# On View: The Questing **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** July 1, 1981 --- “Perhaps it is not the success or failure of the quest but, instead, the act of questing itself that matters.” The Holy Grail. The Fountain of Youth. The Eternal Woman. The Pepsi Generation, for that matter. All engage us (or engaged somebody) in quests, and most quests—whether or not we include the other cola is open to question—are worthy or at least time-consuming. And sometimes they make nifty subjects for books, occasionally even for movies. The quest, broadly defined, occupies us this month at the movies, this while the summer glut descends upon the theaters and we are overwhelmed by sequels to sequels to mediocre horror films. ## The Hand Speaking of which, _The Hand_ comes to us superficially as just another sleazy scary film, but it is considerably better than the ads suggest. An adaptation of Marc Brandel’s classic horror story, _“The Lizard’s Tale,”_ this film boasts not only another remarkably believable performance by Michael Caine, who terrified blondes and moviegoers last year in _Dressed to Kill_, but also a poignant variation on the theme of questing. Jon Landsale (Caine) is a mildly popular cartoonist who loses his hand in a freak accident. His wife (Andrea Marcovicci) is driving too fast, this in the midst of a domestic dispute, and Jon waves a truck back, but unsuccessfully. Splat! The hand is severed, the shrieking is something fierce, and we have before us one cartoonist with his drawing hand untidily removed. We are set up for poor Jon’s troubles quickly: his wife is into mind-expanding exercises conducted by a not terribly convincing fellow with more than mind-expansion on his mind; his young daughter is terribly precocious and something of a vegetarian bore; and the guy can’t draw. He can fantasize, however, and yearn for what is gone. After he has been stitched up and more or less patched together, Jon goes out to the highway and the grassy patches to find his hand. No hand in sight, though his signet ring turns up. A rational fellow, Jon reasons that the hand is now decomposed, and life goes on. The hand, however, is not decomposed, and certainly it’s anything but gone. It has been scampering about in search of Jon, and as time goes by it manifests a rather jealous nature and does unspeakable things to a young lady with whom Jon begins an affair, and to various others. It is also none too happy with Jon. It is an unpleasant hand, a vengeful and awesomely powerful hand, and the movie celebrating it is spooky and wonderfully cogent though absolutely gaga. Maybe the hand is doing all this; maybe Jon is to blame. We see the hand, Jon sees the hand, some victims and would-be victims see the hand, a psychiatrist, played with unaccustomed control and near understatement by Viveca Lindfors, sees the hand, but who can prove that the hand exists? _The Hand_ functions splendidly on two levels, both as horror story and as a psychological thriller. Oliver Stone, who wrote and directed the movie, treats us to that rarity, a film offering two intriguing interpretations, the one, of course, hysterical nonsense, the other one perfectly down-to-earth though just as perfectly suited for a case study of psychopathy. Our cartoonist friend observes early on that he still feels his missing fingers. He learns, as all victims of amputation learn, that phantom feelings remain for years, often forever. He wants something that is gone; he also wants to vent his fury on those who cross him; he wants ultimately to destroy himself. His quest is for more than a missing appendage; it is for a satisfactory marriage where there is no longer any satisfaction, it is for love with an improper stranger, it is for the restoration of wholeness in a life that is off-balance in part, but only in part, because Jon’s is a body now grotesquely off-balance. The interpretation of just what all this actually signifies must be yours, but I lean to the psychological rather than to the other approach. ## Excalibur Not that every guy who loses a hand suffers the additional torments inflicted upon Jon. In John Boorman’s _Excalibur_, a nearly three-hour lesson in how not to bring the Arthurian legends to the screen in 1981, most of the sad examples of the force of sword against flesh merely cry out in agony and topple to the wayside. The focus here is Camelot in bloom and Camelot in disarray, Arthur conceived in magic, permitted by his gifts to extract the sword from its stone, creating the Round Table, cuckolded courtesy of Guenevere and Lancelot, and done in by his wretched son Mordred. Misery in a grand medieval style provides the gory backdrop for the majestic story of Arthur’s dream and Arthur’s nightmare, and Alex Thomson’s gloomy, sometimes haunting photography adds a lush, oddly inviting setting. _Excalibur_ is an unintentional comedy. Merlin (Nicol Williamson) gives the film its life and its humor, the actor evidently having decided to try out every note in his vocal range, and every intonation, and to hop about as if auditioning simultaneously for a burlesque and a second-rate tragedy. Everybody else is morbidly serious, and since Mr. Boorman