The Knights of the Round Table: Camelot in Hollywood

Abstract

When American filmmakers, “men from an undiscovered hemisphere,” claimed Arthur as their “natural father” in the 1950s, they glossed Malory’s warrior king, Tennyson’s blameless monarch, and White’s hapless philosopher as a democratic hero in a motion picture genre that functioned to “make the world safe for democracy.”¹ At the birth of the film industry, community leaders and Progressive reformers would not have agreed with Griffith’s characterization of film as a safe, American medium; in fact, they cast a trip to the nickelodeon—which, by 1904, had become a common pastime among the urban immigrant working class that the reformers sought to domesticate—in the same category as visits to brothels and gambling dens.² However, as the decade progressed, the reformers began to recognize cinema’s potential as a “grand social worker” with “an incomparable power for remodeling and upbuilding the nation’s soul” and the dominant culture moved to take control over cinema’s content and to exploit its possibilities.³ They began by encouraging the production of American-made films exploring democratic national myths—rags to riches, the romance of the West—to displace the European films “depict(ing) (the) foreign norms of immigrants from Catholic peasant backgrounds” that had accounted for more than half of the films shown in the first decade of the century;⁴

Then there were people who turned out the Morte d’Arthur in mystic waves like the wireless, and others in an undiscovered hemisphere who still pretended that Arthur and Merlyn were the natural fathers of themselves in pictures which moved.

T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

Are we not making the world safe for democracy, American democracy, through motion pictures? Our heroes are always democratic. The ordinary virtues of American life triumph.

D.W. Griffith, undated radio speech