This version is usually the best regarded of all the adaptations but makes for painful watching today. Though the adaptation is generally faithful to the book, in terms of production values it is conducted at the level of a high school pantomime cardboard and tinsel spectacle (although it is at least well photographed in Technicolor). Where Mark Twain engaged in an amusingly vulgar satire of the English, the film reduces the Arthurian cycle to the punching bag of idiot buffoonery – Arthur is portrayed as a doddery old man, Merlin as a scheming conman, while the Knights of the Round Table are there only for the brunt of Bing Crosby’s idiocy. Take case in point – the supposed outrage at the feudal exploitation of the peasantry, but this is a wrong that is never remonstrated about any further than the requirements of a plot point.

The worst thing about the film is Bing Crosby who walks through proceedings with a bland non-expression that sort of suggests a lost puppy dog, challenging everyone he meets with the honorific ‘Buster’ or ‘Bub’. In one scene following a lengthy villainous tirade from Merlin, Crosby’s only reply is to nod and a comment “Nice guy” to nobody in particular. It is this kind of watery idiocy that states a good case for retroactive abortion.