By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

Once upon a time, long, long ago, folks craved a magical mom and pop to run interference for them when things went wrong ... so they created kings and queens. Responsibility for a country's health and well-being fell upon the shoulders (and private parts) of these divine power couples -- mythic models for the likes of John and Jackie, Bill and Hillary.

So complete was the identification of sovereign with nation that his people would sometimes ritually whack the king, turning him into royal fertilizer to keep things green. And the queen had better breed, not only to continue the royal line, but also to act out and preserve the country's fruitfulness. A royal consort's adultery, like Guinevere's fling with Lancelot, could blight crops and loose an epidemic of ED, from king to commoner.

As the world got more civilized and citified, monarchs began to live in bell jars of artifice and privilege, totally insulated from nature and subjects. Where once royals might be sacrificed for the good of all, they now lived off the fat of the land, and heads rolled at their pleasure. (Catch Jonathan Rhys Meyers' killer Henry VIII, currently bedding and beheading on Showtime's "The Tudors.")

The royals' wretched excesses made them celebrities of a sort, objects of hatred and perverse pride, for les misérables of London, Paris and St. Petersburg. Inevitable proletarian revolutions would obliterate most royal houses -- Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" chronicles the painful demise of one such dynasty.

In America, TV reality shows may spotlight the common man, but celebrities, movie stars and music icons are our unofficial royalty. Elvis is our once and future King, and party-girl Paris Hilton subs for Marie Antoinette. Think of Brangelina as today's Arthur and Guinevere, bent on saving the world, seating a slew of tots at their Round Table.

Still, we fell in love with "The Queen" (Helen Mirren) last year, charmed by Elizabeth II's old-school royalty as it collided with the power of contemporary celebrity in the form of Diana, the people's princess. And that redheaded maiden and matriarch Elizabeth I (Mirren played her, too) retains the magical allure of those fabled rulers who -- never mind their personal foibles and appetites -- considered their countries extensions of their own flesh and blood.

Anticipating the opening of "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," the incomparable Cate Blanchett's second outing as the virgin queen, we deal a royal flush of 10 silver-screen depictions of kings and queens.

"Excalibur" (1981)
A gorgeous dream of utopia begun and lost, "Excalibur" hearkens back to that time when all things physical and spiritual depended on the king and queen's connubial bliss. His skull elegantly clasped in shining silver, Merlin's in charge, mostly, as the wily con artist, sorcerer, and quasi-film director (Nicol Williamson) who sets in motion Arthur's conception and rise to power -- so that the green kid (Nigel Terry) and his sweetheart Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi) can advance the cause of civilization in barbaric Britain. Director John Boorman ("Deliverance," "The General") deftly mixes pagan and Christian symbolism in this eroticized passage from natural love and landscapes into a surreal hell where power-mad Morgana (Helen Mirren, sexually splendiferous) encourages Mordred, the son she got through incest, to slaughter his father Arthur and unhinge the world.

"Alexander Nevsky" (1938)
Sergei Eisenstein's vision of mythic kingship plays more like exultantly epic music (Prokofiev composed the famous score) and archetypal sculpture than moving picture. The 13th-century Teutonic knights who invade and violate Mother Russia are dehumanized, bucket-helmeted kin to the gold-masked Mordred of "Excalibur." They come on like hard-edged Death, the medieval equivalent of panzer divisions. Like King Arthur, Prince Nevsky belongs to the earth: he and his grufty soldiers seem to literally rise up out of the Motherland, a harvest of heroes, and the foreign invaders are swallowed by Russia in the decisive battle on an ice-locked lake. Usually bare-faced, blond Nevsky presents his noble visage to his subjects and the camera as though it were God's gift, a natural-born icon. (Stalin had just signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, so "Nevsky" was suppressed -- but not for long.)

"Henry V" (1989)
When Laurence Olivier directed and starred in his "Henry V" in 1944, the spectacle of a slacker-prince growing up overnight into a wise, warlike king was just the ticket for an England under Hitler's hammer. At 37, Olivier played his reformed Hal as a brave and urbane model of royalty, a self-possessed leader in Britain's assault on a foreign power. But 28-year-old director-star Kenneth Branagh's Hank Cinq, when first glimpsed lounging on the throne, looks like a tousle-haired tot, cousin to Jimmy Cagney. Hissing snarky orations through thinned lips or bellowing bellicose rants, Branagh's a calculating boy, sadly lacking in charisma. Worse, this princeling's bent on breaking the peace for no good reason -- except that winning an overseas war will prove he's a warrior-king worthy to follow in Dad and Granddad's footsteps. Reportedly, Branagh's "Henry V" aimed to skewer Margaret Thatcher's 1982 Falklands adventure, but so subtle is Shakespeare that the play now reminds us of the feckless scion of a contemporary American dynasty and his improvident foreign war.

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