Conan The Barbarian (1982)

Crom Night

Conan The Barbarian (1982)
USA/Spain/Mexico 1982 
Directed by John Milius
20th Century Fox 
Australian Blu Ray All Zones 

“They told him to thrown down his sword in the earth. 
Ha! Time enough for earth in the grave.”
The Wizard, Conan The Barbarian (1982)

A quick note about the Blu Ray version of the classic film which I used for this review. It’s the Australian edition which my cousin, who lives there now, got to me fairly cheaply. The reason I chose this one is because it contains two different versions of the movie, dependent on what zone your Blu Ray is set to. If you watch this on the British setting, Zone B, it will only play the censored version of the film, falling in line with the BBFC categorisation. However, if you have a multizone machine and play it in another country’s zone, such as Zone A (US zone), then it will play the full length, uncensored version of the film.

I was fourteen years old when I first saw the AA rated (14 years and over... if you can remember that ratings system) Conan The Barbarian on its original cinema release back in 1982. However, I was quite familiar with the long series of short stories published in the UK at the time, which included the original 1930s stories by Robert E. Howard and intermingled with additional stories either expanded from unfinished Howard manuscripts or, more notoriously, rewriting other Howard tales and transforming them into Conan stories. I had read a few of the Marvel comic books and magazines too, of course but, not many of them compared to the amount of novelised collections of the character I read. 

So I knew what to expect from the character and, although I remember being slightly disappointed when the skeleton from whom Conan stole his sword didn’t rise up and attack him as the mummified remains did in the L. Sprague De Camp story that sequence was based on (although, there is a very slight suggestion that he almost does), I still felt that John Milius and his cast/crew had done an amazing job of, not only making an entertaining movie but, really staying to the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s original works. I’ve always thought of this as the last great studio ‘heroic fantasy’ genre film and, despite the number of knock offs (and even a genuine sequel), not to mention some not so great adaptations of Tolkien in recent years, I still stand by that. A few have come close but this one... this is the last great one I think, after all those films by the likes of Ray Harryhausen... where everything comes together to make things work and create the perfect ‘sword and sorcery’ film.

John Milius’ script, which trashed a lot of Oliver Stone’s previous draft and reset it in the original mythical timeline of Robert E. Howard’s fictional Hyborian Age (the film was originally to have been set in the far future like some kind of post-apocalyptic tale), is a pretty good creation and one of its strengths is that it gives a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a very strong Austrian accent at that time, very minimal dialogue to work with. He was a relative newcomer on the acting scene but two things really help this very capable and interesting actor out near the start of his career. Number one is that he was surrounded with truly great co-stars like James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader) who played the film’s lead villain, Thulsa Doom and, of course, the great Max Von Sydow (who plays a cameo as King Osric) and this was a good training ground for him, I reckon. 

Secondly, the minimal dialogue, while serving the actual character of Conan fairly well and helping make the character more convincing (he’s perhaps a little less wordy than his literary counterpart, if memory serves), allowing Schwarzenegger’s physical presence and attitude to define the role, is actually both very well written and, except in a few notable instances, is the pattern for the majority of the other characters in the movie too. Including Schwarzenegger’s brilliant co-stars Sandahl Bergman as Valeria and Gerry Lopez as Subotai (although they also get a few scenes to let their dialogue go beyond the few words variety here and there). Epic and poetic streaks of minimal dialogue like, for example... “The blood became as snow.” from the wizard, played by Mako, who is also the film’s narrator. 

A lot of the time the movie is almost silent acting but, that’s okay because the richness of the visual images, the fluid editing and the tremendous achievement of the musical score written by the late Basil Poledouris, means that the film really doesn’t need to lean on the crutch of dialogue and, in fact, cinema was born without it anyway, to an extent. 

Thinking about my favourite sequence in the film... after Conan has been crucified and bites the throat out of a vulture (which is a scene from one of the many Howard stories rubbed together and fashioned into a completely new story for the film), after he is brought back to life again... Conan, Subotai and Valeria penetrate Thulsa Doom’s lair in a sequence where they rescue King Osric’s daughter while taking on a fairly heavy loss. The whole sequence lasts maybe 12 or 14 minutes but, during the whole thing until the three thieves have escaped, just before one of them gets shot with a snake (yeah, you read that right), there are only four lines of minimal dialogue, comprising nine words. I noted them down as I watched this time...

