the hero finds his former lord in a demented state, with only his daughter, the hero's would-be amour caring for him. The place is a smoldering pile of smoking debris; does the hero take the surviving pair to Camelot where they at least will have shelter and something to eat? NO!!! He leaves them there amid the ruins! What a guy! There are other lapses like this.There are some deeply strange scenes, most notably Stonehenge full of dancing pagans bringing Margaret Murray's theories to life. The hero—who in the course of a week or so learns all the fighting arts of a knight—disguised as The Black Knight, rescues his amour from pagan sacrifice. I must have dozed off, because she was wearing a wig as a would-be sacrifice, and I have no recollection why she was wearing the wig.King Arthur is miserably stupid in this movie, and there is no Guinevere. The Bad Guy is Sir Palomides, a Saracen knight who DID appear in some of the Arthur stories, but he wasn't in league with renegade Cornishmen or crazed Stonehenge pagans. Peter Cushing is fun to watch in this role.I love secret passages, and this movie has one roomy enough for the hero to run through! Following the passage, he eavesdrops on conspirators. Perhaps he is hard of hearing, because he doesn't just listen; he opens up a secret panel allowing nearly a full-length view of him with the Evildoers five feet away! The movie goes on and on and on—can someone tell me what a bunch of armed horsemen are going to do to attack a castle? And why the castle archers expose themselves to enemy fire? The painting of Camelot is a fantasy medieval castle on steroids. It is enormous, but we never see much of the interior. I would hate to have to pay the heating/air conditioning bills.The helmets of Arthur's knights are strange…possibly inspired by the helmets of the Teutonic Knights in "Alexander Nevsky." Just like Zorro, our hero sheds his Simple Blacksmith Clothes for the (unique) short-sleeved armor et alia of The Black Knight—more aptly The Big Black Bird Knight. He stashes his horse somewhere out of sight, too. Unlike Zorro, he does not have a plausible hidey hole for his changing room and horsekeeping headquarters. He just appears and rides for the next castle.Except for the crowns, which look like the paper crowns Burger King gives away, none of this looks cheap, but the writing and acting sink any chance this movie had. The Faux Old Timey English grates on the brain. Alan Ladd doesn't help.It is all exhausting, watching all the going back and forth between various castles and other hangouts. I think I would have found this one annoying when I was ten years old.

If you are looking for the epitome of "it's so awful, I cannot look away" movies, then this has got to be it! Everything is just dire, (except Peter Cushing as the baddie, (although he must have spent many an hour focusing on his coming fee rather than trying to think of his role - as a Saracen knight at the court of King Arhur (?????))). Alan Ladd's 'acting' is on a par with the 'plot', (if you can find it), and both are upstaged by the costumes, (especially the knights' or 'Vikings'' helmets, adorned with more horns, heraldic beasts and other appendages than a Victorian coat-stand). The real things not to miss, (in between either collapsing in hopeless fits of giggling or nodding off entirely, (and I could only watch my recording from the television in something like six (short) takes)), are the 'set pieces', especially the 'Virgin Sacrifice' scene at 'Stonehenge' - a good 25 years before Monty Python, but indescribably funnier than anything Cleese and his chaps could ever have thought up. Words can only go so far in describing a turkey of this magnitude, so if you are a fan of Mel Brooks-type spoofs and want a taste of something way beyond spoofing, set the VCR to record this one the next time it is on television, (as I cannot imagine any VHS or DVD distributor in their right mind ever putting this one up for sale), grab a bucket of popcorn, a box of tissues, (for when you collapse in laughter at frequent points), and go for it when you need a lift.

Having your wife as your agent can carry some advantages I'm sure, but when Sue Carol Ladd made a deal with Warwick Pictures in the United Kingdom for her husband to star, she did not advance his career. In fact this last one, The Black Knight, might have sunk it.The biggest mistake Alan Ladd and his wife made was leaving Paramount before Shane was released to critical and popular success. Who knows what might have happened had he stayed and the Paramount publicity machine cranked up at Oscar time for him.The Black Knight was the third film of three that Ladd did for Warwick that were released by Columbia in America. The first one, The Red Beret was a World War II story and Ladd was a Canadian to explain his non-British accent. The second, Hell Below Zero, was a modern story set on a whaling ship and was not bad and he played an American.But Ladd had no business in The Black Knight, a tale set in the days of King Arthur. Peter Cushing as Sir Palimedes, a knight who's in the Mordred vein, is plotting with Patrick Troughton playing King Mark of Cornwall to overthrow Arthur and return the isle of Britain to the Druid religion. Ladd's a blacksmith, hopelessly in love with Lady Patricia Medina whose father he is in service to. Upward mobility isn't the rule in those days, but it can be done as Ladd's friend and mentor Andre Morrell says. Go into knight training and incidentally find out what's behind all these Viking raids were having. Poor Alan Ladd just doesn't have the requisite image for dueling. Twenty years earlier Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. could have handled the role with ease. But Alan Ladd was never meant to be buckling swashes. Lines that sounded natural coming from Errol Flynn sound ridiculous from Ladd.Director Tay Garnett handles the battle sequences real nice and the rest of the British cast look like they know what they're doing. At least this was not the worst film Alan Ladd ever did. That was awaiting him in Duel of the Champions.

I liked it only because I fancy swords and medieval armor. However, you're not going to learn anything factual nor fascinating about medieval combat here unlike in Robert Taylor's Ivanhoe or Knights of the Round Table.The character portrayed by Alan Ladd wears an abbreviated armor eschewing the greaves and other gear to protect the legs and arms. Save for the breastplate and chain mail (short sleeved at that!), there is little to suggest that he wears authentic knightly armor. Even his helmet covers only the top of his face (no doubt to display his handsome features.) Robocop is the same way. The reason for the light armor becomes apparent when Ladd performs acrobatics in combat unlikely to have been part of a knight's dueling or battle paces. Robert Wagner in Prince Valiant does similar things.The heroic Black Knight is actually a commoner and thus barred from bearing knightly arms and so has to keep his identity secret.The villains are a Saracen knight (Peter Cushing) allied with Cornishmen. Why the people of Cornwall who are as British as the English? Beats me.Cushing gives a luscious performance as a baddie. His quip after humiliating the blacksmith Alan Ladd before his lady love (Patricia Medina) is memorable. After failing to egg the meek Alan Ladd into fighting him, he turns to Patricia saying: "Please pardon this shameful exhibition."The photography and location shots are excellent.