Word: launcelots
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...LAUNCELOT, MY BROTHER, by Dorothy James Roberts (373 pp.; Appleton-Century-Crofts; $3.95). The inside story, told by Sir Launcelot's brother Bors de Garis of the triangle formed by King Arthur, Queen Guenivere and the famed Knight of the Round Table. Author Roberts has the good taste to follow Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson in keeping the characters perfectly unreal and tucking the dalliance between the lines rather than between the sheets...
According to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, Launcelot of the Lake hardly ever had a bad day at a tournament. But for Malory, Launcelot did not live just from joust to joust. His chivalrous life was sprinkled with palace romances that would be cover stories in every contemporary magazine from Focus to Dare. In Knights of the Round Table, the movie version of the tale, MGM has all but smothered the knight's rakish inclinations. True, he remains the "champion" to Queen Guinevere, but in the book the word seems to have a greater breadth of meaning...
...understand the screenwriters' efforts to scrape the tarnish from poor Launcelot's soul. And it is clear that they had to pare down the number of characters wandering through the story to keep within the limits of the CinemaScope screen. But when only a lean-faced Mel Ferrer, a sullen Ava Gardner, and a Frank Merriwellish Robert Taylor remain, disappointment tends to creep in. All that keeps the audience from leaving their seats are the colorful sword-swinging battle scenes between regiments of Round Table rivals and the single-handed heroics of Robert Taylor's Launcelot...
...Arthurian lance. To save himself from the stake, he has only a pocketful of modern matches, a watch crystal, a hefty magnet and an almanac. This, of course, is where the fun should begin. But it doesn't. Bing riffles through his wonder-working stunts, jousts with Sir Launcelot (Henry Wilcox-son) and rescues King Arthur's beautiful niece (Rhonda Fleming) with his tongue conspicuously in his cheek. To underline his bare-faced parody of a second-rate Bing Crosby, he also sings a few typically Crosby tunes...
...thoroughgoing Micawber-type fraud who never brings off his constantly promised miracles, but never alienates his small disciple's faith in him. O'Malley's companions are: 1) Atlas the Mental Giant, a bull-necked gnome who computes all problems on a slide rule; 2) Launcelot McSnoyd, an invisible leprechaun who speaks thick Brooklynese; 3) Gus the Ghost, an ectoplasmic intellectual who ghostwrites O'Malley's autobiography when O'Malley runs for Congress. There is also a talking dog, Gorgon ("Didn't know I could do it. ... Never tried it before, I guess...