Prohibitive production costs and an inability to secure therights to The Lord of the Rings turned an early attempt by John Boorman at bringing Tolkien’s masterwork to the screen into another of the director’s dream projects. That project was 1981’s Excalibur, the most unashamedly romantic, mythic interpretation of the Arthurian legend ever committed to film, and also one of its most gritty and bloodthirsty.

Though the screenplay does away with much of the decoration found in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, upon which it’s based, the film remains an unequivocal attempt at mythbuilding. Highly stylised, broadly drawn characters populate a Britain that is by turns dangerous and glorious, and the central conceit – the king and the land are one – is doggedly maintained throughout (much to the film’s benefit). There is also the image of the sword Excalibur, which, far from being a symbol of war and bloodshed, is, in the hands of the rightful king, a symbol of unity and instrument of healing.

Our rightful king in this case is played by Nigel Terry, who brought a wealth of stage experience to the role of Arthur which lent his portrayal a very regal, noble air. Whenever I think of King Arthur, it’s Nigel Terry, atop the hill with his knights when he promises to build Camelot and the Round Table, and talks about a fellowship of like-minded individuals working towards a common goal. It’s this Arthur that resonates with me the most, the one who is willing to allow himself to be “the stuff of future memory”, who self-effacingly recognises that it is not his lot to lead a normal life; a man who, in short, is willing to become an ideal.

Boorman bolsters his film with an operatic score, borrowing pieces from Wagner and, most effectively, from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana: ‘O Fortuna’ is not just a rousing, melodramatic piece, but is, lyrically, close to being a thematic summary of the film as well – note its use before the final battle, as the land is renewed along with Arthur. It isn’t edited very well in the film, but its inclusion hits all the right buttons on an emotional level, and there’s an appropriate symmetry in using these operatic pieces to score this particular hero’s story.

But the film isn’t perfect. There’s some occasionally over the top acting, some strange things like Uther having sex in full armour, some cheesy special effects that just don’t work anymore (such as the painfully obvious green lighting to represent the Dragon), and Boorman assumes that viewers will at least be passingly familiar with the story of Arthur, particularly when it comes to the Holy Grail. But as someone who has been fascinated with the Arthur legend since I was quite young (I first properly encountered him in Stephen Lawhead’s excellent novel sequence The Pendragon Cycle), such criticisms pass without my noticing. What excites me more, still to this day, is that in Excalibur we have a film that isn’t afraid to portray Arthur as a truly mythological hero. Somewhere between Robert Breeson’s subversive Lancelot du Lac,and revisionist takes such as The Mists of Avalon, Excalibur stands out as a sumptuous, daring attempt to evoke the spirit of the legend.