Subotai: So this is paradise?
When he catches a glimpse of an enthusiastic orgy of cannibals.
Valeria: The princess!
Valeria: Come on.
Big, heavy looking villain: You!

The movie is pure cinema whichever way you look at it and, though I’m not all that happy with some of the satire on show... it takes a serious side swipe at hippies although, to be fair, it also bashes suicide cults at the same time (so it can’t all be bad), I’d have to say that the film certainly holds up to repeated viewings over the decades (I’m not sure if I’m into double figures on this movie yet but, getting there). It’s also probably one of the first films (at least released into cinemas in this country) to mix the bloody violence and gore which, even when the 1930s Weird Tales pulps the stories were first published in, are part and parcel of many of the literary yarns published in this genre. It actually felt, for a brief amount of time, that fantasy cinema was actually, finally growing up. Alas, the kiddies would win out in the end... and I’ll discuss what happened with the sequel when I rewatch that one very soon.

The film has some outstanding set pieces and moments, many inspired from the original short stories, plus some nice cinematic ideas... such as the sweat from Conan’s head as he steals a dazzling jewel dripping onto the eye of a giant snake which then awakes and attacks him. There are also some of Milius’ movie influences on quite vivid display too. The setting up of the encampment for the final battle sequence is like a miniature homage to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and the writing that covers Conan’s body to help protect it from demons, when the wizard is trying to stop his almost dead body from being taken by them, is reminiscent of the writing used to try and stop other supernatural creatures in one of the segments of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan.

And then there’s that beautiful score by Basil Poledouris. I don’t think I’ve seen many ‘greatest film score’ lists over the last few decades that haven’t included this in their top ten. Certainly, I think it’s one of the most astounding achievements in the art of film music and one piece of music, The Orgy, co-composed by Poledouris with his daughter Zoe, which uses a repeat structure similar in style to Ravel’s Bolero, it seems to me, is easily my favourite piece of film music ever written. 

The score serves both as something supporting the movie’s emotional moments but also has its own ways of giving to the story. For instance, in a wonderful montage where we see Conan grow from a child into Arnold Schwarzenegger, pushing a giant Wheel Of Pain for a decade, Poledouris writes in screeching iron to the track, something which starts, timed to the rhythm of the score, as soon as the wheel first comes into the left of the shot, like a sound effect but, in this case, a musical punctuation. And, of course, as a stand alone listen, this is a fantastic work of art. I own various incarnations of this score on vinyl and then CD over the years, including one which is transcribed for solo church organ as an album. 

And that’s me done with the absolutely brilliant, first cinematic incarnation of Conan The Barbarian. I could never recommend this movie enough to anybody and this hopefully won’t be the last time I watch it. I’ll be jumping onto the slightly less satisfying sequel, which I’ve not seen more than a few times and don’t remember all that well, sometime very soon. Also, if you’re into this kind of thing, I’ll hopefully be reading a thick doorstop of a reprint of all the original Robert E. Howard Conan stories as they appeared in Weird Tales, in an absolutely beautiful hardback edition (double columned like those original magazines, no less), so look out for a review of that at some point too... 

No, wait, I ended up reading that and posting the review long before I got around to putting this review up so, yeah, you can read that review right here. 

Harryhausen - The Lost Movies

Stopped Motion

Harryhausen -
The Lost Movies
by John Walsh
Titan Books ISBN: 978-1789091106

Many viewers of fantasy cinema love the stop motion worlds created for the screen by the late, great Ray Harryhausen in films such as The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here). However, do you remember Ray Harryhausen’s 1959 movie version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars... in Cinerama, no less? Or how about his 1969 version of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian character?

If you’re scratching your head and thinking quizzically about that then don’t worry, you’re not losing your mind and tripping into some fantastic alternative reality. These are film projects that were planned at the time and never came to pass and, fascinating as they are, this is just scratching the surface of John Walsh’s new book Harryhausen - The Lost Movies.

