Arts
Thursday, May 21, 1981
The Michigan Daily
Page 7
'Knightriders'
O GUSH
- epic on wheels
By DENNIS HARVEY
At first, George Romero's
Knightriders seems like a minor
miracle, meeting the overweening
goals it sets for itself with wobbly but
unaffected charm.
By its end, despite missteps and one
rather large stretch of unnecessary
footage, it's looking like all other past
and future contenders for the honor of
being this year's best film might just as
well throw in their cards. It shows up
John Boorman's Excalibur, the
simultaneously released Arthurian
epic, to be ... oh, well, Knightrider's
overwhelming generosity makes petty
comparisons seems distastefully
mean-spirited. Suffice it to say that
Knightriders has all the sensuality,
warmth, gentility,° honor and true
Utopian spirit that Excalibur passes by
in a muddle of expensive image-
mongering. It's the sort of movie that
leaves you feeling serenely happy that
there are movies.
The whole premise is a loftily whim-
sical metaphor, risky as hell: using the
Camelot legend seriously in a modern
setting, as a fable of the innocence that,
if it could be so fatally and eternally lost
in the medieval ages, scarcely seems to
stand half a chance in the cynical un-
derworld of the 20th century. But
Romero has more optimism than one
dares to expect; if Excalibur seems
determined to gloomily debunk the
romantic hope of its myth, Knightriders
is a reaffirmation of faith.
Romero's Round Table is a collection.
of goofs, strays, post-hippies and
desperate visionaries who've banded
together to form their own gypsy
Camelot, dressing up as medieval folk
and travelling from town to town as an
open-air circus - jousting with fairly
harmless rubber lances, astride motor-
cycle "mounts." The atmosphere of
declawed affection and play is
definitely '60's-communal, but this
band's King Arthur, Billy (Ed Harris),
is a wild-eyed disciple of Truth from
another age entirely. Impossibly blue-
eyed, Aryan and noble, like a haughtily
angelic Paul Newman, Billy's Christlike
adherence to the cause of good is more
than half insane; his fervor binds the
group together, and his demands
threaten to drive them apart. Evil en-
ters this paradise in the form of money,
greed, publicity - the modern world.
Torn between the necessary com-
promises of reality and Billy's sweet
but seemingly doomed fantasy,
Romero's Lancelot (Gary Lahti), his
male Morgan Le Fay (Tom Savini) and
subsidary court figures find themselves
stuck in a double bind, wanting but
unable to live the noble existence that
the outside world force to them to see as
illusory.
Knightriders is a true epic, that rare
thing. It's hard to reconcile Romero's
previous strengths as a director - best
seen in the stark docudrama horror of
the original Night of the Living Dead,
and in the wierdly unsetting novelty of
Martin's vampire-daymare - with
Knightrider's expansiveness, its ab-
stracted but warm characters, and its
genuine feel for grand tragedy. In"the
past Romero has been literal rather
than lyrical, but here he shows a new
visual confidence, even flashiness,
without falling into empty poses. The
film is full of poetic imagery, and if
Romero doesn't always have the
technique down as patly as a hundred
current director/aesthetes, nothing
here has the familiarly vacant sham-
poo-commercial prettiness many
filmmakers stumble into. The care goes
beyond surface gorgeousness, into the
emotional charge that should suffuse
such images and hardly ever do.
Like most movies with a soft heart,
Knightriders has its minimal quotient
of soft-headedness. In order to counter
the dreamy mysticism of this Camelot-
on-wheels, Romero presents all out-
siders as a threat. The audience at each
"performance" is a bunch of
disbelieving jerkoffs, their mouths
permanently bulging with junk food.
Lancelot has a fling with a local girl
(Amy Ingersol) who comes on
abrasively and annoying; she even-
tually softens, somewhat, but she's still
seen as too thin, too selfish to become a
part of the carnival scene, and is rather
heartlessly left on her parent's subur-
ban doorstep - after having run away
for a week - to face their wrath. The
promoters who try to horn in on the
troupe are well-oiled city slickers out of
a Victorian melodrama - the woman
who lures Morgan offis so lewd that her
lips never un-purse. These vaudevillian
characters are amusing at times,
cheaply conceived though they are, but
sometimes the sleaziness makes one
groan, especially when two middle-aged
fatties are caught lolling about au
naturel stuffing pizza into their
mouths.
Of, well, perfection is too much to ask
for. Roughly eighty percent of
Knightriders is delicate and moving
enough to make the rest completely
forgivable. Ideally, about 20 minutes
might have been trimmed - there's a
final full-scale demolition-derby-in-
armour that's fine but, coming after
two of the same, could have been writ-
ten out. Still, you can understand how
easy it must have been for Romero to
lose himself in this project and drag it
on a bit too far.
The performances in his earlier films
were usually amateur to the point of
achieving some wierd air of cimena-
verite reality; here they're unexpec-
tedly professional, fine-tuned and
passionate. Ed Harris' Billy/Arthur
especially, is a small revelation - a
true King for the '80's4 halfway between
St. Francis and Randall MacMurphy.
The only notable failure is Geuenevere
(Christine Forrest), reduced here to a
subsidiary figure - fortunately, since
all she's given to do is fret and look
tearily pretty. Guenevere always
seems to lose out to one-dimensionality
in both literature and moyies; oh, well.
Knightriders is far from unflawed,'
but its success and complexity go far
beyond the realm of most Hollywood
epics - this in a movie that was made
independently, on a comparative
shoestring. Romero once seemed a nif-
ty but minor auteur, gifted mostly - if
not only - at creating a certain burnt-
out wierdness, creepily straightfor-
ward. Now I can only hope he doesn't
just return to plow those same old Dead
pastures, because Knightriders takes
on the whole world and, radiantly,
conquers it.
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"KING"-8:30
HIRING OF NEW EMPLOYEES IS DISPUTED:
Wordprocessors workers picket
(Continued from Page 3)
THE WORDPROCESSORS' owners
have filed for bankruptcy, Herman
claimed, but "the store has been
mismanaged for years. The fact that
we've boycotted them has only pushed
them further toward the edge."
According to Herman, the employees
of The Wordprocessors also picketed
last Friday because "the owners had
fired an employee of the store without
sufficient notice," thus constituting an
unfair labor practice.
Boltz countered this argument by
saying the employee was not fired but
told "that they no longer had work for
him and that if they did he would be
contacted in the future." The worker
was. not a full-time- employee. The
owners subsequently rehired the
worker in question and the picket lines
were taken down.
BOLTZ CLAIMED that the unions
have failed to notify the owners before
picketing in some instances. "The duty
to bargain is a two-way street. We not
only have the duty to bargain, they
must do the same to us."
Boltz said, "We have always been
willing to bargain," adding that "I'm
saddened by the way things are right
now."
Herman countered this by saying, "I
think he should have been expecting
something given the fact that we infor-
med them that we would take action."
The union intends to offer the owners
of Wordprocessors a new contract in
the near future, to "make issues more
clear, though I don't know what could
be clearer than a signed agreement,"
said Forrester.
To this Boltz replied, "We have said
that we are willing to resolve the mat-
ters at hand any time the unions are
willing. We have always beep willing to
resolve whether these people are within
the bargaining unit or not."
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