Word: gentile
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...KNIGHT. Chaucer's "verray parfit gentil" hero could be a killer in a metal dinner jacket, slaying unbelievers when it pleased him. Even so, as Mark Twain speculated about the old warriors, "there was something very engaging about these great simplehearted creatures, (although) there did not seem to be brains enough . . . to bait a fishhook with." The knight has been Galahad, Don Quixote and every tin soldier, in Robert Louis Stevenson's couplet, "With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes, through the hills." The chevalier now answers the roll call as Rambo and G.I. Joe. He wears camouflage...
...pageant, Boorman's knights and ladies look just right-like the children of a lost age or planet. Their acting is as green and lush as the rolling hills of Ireland, where the film was shot. Nigel Terry (Arthur) is no Sean Connery, the parfit gentil knight of Robin and Marian, but he passes persuasively from innocence to kingship to the realization that immortality can be won only through a fatal joust with his son and slayer. Cherie Lunghi too closely resembles a Covent Garden flower child to bring Guenevere to mature life, but her callow modernity wreathes Excalibur...
...always was an authoritarian film director and, on television, an acerbic mystery-show host. But advancing age has banked some of the old fire, and at 80, Sir Alfred Hitchcock is likely to be, as Chaucer put it, "a verray parfit gentil knight." Hitchcock's name as Knight Commander of the British Empire appeared on Queen Elizabeth II's New Year's honors list, the only show-biz personality knighted this year. Fittingly, he received formal notification of the honor at a ceremony in the commissary at Universal City Studios. Why, Hitchcock was asked, had it taken...