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Fortunately, Actor Palance is too convincing a rat to be completely immobilized in this dramatic mousetrap. He makes his audience understand not only why he went mad but something of how it feels to be that way; and when at last he deliberately quenches his blazing life in the Thames, the scamp in every moviegoer is both chastened and given its due respect.
Some of the minor parts are also feelingly played. Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams, especially, provide more than comic relief: their downstairs charm is a real dramatic foil for the insanity in the attic. Isabel Jewell is touching as one of the Ripper's victims. The musicomedy scenes in black and white are wittier and sexier than most of those seen recently in color. But the picture belongs to Palance.
He takes it over with his talent for drawing the spectator down into his private whirlpool.
Knights of the Round Table (M-G-M), in which Metro takes up the Arthurian legend where Tennyson left off, is one of 1954's first big quests for the box-office Grail. The cup should soon be running over. Like MGM's last two spectacular hits, Quo Vadis and Ivanhoe, it has all the proven elements of success—famous names, a famous title, Technicolor—and CinemaScope too.
The scriptwriters (Talbot Jennings, Jan Lustig and Noel Langley) did a pretty clever job of forcing the huge, loose body of the saga into a kind of literary iron maiden: the subject is murdered, but the movie is kept in shape—even though it does run scoundrelly long (115 minutes).
The picture begins with Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone, continues through his meeting with Lancelot, his triumph over Modred, the marriage to Guinevere, the making of the Table Round, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, their exposure by Modred and the consequent ruin of the state, Arthur's death at the "last, dim, weird battle of the west." and Lancelot's revenge on the villain of the piece. Every turn of the tale is contested with swordplay so dashing that the broadsword may for a time replace the rocket pistol in the age group to which this picture is supremely well-suited.
Robert Taylor, who helped make the studio so much money as Ivanhoe, should make it even more as Lancelot, even though his strength in the rough & tumble scenes is obviously as the strength of one.
Ava Gardner, as proud Guinevere, leans from a casement in a way that explains a lot of things the ancient lays left unexplained. Mel Ferrer, as King Arthur, is the only figure in the film who rises easily to the epic elevation, and thus strongly suggests what might have been done with this picture if a little imagination had been spent on it. As is, it is a flashily entertaining, double-width comic strip.