King Arthur rides in from Russia with love - By John Harlow, Los Angeles

SCHOLARS have derided an £80m Hollywood film about King Arthur which portrays the legendary saviour of Britain as a Russian warrior in the pay of the Roman empire.

Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer who turned the Disney theme park ride Pirates of the Caribbean into a multiplex blockbuster, claims his king, played by Clive Owen, is the “most historically accurate” version of Arthur ever committed to film. But after seeing extracts from the movie, which will be released in Britain and America in July, American academics have called it “weird” and insulting.

In the Bruckheimer script for King Arthur, the “once and future king” is a 5th-century warrior born in a land that would later form part of Russia. He is recruited by the failing Roman empire to save its former colony, Britain, from the Saxon hordes and avert a “domino effect” of collapse in other imperial territories.

Wearing full Roman armour, Arthur builds Camelot inside a crenellated fort and marries a leather-clad warrior princess called Guinevere, played with cleavage-baring aplomb by Keira Knightley from Pirates of the Caribbean. Guinevere, an expert archer who can fire a flaming arrow half a mile, later goes to war with Arthur before becoming entangled in a love affair with Sir Lancelot.

The script writer is David Franzoni, who won an Oscar for Russell Crowe’s Gladiator and is working on a screenplay about the Carthaginian general Hannibal. Franzoni has said he wanted to show the man behind the Arthurian myth.

“In the film, Arthur is from that area called ‘beyond Germania’, known today as Russia, where the Romans recruited soldiers to fight their later enemies, such as the Goths. They would not waste one of their own aristocrats to solve the British problem,” said a source close to Bruckheimer last week.

“The film makers are not saying it’s 100% accurate, but it’s more realistic than, say, John Boorman’s Excalibur.”

Arthur’s origins remain mysterious but his legend has evolved in the work of writers since the 12th century, when Glastonbury monks claimed to have found his tomb.

While some scholars such as the British television historian Michael Wood have suggested he is entirely mythical, others believe there is evidence of a war leader who defeated the Saxons in a battle in about AD496, holding back the invaders for a generation. This historical figure may have been called Arthur.

The 12th-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, and French poet Chrétien de Troyes produced some of the earliest work on Arthurian themes, and the Norman writer Wace mentioned the Round Table.

Arthur’s Camelot has been variously identified as Caerleon in Wales, Camelford in Cornwall, Cadbury Castle in Somerset and, by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century, Winchester in Hampshire.

Professor Alan Lupack, who runs the Camelot Project at the University of Rochester, New York, collating Arthurian literature, said some enthusiasts might be offended by this latest portrayal on screen.

He said there was no evidence that Arthur had been engaged by Rome, let alone that he had come from Russia.

“Because this is legend rather than history, writers and film makers are free to do what they want, but then they cannot call it historically accurate,” he said.

John Boucher, who is writing a guidebook to Arthurian sites such as Tintagel in Cornwall, said: “It appears that Clive Owen is defending Hadrian’s Wall from the Saxons rather than the Scots, which is just plain strange.”

But this was not as “weird” as making Arthur Russian. “I think the British, and the Welsh in particular, who always claim Arthur, will be insulted and mystified,” he added.