has opted to compress nearly the full scope of Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” into one film, all the principal actors are engaged most of the time in declaiming, posturing, striking attitudes, such that they are reduced almost to walking concepts: Pride, Lust, Virtue, Deceit, Remorse, Vengeance. The movie is not helped by its casting of the major parts, most of which have been filled by strikingly attractive people who seem to have dropped off the pages of _Gentlemen’s Quarterly_ or, possibly, _Playgirl_, but who have been too busy fixing their hair to learn to act. No one is believable in _Excalibur_, neither in the freshness of its first half hour nor in the agonizing decline that follows, neither when Arthur (Nigel Terry) and Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) fight and become fast friends, nor when Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) captivates her Arthur and then his buddy, nor, at long last, when snippy Mordred (Robert Addie) goaded on by his mother, Morgana who is his mother, Morgana, who is also Arthur’s half sister (Helen blows with his father. _Excalibur’s_ failure is monumental, not insignificantly because its aim is so high. Its most stirring section deals with the quest for the Holy Grail, which carries us into the region of sanctified madness as well as into the dwindling arena of bad magic. The bright ambition of a valiant brotherhood of knights to come together in an unblemished circle of decency and honor degenerates in the famous story into a dissolution of spirit, as of flesh, all precipitated by the lust that brought Lancelot to take Guenevere from her husband, all in time dissolved into a fanaticism that, though given the gloss of Christian piety, is at heart pagan. Someone once defined a fanatic as a person who redoubles his energies as the original reason for his exertions escape him. The questing in _Excalibur_ is by that definition a trenchant example of fanaticism in high gear. _Excalibur_ itself is blurry and, ultimately, silly. ## Knightriders Undoubtedly quite by accident, the Arthurian material provides another filmmaker with ample material just as _Excalibur_ comes and, not much lamented, goes. George Romero, best known for his horror films, _Night of the Living Dead_ and _Dawn of the Dead_, has put his zombies away for a while — a third installment of the _Dead_ saga looms not far ahead—and updates Camelot for our time. We are with a group of bikers headed by Billy (Ed Harris), who, as King William, rules and “fathers” a tribe of delayed counterculturists making something of a living by putting on medieval pageants and motorcycle jousts for provincials along the highway. Merlin (Brother Blue) is much more entertaining and also believable in _Knightriders_ than is Williamson’s Merlin in _Excalibur_, and on the whole the characters are more appealing. Certainly the conflicts are less earth-shattering. Billy has his pal in Alan (Gary Lahti), who becomes something of a Lancelot while waiting until the very end to walk off with Billy’s queen, and in Morgan (Tom Savini), who didn’t know until too late that the first Morgan was a lady, Billy has his nemesis. This Camelot has troubles with the law and troubles from within, and for no particular reason it presents us with a master of ceremonies named Pippin (Warner Shook), who discovers that he is homosexual and finds a lover among the troupe. Billy delivers a series of speeches about his Idea and the purity of that Idea, and after some two and a half hours he relinquishes his crown to Morgan and goes off to die. I’m not quite sure what George Romero is trying to tell us in _Knightriders_, other than that playing dress-up on motorcycles can be picturesque and that the lure of commercialism can muck up a good latter-day commune, sure as shooting. Somewhere meandering among the vignettes and homey preachments and cozy trysts we can discover a fuzzy lesson about the search for value in an increasingly valueless society. Billy’s quest is for the order and peacefulness of a harmonious family. In Ed Harris, George Romero has an actor who exudes beaming blond rectitude, who stoically endures his pains both physical and spiritual, and who rises to the occasion every half hour or so by chastising some knave or proclaiming his complete confidence in the inevitable rightness of all things. Harris is a find. He stands erect, he appears to have not a care in the world, his thinning hair lays in golden wisps on his broad forehead, and wherever he goes in the picture he seems to carry along an implicit bag of virtuous attributes, which he tends alternately to husband and to cast about to the undeserving throng. He won’t even sign a little boy’s biker magazine because he’s pictured inside as some sort of Evel Knievel, though near the end he searches for the boy and gives him his sword. This is Camelot on a trip. Romero has wisely decided not to mimic the Arthurian personae very closely, and he has not hesitated to borrow from everywhere, here a Friar Tuck, there that beaming young Pippin, elsewhere a little _Easy Rider_. Billy’s Camelot is its own reason for being: it is, we assume, because it must