Knightriders

#2 in my ranking of George A. Romero’s filmography.

There’s something key in understanding an artist when they take up a project after a big success. Dawn of the Dead was the film that finally got George Romero out of debt and the ability to command decent budgets, and what did he do with that success first? He made a kind of goofy retelling of the Arthurian legend with knights on motorcycles that’s still deeply earnest in its depiction of its characters. It was already obvious from films like Season of the Witch and Martin that while he was working in horror-adjacent areas, Romero wasn’t really interested in staying there. He was trying to move out. With Knightriders, Romero left horror behind completely, and it showed that he could have been so much more than the zombie guy. Honestly, I loved this film.

King Billy (Ed Harris) is the leader of an anachronistic society touring around the Pennsylvania countryside as a traveling renaissance fair with the centerpiece being the jousts (just like all renaissance fairs). The only difference is that these are done from the seats of motorcycles instead of horses. It seems that some people can’t get past the silliness of the sight of people jousting from motorcycles, but I got past it pretty quickly. I got past it because the characters are remarkably well written and performed.

The center of it all is Billy, the guy with a vision of another life tied to a time long-since past. Around him is his Guinivere, Linet (Amy Ingersoll), his Merlin (Brother Blue), his Morgan le Fay, Sir Morgan (Tom Savini), and his Lancelot, Sir Alan (Gary Lahti), among others. What’s interesting is that, among the very large number of little subplots that play out, no one ever defines what it is about the life they live under Billy that attracts them so much, what keeps them going from small town to small town with little pay and not much more than each other. That gets explained through the sense of community that Romero draws through these people. There are conflicts. There are disagreements. However, these people really do seem to like each other. For instance, probably the central plot thread is Morgan trying to beat Billy in the arena because he wants to be king (rules of the society laid out clearly), and the physical conflict is hard and even bloody. And yet, when it’s over, Billy wins through the defense of his other knights, they still smile at each other genuinely. It’s a community greater than any conflict of visions.

As alluded to earlier, there really isn’t much of an overriding plot through the whole film. It’s more of a swirling series of subplots that revolve around a central idea: the community finding meaning away from modernity. It’s an echo of Clint Eastwood‘s Bronco Billy. The subplots are around a small town deputy sheriff lording over them, Alan getting a girl, Julie (Patricia Tallman), as Linet looks at him longingly from afar. They encounter a promoter, Bontempi (Martin Ferrero), who wants to up their profile and get them better gigs (this ends up manifesting as the central disagreement between Billy and Morgan). Alan even goes away for a few days to reset.

My only real problem with the film is that it feels massively cut down. At two and a half hours in length, that seems like a weird complaint (most people seem to think that it’s too long, not too short), but Romero’s initial cut was reportedly seventeen hours long. Now, I could imagine a very large bulk of that being motorcycle joust footage, but it’s obvious that he was pursuing the lives of all of his characters. He had to sacrifice a bunch to get it down to a manageable length. The biggest example seems to be the character of The Indian (Albert Amerson) who appears halfway through the film and becomes this silent disciple of Billy. I really feel like there was more to introduce him, perhaps connecting him to Billy from afar before. Considering how important he becomes in the film’s final moments, his introduction feels so shortchanged.

The resolution is this fight for the crown, and it’s built on all of the character work that Romero had crammed into the film up to that point. It’s exciting to watch. The action is clear (Romero’s secret weapon is his very strong ability to build sequences through editing), and the finale is heartwarming. And yet, the film keeps going, following Billy afterwards, and it’s wonderfully affecting.

The core of the film is related to the cores of both Season of the Witch and Martin, the idea that believing in something unreal still allows the power of that unreal thing to manifest within a person. This time it forms in an ideal, the ideal of this kind of anachronistic, courtly life built on physical combat and everything around it. That’s what Billy was trying to recreate, Camelot in the wilds of Western Pennsylvania, and in the rejection of modernity for something more tangible and real, he found something that connected him to other people in a genuine way.

I also really get this sense that Romero was making a film about his own career up to that point. The efforts to make the weird, little movies bumping up against the zombie movies that gave him his only commercial successes that he poured his craft into but feel more distant from the man himself. Knightriders was his next effort at being genuine, following his own path instead of the compromised places that the rest of the world wanted him to go.

I honestly loved this film. I do think it suffers slightly from being cut down (an extended cut at three hours is something I’ll always want and will never see), but it’s this wonderful portrait of anachronism and meaning. It’s filled with very nice performances (Savini is surprisingly very good). Romero’s editing around the action sequences keeps things interesting. It’s just an all around entertainment. That it failed commercially is potentially the saddest moment of Romero’s career. He was so much more than zombie movies.

Rating: 3.5/4