Written by the current gatekeeper, so to speak, of the legacy of this remarkable stop motion animator and film maker extraordinaire, this book is a nicely illustrated look at the many different projects which are the fabulous “what if?” periods of Ray Harryhausen’s life... mostly but, not always, coupled with his producing partner Charles H. Schneer, of course. And as you can imagine, it’s a treasure trove of lost projects that, in some cases most regrettably, never came to pass. It’s also a source of some quite surprising things, when you look at some of the cinematic treasures which were possibly ‘in the mix’ for Harryhausen’s attention.

Starting off with quote testimonies about the frequency of lost projects the average film maker has to regrettably turn his back on by five famous movie directors... Guillermo Del Toro, John Landis, John Boorman, Mike Hodges and Nicholas Meyer... the book goes through the life’s work of missed or passed on opportunities of the great man chronologically and with chapters set into periods of his work.

The book takes the works of three categories of ‘lost film’(and occasional TV show or series of short films like the proposed 1950 Baron Munchausen shorts) as it goes along with the different types designated thusly:

Projects turned down by Ray - these are ones which, for some reason or another, Ray either wasn’t interested in or saw some huge problems which might scupper the project and so didn’t spend too much time on them. For the Conan movie, for example, Ray knew he wanted to do it ‘straight’ to the tone of the original pulps and was pushing to go for a violent, gory approach for the subject matter... something he didn’t usually entertain as a good route with his work but, for this project, he thought that would be the right choice. Regrettably, various producers didn’t think a fantasy film with that level of violence would be deemed commercial enough for the cinema on the expected release year of 1973 (once all the animated creature sequences were done) so the project didn’t go ahead.

And it’s an impressive and surprising list of projects that Ray turned down, many of them which you could see would have benefitted from Ray’s golden touch and would have made sense if he’d taken them on. They include among them, such famous titles as The Giant Claw, Night/Curse Of The Demon, King Kong Vs Frankenstein, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, The Land That Time Forgot, The Hobbit (in 1974), Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (although that lovely shot of him standing next to the stop motion version of the Tauntaun at ILM is reproduced in this book), The Princess Bride, an early version of the X-Men and David Lynch’s version of Dune. An impressive list of projects to pass on to be sure but there are many others mentioned in this book and in some cases it also talks about who approached him for which project and the reasons why Ray turned them down.

Projects that Ray was developing - these were propositions to make into a film project but which didn’t get finished for one reason or another and they run the gamut from the book being able to show just a single surviving sketch such as a proposed 1948 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher to having a load of surviving artwork plus assembled models ready to be animated and, in the case of some of the projects (and I guess you’ll need to scour YouTube to see some of these), actual test footage of the models in preparation for filming.

Alas, for some of these projects such as a proposed 1954 version of H. G Wells’ The Time Machine, no preliminary sketches have survived.For others of these though, you can get a real glimpse, sometimes more than a glimpse, of what might have been. For instance, Ray’s version of War Of The Worlds would have included the proper tripods from the book and not what George Pal ended up doing with his movie version. Or the much mooted Sinbad Goes To Mars project.

And then there’s a third category of films, where the movie was made by Ray and is another jewel in his filmography but sequences were either developed but not shot for these or just left on the cutting room floor. So a sequence where two Cyclopses fight each other in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was storyboarded out (the book is full of Harryhausen’s illustrations and models of these kinds of things, by the way) but never made it into the final version. Also, scenes with snakes (and also in the case of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad... rats) were cut out from most of the films where they were originally to be included, purely because Charles H. Schneer had a phobia about them and so he always eliminated those scenes first. One has to wonder how the Medusa in Clash Of The Titans got past him. Interestingly, a decade after the film came out, a young 17 year old fan sent a homemade mask of the Cyclops from that film to Harryhausen and Ray responded with an encouraging letter. Ladies and gentlemen, that young fan grew up to be the famous Hollywood creature creator Rick Baker.

And some of the commentary on these existing films contain their own surprises...

So sure, the scene in The Three Worlds of Gulliver where the title character fights a devil homunculus never made it to the cameras but, apparently neither did Danny Kaye, who was wanted for Gulliver but couldn’t get Sam Goldwyn to release him from his contract to shoot the movie.

Or the fact that for The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, Christopher Lee was originally wanted for the main villain of the movie, a part that went to the then unknown Tom Baker (and which brought him to the attention of the producers of the show that shot him to international fame).  Also from this movie, Orson Welles was apparently wanted for the role of The Oracle but an uncredited and completely unrecognisable Robert Shaw plays the role in the final film. As for the Valley Of The Vipers scene originally slated for the movie... well, you can bet Schneer got rid of that one too.

