A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

How sad is this?

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This was a pleasant Bing Crosby vehicle, sitting in a comfort range somewhere between Abbott & Costello Meet Captain Kidd and The Court Jester. It was a favourite family film in ye olden days of mine; to which there's no going back.A young American blacksmith in 1912 relates his story – that he was whisked mysteriously back in time to King Arthur's Court in Camelot, England in 528, where he instantly proved a hit with the denizens and fell in love with one of them, the Good Lady Rhonda Fleming. Great Hollywood liberties were taken with Mark Twain's text of course, intentional and unintentional anachronisms abound. Especially with the flat van Heusen & Burke score – pleasant enough ballads but the only one turned timeless was Busy Doing Nothing. To me, 50% of the reason to watch the whole film now is just for that song, a wonderful 3 minutes I only wish was longer. The irony was never lost on me that Crosby, Cedric Hardwicke and William Bendix were joyously celebrating their freedom on the road whilst simultaneously looking out to verify the kingdom's human suffering and despair! Later on, another irony was that apparently the first American manufactured product on British soil was a gun… Plenty of familiar faces in here to watch out for: Alan Napier as the executioner heads the list, Merlin, sorry, Murvyn Vye as a rather slapstick wizard, Richard Webb playing Sir Nelson Eddy, Joseph Vitale having stopped giggling from his previous film's laughing gas, Henry Wilcoxon never looking more like a brick toilet block, etc. Director Tay Garnett seldom put a foot of film wrong in the '30s and '40s.I have a few problems with it – the technicolor has washed away on a few prints which can be annoying at times, the sound was never great, the acting variable and the plot veered from inspired to winceable corn, and the ending was too Zen to laugh at – but still, a pleasant entertaining film for all that. Hopefully I'll be able to revisit it again sometime soon.

Is this a great cinematic achievement, in the sense that Citizen Kane and La Grande Illusion are great movies? No, of course not. But is this a thoroughly enjoyable movie? Most definitely! The high spots: Bing Crosby, as natural and charming as he has ever been in a movie; William Bendix, whose impeccably enunciated lines are a comic wonder - he made me believe he would have been great as one of the comical characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream; Cedric Hardwicke, who knows just how to deliver his lines to the greatest effect; and the script, which is really very funny.The low points: 1) the script for Rhonda Fleming's role. She looks radiantly beautiful, but her dialog is worthless, and so she comes off as dumb in a movie where the three leading men come off as very clever; she deserved better. 2) the music. Van Heusen and Burke wrote some great songs, such as "Swinging on a Star" for Crosby's 1944 hit Going My Way, but there isn't a memorable number in this movie. That's probably why this otherwise very enjoyable movie is so forgotten.You'll have a great time watching this.

Mark Twain's book had already inspired "a Yank at Oxford";both this movie and Tay Garnett's feature a gorgeous lady:Vivien Leigh in the former,Rhonda Fleming in the latter.What a good idea to have the characters speak old English!For once ,it's not the easy way out.The myth of the Knights of the Round Table is given a rough ride:Merlin becomes the villain probably for the first and last time in the history of cinema,the fair knights shows a tendency to embroider the truth and to "invent" their exploits,king Arthur is an old white -bearded man who never stops sneezing and Lancelot is not even handsome. No Guinevere either.Unlike in "Brigadoon" ,in the Middle Ages ,they made it rough all over the placeThe Yank has to expend a lot of energy and boundless ingenuity to escape from the stake and the block;the eclipse trick was also used by Hergé in the adventures of Tintin " Le Temple Du Soleil" aka "prisoners of the sun" which Spielberg will transfer to the screen in the years to come.The prologue and the epilogue make two of the characters "travel in time" without a machine .The colors are splendid and the best song is the last one who has this sublime line " trying to find things NOT to do".Good entertainment .

50 years old, this musical comedy fantasy might look its age, but it wears it with dignity.This film is still great fun. Crosby was never really romantic lead material, but he delivers the material with the lightly humorous edge it needs. Bendix plays broad and is huge fun in a part which calls upon his strengths. Hardwicke - how joyous for a knight of the realm - a genuine one - to throw himself into caperings like this with such abandon. And Rhonda Fleming enjoys herself in the least showy of the main roles. Only Murvyn Vye disappoints as an unconvincing Merlin.Though not a musical, the songs are very good, and the "dance" routine accompanying Busy Doing Nothing is perfect - funny, appropriate, dexterous without being challenging, and making a virtue out of Crosby's musical movement which, let's be fair, was inherently amusing due to its never being his greatest strength.The colour is fine, the sound is a little muddy in places.And the story - well, it takes some liberties with the original, but I suspect that Mr Clemens might well have been pleased with the result.