Arabian Knight
With the voices of Vincent Price, Matthew Broderick, Jennifer Beals, Eric Bogosian, Toni Collette, and Jonathan Winters
With Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Arliss Howard, Jason London, and Chris Penn.
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Arabian Knight, once titled The Cobbler and the Thief, started out as a labor of love for Richard Williams, a Canadian-born animator who after brief stints with Disney and UPA settled in England in his early 20s and built his own studio there. He’s best known for his TV commercials, the title sequences to What’s New, Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the occasions for his two Oscars, A Christmas Carol (1971) and the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Williams had been working on The Cobbler and the Thief since 1968, apparently whenever he wasn’t busy with more lucrative projects, but eventually he lost creative control over it, and it’s been through many vicissitudes since. In the final credits, three individuals not including Williams and his cowriter Margaret French are credited with “additional dialogue,” and some of this dialogue is noticeably offscreen or not in sync. Miramax released the film–which runs a little over an hour, about the same length as Dumbo–two weeks ago as if it had the measles, at least as far as anyone in the press was concerned.
This abstract notion of humanity and human behavior is central to the movie. Snipes never plausibly impersonates a woman even when he’s quiet and standing still, and Swayze at his most resourceful impersonates Jack Lemmon impersonating a woman in Some Like It Hot, which means that his impersonation is still at one remove. Leguizamo fares slightly better, but English director Beeban Kidron appears to have been so distracted in her handling of the actors that even veterans as talented as Blythe Danner and Stockard Channing seem ill at ease. And Kidron’s feeling for American small-town life–what it looks, sounds, and feels like–seems to border on the nonexistent.
So much for the dazzling formal beauty of Arabian Knight, which is at the other end of the spectrum from the strident ugliness of To Wong Foo. But the story, characters, and “message” of Arabian Knight–the things that in To Wong Foo are completely clear, if idiotically simple–often border on incoherence; the filmmakers’ love of beautiful surfaces seems to have excluded the cultural, historical, social, or psychological consistency that might have given some structure to the narrative. The story is supposed to be taking place in ancient Baghdad, but the way the title crosses “Arabian Nights” with “Knights of the Round Table” only begins to suggest the film’s confusion.