Also, I have to say that, judging from the storyboards in this book, the unused Shadow Men who created the Minoton from Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger would have been a really scary thing for children to view and, perhaps, should have stayed in the movie.

Fans of Hammer movies will also find much of interest in here with the unmade projects like When The Earth Cracked Open (one of the famous 'pre-posters' for that film is reprinted in this tome) and their attempt to make their own King Kong movie.

As for Clash Of The Titans, one of my least favourites of Harryhausen’s ouevre, it explains why the death of Medusa in the film is so different from the one in the Look-In graphic novel sold at the time of the film’s release. However, regarding this motion picture, the most interesting but, also, the most frustrating revelation of this book is the discovery made by the writer when researching this. That is the discovery of a TDK blank cassette on which is recorded John Barry’s rejected demo score for the film. I would love to hear this... as would a lot of people but, I’ve no idea what condition the tape is in or if it could be preserved for a commercial release. It must be a fascinating listening experience though. 

And that’s me done with this book for now. There are a heck of a lot of dead movies covered here and there’s many more you can read about in Harryhausen - The Lost movies. John Walsh has conceived and written a really fascinating book which gives a real insight into what some of these productions might have had going for them, with plenty of the original illustrations and models reproduced here too. A real dream of a book for certain readers, I’m sure and something most cinephiles of a certain kind will want to immerse themselves in. Definitely worth a read.

Conan The Barbarian

Something familiar, Something peculiar, Something for everyone: A CROMedy tonight!

Conan The Barbarian 2011 USA

Directed by Marcus Nispel

Screening at UK cinemas

Ok... so last night I saw a new peplum called Conan The Barbarian. True, it’s not a peplum in the absolute strictest sense of the word (just like John Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars and Assault on Precinct 13 aren’t technically Westerns, although you’d be hard pressed to find anyone refuting that claim) since it’s an American made tale of the mighty Cimmerian... and this is fitting since Conan was created, after all, by a young man by the name of Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas in 1932.

The movie I watched, however, does harken back to the traditions of the Maciste and Hercules pictures that were churned out year after year by the Italian film industry. Granted, it’s not as close in style to these movies, perhaps, as the original 1982 movie of the same title, but it’s certainly another stab at the US sword and sandal epics that kickstarted the whole peplum cycles in the first place (right back in the silent movie era if memory serves me right... and I know if it doesn’t then one of you lot will jump on here and have a moan at me in the comments section, I hope).

And it gets better. Not only was it a fair to middling peplum... although very much with a modern (or should that be postmodern?) flavour, but it’s also not a terrible version of Conan, so that’s not so bad then. Granted, it’s not quite got the feel the original stories had when they were published in such pulps as Weird Tales, but the character has certainly been injected with a certain gutsiness which is pretty basic if you’re going to make a movie about this kind of character.

The classic image of Conan is not that of the ones depicted on the occasional cover of Weird Tales magazine, who may well have been best represented by an actor like Victor Mature, but those put out by both Marvel Comics in the 70s and in the illustration work of the late, great Frank Frazetta. Which is fine because that was also closer to Howard’s Conan than the images depicted on the pulp covers.

This Conan is, thankfully, not a straight remake of the 1982 movie, however it is also nowhere near it’s equal and, unfortunately, makes some of the same mistakes as that one did... and when I say mistakes I am merely commenting on the faults of the process of adaptation as I see them applied here.

Now Robert E. Howard’s stories are the way I knew Conan as a kid... and for some reason the quote “I’ll split your head like a ripe melon” is spiralling it’s way back from the past to me. I have to say though, if this phrase were the only qualification to make a great movie from the Cimmerian’s adventures then both the Conan The Barbarian movies are excellent adaptations (I’m gonna forget about Conan The Destroyer because the Conan’ness of it was torn from it and it was reduced to being a second rate Sinbad movie... with Grace Jones in it). However, what I remember from these stories is that they were all fairly short. If my hazy memory serves me well then I think I’m right in thinking that Howard only wrote one full novel... one set much later in Conan’s chronology, when he was a king and had a son. The shorts were always quite episodic and although a rough chronology could be put together from them, they were mostly never a part of a larger arc and usually started when Conan was always just on his way to or from somewhere else where he’d had untold adventures.

