The movie Camelot is a film adaptation of the play Camelot, which was based on T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which was based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur . . . get the picture?  The stage play, which originally starred Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, made T. H. White a rich man.  The stage play is notable because it is the first musical to not have a happy ending.  The ending is upbeat, but it’s not happy.  In 1964, Lerner and Loewe’s other major musical, My Fair Lady, was made into a movie starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn; Camelot was an attempt to follow up on the success of that movie.  But the movie’s director, Joshua Logan, decided that he would abbreviate, and even omit some of the songs in order to focus on spectacle (the tournament, for example, is not in the stage show) and the development of the dramatic situation.  Also, actors were chosen for the movie who were not exactly renowned for their singing abilities—Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave were both classically-trained members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, while Franco Nero (Lancelot) was best known for his parts in spaghetti westerns.