“Between minnesingers and movies is a chasm of time and change, but a single tradition: to keep alive the old stories that tell us who we are, whence we came, and what the future holds” (John Boorman). Amid shimmering forests, strangely masked knights and milling peasants on market day, the myth and the reality of Britain's prehistory emerge. John Boorman's venture into sword and sorcery is a retelling of the Arthurian legend that opens on an image of the sword, Excaliber, and focuses on the sorcerer, Merlin, portrayed by Nicol Williamson. The classic tale is told--the rise of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the betrayal of Guenevere and Lancelot, the purity of Perceval--but, as Andrew Sarris writes, “With Nicol Williamson as Merlin dominating the court of King Arthur both conceptually and charismatically, the legends take on more of their original pagan quality, and thus dispense with much of the Protestant piety of Tennyson's Idylls of the King.... With Merlin at the center, magic plays a larger part than faith in the destinies of the characters....” Boorman states (in American Film), “I'm trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth.... I want it to have a primal clarity, a sense that things are happening for the first time. Landscape and nature and human emotions are all fresh. I tell the actors that they are not reenacting a legend. They are creating it...it's unfolding.”