The films are therefore not the best format to adapt this character to because you have to impinge your own narrative structure on them. Howard’s other character Soloman Kane had a whole movie made a year or so ago about a back story that he never wrote... but that one at least was on a level with the 1982 Conan movie in terms of watchability. Both the 1982 and the 2011 movies have gone for a revenge story surrounding the death of Conan’s parents when he was a child (indeed, the new one makes the death of his father into almost the reveal of Charles Bronson’s character in Once Upon A Time In The West)... both run in slightly different directions and both properly bring in black magical arts and sorcery, as they should. It has to be said though that the new Conan The Barbarian also uses a ridiculous and tired old concept of a divided symbol or talisman (in this case a mask) of which the restoration of all the pieces will allow a sacrificial ritual to be performed and evil to rise. In the pre-credits sequence (which actually uses a few dialogue lines in voice over which were used in the 1982 movie’s pre-credits sequence) we are even shown the mask smashed into uneven segments. Funny then, I thought to myself as the bad guy in this movie did his thing, how those segments just snap back into place like an old Aurora model kit with no glue or anything needed... considering it had been, you know, smashed into pieces and all.

This Conan, like the 1982 version, has various set-pieces linked together by the underlying narrative but each of these set-pieces does follow a progression (unlike the 1982 original which had a few things going off into their own tangents) and while this probably makes for a stronger movie for some audiences, I somehow found it a bit of a turn off and another step away from the spirit of Howard’s Conan. That being said, I’m sure Howard would have gone on to write many more, tightly structured Conan novels had he lived... but he shot himself at the age of 30.

There were a fair few Conan novels written and published by other writers in the 70s when I were a lad (it was almost impossible to go in any bookshop in those days and not see 30 or so different novels depicting a half-naked Conan attacking some foul creature of dark sorcery while a similarly half-naked girl looked on). However, I can’t really look on these as official Conan stories and so I can only compare the film to the original novels and, obviously, films in a similar vein from the past.

Where I stand with the new one is that it gets a few things right and a few things wrong... and we’re left with something which is not quite Conan but enjoyable all the same... although, to be fair, it does drag in some places.

So what did it get right and where did it go wrong?

Well it was pretty violent, Conan was pretty ruthless and there was mention and obvious links and references in the movie to his days as a “freebooter”. This is all good stuff. Unfortunately, for all this it still got a bit boring in places and there were not enough examples of monsters or sorcery. The one big scene where Conan had to fight invincible soldiers spawned from the sand drags on far too long and just was not a great action sequence. He needed to fight a skeleton or a snake humanoid or something more Conan-ish I fear... and possibly find himself seduced by an evil enchantress. This one didn’t quite cut it because it felt like everything in this movie had to have a reason for happening... and Conan was never really like that as far as I can remember. Things just happened to him.

Also, Tyler Bates score is quite competent and useable but it's not the absolute masterpiece of scoring that we got from the late Basil Poledouris for the 1982 movie. That one is constantly flagged up as being one of the greatest movie scores ever written, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the more famous scores by Rosza, Herrmann and Bernstein so... well really, Tyler Bates had a lot to live up to and he does a serviceable job.

So I’d recommend this movie to a point but I’d have to say that this one didn’t nearly nail it as much as the 1982 movie did and also I’d have to personally proclaim this as one of the noisiest action movies ever. This continues the tradition of movie sound effects started in From Russia With Love of having the thuds, clangs and suchlike turned up way past their natural sound setting. Yep, all the sounds are dialled up to 11 on the mix in Conan The Barbarian. So you might want to have a think about giving your eardrums the gift of cotton wool before you go into the cinema. Also... the 3D was, as usual in contemporary movies, completely unnecessary. So there’s that.

All in all then, a mostly fun, enjoyable film but it’s not nearly as much as being in the spirit of the original Conan stories as the original movie was (which is a hard act to follow since that one was written by John Milius and Oliver Stone)... or even as much of a Conan movie as The Scorpion King was to be honest. Recommended with caution on the understanding that this is only the second best Conan movie ever made... like I said, we don’t mention Conan The Destroyer around these parts.