be, and fill in the heavy justifications on your own time. Yet however ponderous its message — George Romero must on occasion have forgotten that he had put the zombies away for a while — and however jarring its anachronisms, _Knightriders_ is much more successful, on every level but the photographic, than Boorman’s _Excalibur_. It is, in fact, strangely moving in its commitment to a quest for spiritual freedom and harmonious communalism, and in its final scene, which of course involves us in the crushing of the dream, it evokes hushed respect from an audience. (_Excalibur_’s end inspires only gratitude that the thing has, mercifully, ended.) ## Lion of the Desert Another epic for our time comes to us from a screenplay by H. A. L. Craig, under the direction of Moustapha Akkad. _Lion of the Desert_ serves three purposes: it presents a cleverly skewed history of the Italian-Libyan conflict terminating finally in the subjugation of the African territory by the fascists; it hamfistedly leads us to see parallels between that conflict and Mr. Akkad’s interpretation of the current troubles confronting the Israelis and the Palestinians; and it zeroes in on two mutually exclusive quests, the one for empire, the other, that of the intended victims of empire for their own nationhood or at least peoplehood. As Mr. Akkad reads the twenty years of intermittent warfare between the Bedouin people in Libya under Omar Mukhtar (Anthony Quinn) and the Italians, the experience was unequivocally that of virtue versus vice. Almost all the Italians, from General Graziani (Oliver Reed) and Benito Mussolini (Rod Steiger) on down, are venal; all the followers of Omar Mukhtar are valiant. Akkad permits himself one or two nice-looking Italians but by and large he has cast the movie so that the Europeans are unappealing and the prominent Libyans are handsome men and doe-eyed, immaculate women. He has eliminated any complexity from the story, thus inspiring in audiences, at least in the New York City audience with which I saw it, roaring affirmations for the Libyans at every turn and rowdy cheering for every Italian debacle. Moustapha Akkad has further weighted his picture with innumerable shots of the Bedouins in refugee camps, which are called concentration camps, the better no doubt to remind us of the Nazis, and certainly to remind us of the Palestinians made homeless by the horror of modern middle-eastern politics. It says something about the way American attitudes are so easily shaped to favor anything remotely Third Worldy that we see in our country today not only a radical departure from the previous attitude toward the middle east (recognizing a hefty measure of Arab responsibility for the plight of today’s refugees), but also such easily swayed audiences at a movie as patently propagandistic as _Lion of the Desert_. And yet, the movie has enormous force irrespective of its unsubtle approach to history. Quinn has rarely been better, and Reed is delightfully singleminded as Graziani. Rod Steiger has only a few minutes to do his Mussolini imitation but it’s a good one and the actor throws himself into his cameo fully. Irene Papas can no longer be suffered in any movie; her very appearance is like a cue to get ready for extended moaning and passionate nobility. But at least she looks properly haggard and put-upon. The battle scenes are among the finest we’ve been treated to in many years, and the scenery is fine. More to the point, the contest of values is exciting and provoking. Graziani, seeking glory through Libya as a way to increased influence with Mussolini, who sought glory through many fronts, squares off against Omar Mukhtar, who sought only release from endless war with Italy, though that release had to come by independence, not subjugation. As in reality so, too, in _Lion of the Desert_: Mukhtar is caught and hanged. But whereas in the movie the unwary are led to believe that Libya will be freed by the superior force of Arab virtue, in reality Libya was freed by the British. And for all that, for all the death and misery, Libya wound up at last not free and noble and virtuous, but as a playpen for a government of terrorists and fanatics headed by Col. Qaddafi. So much for another Third World fantasy. Perhaps it is not the success or failure of the quest but, instead, the act of questing itself that matters. So much of life, so many aspects of our culture, among them the movies, amount to little more than getting by. In the end, of course, to unearth the hoariest of truisms, we are all dead. Some people prefer to head in that direction with some purpose, and some movies, many of them failures but occasional examples among them successes, prefer to examine the quest, the questing, and those who quest, instead of those who merely content themselves with getting by. LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS), WRKO-AM (ABC), and _The Boston Herald American_. He hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on radio and “Nightscene” on television, writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, reviews books and restaurants, and lectures frequently on popular culture and politics. ©Copyright David Brudnoy 1981