Conan The Destroyer

Crom, But Not Forgotten

Conan The Destroyer
USA/Mexico 1984 
Directed by Richard Fleischer
20th Century Fox Australian Blu Ray All Zones 

Oh, well... I remember looking forward to seeing Conan The Destroyer when it came out in 1984 but, even then, I realised it was a bit of a mess. Fun but... not that great as a movie about Robert E. Howard’s memorable hero. Let’s make no mistake, Conan The Barbarian (reviewed here) was pretty much the last truly great film from the ‘heroic fantasy/sword and sorcery’ genre and still is to this day, in my opinion (Peter Jackson kind of screwed up Tolkien and the nearest thing we have to a modern fantasy adventure of this kind is probably the contemporary set Mandy from a couple of years ago, which I reviewed here). The fact that John Milius wasn’t able to return to the director’s chair here really sealed the fate of this film, I think. 

What we have is an adventure fantasy movie with the emphasis on the more magical and mystical elements of Robert E. Howard’s Conan adventures... at the expense of the absence of a lot of the things that really worked so well from that first movie. The character is way too sophisticated in this sequel and the tone much too light hearted. The idea was to make the film even more box office friendly by making it appeal more to kids so the violence and single mindedness of the plot was kind of toned down in the hopes that it would get a lower classification in cinemas... something which kinda backfired in the UK, where the film still managed to garner an AA rating with nothing much to show for it. So, there’s also a lot less blood letting and goriness in this iteration and... that does kind of betray the spirit of the original stories, to some extent. 

Asides from Sven-Ole Thorsen, who is playing a completely different character and who is in the majority of Arnold Schwarzeneger’s films, we have only two characters back from the first film. At least they are played by the same actors... Schwarzenegger as Conan The Cimmerian and Mako as the minor wizard Akiro. We also have a bunch of new characters payed by Grace Jones, Olivia d’Abo, Wilt Chamberlain, Tracey Walter, Pat Roach (as Thoth Amon, no less, who never even met Conan in the original stories, instead always staying at the periphery of the adventures) and, as the other lead villain (as if Thoth Amon wasn’t enough for them) we have, in the words of the Superman The Movie Topps Bubble Gum card captions, ‘the alluring Sarah Douglas’. 

And, they’re all good actors and they jell quite well (well, I heard Grace Jones didn’t get on with some on the set but, yeah, I kinda expected that) and are all pretty good but, as I said, Conan has moved on and although he is still obsessed with the dead Valeria, the film seems like barely anything to do with the original. It’s a kind of half-hearted fantasy adventure which looks and feels more like Roger Moore’s For Your Eyes Only era films than the gritty, half exploitative, sword and sandal epic it really needs to be. I believe the tone of the film was not favourable to the director and that Schwarzenneger also objected to the ‘dumbing down’ of the character in this way which, I believe, went a good way to him losing interest in doing a third movie in the series (at the time... I’m still hearing the third part, King Conan, is still in development with him attached). 

The one good thing is the late, great composer Basil Poledouris’ sequel score. He does recook several themes from the first one such as the main Anvil Of Crom music, the Wheel Of Pain music (when Conan and another character are trying to lift open a heavy door), a sped up version of the Wifeing theme (during a brief, static effects insert of Sandahl Bergam as the dead Valeria) and several versions of The Orgy (aka the greatest score cue in soundtrack history), which I always thought was supposed to represent the Cult of Thulsa Doom from the first movie and so, therefore, seems somewhat out of place but no less welcome here. Other than these, there’s a new heroic theme which also seems somewhat out of place, while still being fairly listenable but, you know, nothing new which matches the strength of the themes in the first one (nothing as cool as, say, the Theology theme at any rate). Still, Poledouris was a great composer and the score is probably the best thing about this movie, it has to be said. I wish Intrada would finally release that restored version of the score they’ve been working on for years... I really have no desire to purchase the rerecording after the travesty of the Conan The Barbarian re-recording.*

The only other thing I could say is that you do get the odd shade of the visual legacy of Conan thrown in, perhaps sometimes accidentally, from time to time. The main moment, to my mind, is when Conan is fighting the creature that Thoth Amon metamorphoses into in the chamber of mirrors, which strongly resembles, to me anyway, one of the Frank Frazetta covers from the 1960s/70s Conan paperback reprints. Which is nice and a rare flash of gold in an otherwise drab production, it has to be said.

And that’s me done with Conan The Destroyer, methinks. I probably don’t really have to watch this one again in my lifetime because it does kind of leave you with a bad taste in the mouth after the sheer brilliance of the first movie. For years I waited for a third movie to come along which would crown Conan King of Aquilonia but, alas, when a third film did come along it was a rebooted version of Conan The Barbarian (a review of this was forged by me here many years ago, when this blog was still young in the eyes of men) but, alas, it didn’t star Schwarzenegger and it got as much wrong as it got right, it seemed to me. The 1982 movie is still the one great Conan movie, as far as I’m concerned and, as the years pass, I begin to think it will always remain so. 

*Actually, since I wrote this review, they have finally released it in 2022... still havent gotten around to listening to it yet, though.

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. 

The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

Necro Crom Icon

The Cthulhu Stories
of Robert E. Howard
Edited by Paul Di Filippo
Word Fire Press ISBN:  9781680570984

If you are into H. P. Lovecraft you’ll know that his most famous legacy, a common thread running through many of his stories recalling ancient, tentacle, aggressive God-like creatures known in its various guises as Chtulhu... was not just something that Lovecraft wrote himself. He freely gave friends and correspondents licence to also reference this, sometimes somewhat tenuous thematic tentacle, in their own writings... often published in similar pulp magazines as Lovecraft’s own tales. So you had people like August Derleth and, I believe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. One of these writers and pen pals was the late, great Robert E. Howard, who would be best remembered for his tales of his Cimmerian barbarian Conan, not to mention such characters as Solomon Kane and Kull The Conqueror. And it’s some of his stories which feature, rather tenuously I should add, in terms of this selection at least (I hear there are many other examples of his tales with Cthulhu elements) in the volume The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard, which was published a couple of years ago.

Now, I am mostly only familiar with Howard's Conan and Kane stories so I was very pleased to have this. As it is, there is a lot of stuff in here which I find oblique in terms of accessing even the sometimes hard to pin down Cthulhu element of Lovecraft’s tales and I have to warn you that if you are expecting horror stories full of madness and creeping dread... well, there are a few of those but there are also a lot of other things which are less likely to make you think of one of Lovecraft’s slithering horrors. For instance, I’d read one of the tales in this tome before... a Kull story called The Shadow Kingdom, in an equally unlikely tome for it to be collected in... a complete Conan in Weird Tales collection (reviewed here). The most this and, a fair amount of the other twelve tales joining it in this collection, has in common with the spirit of Cthulhu is maybe a brief reference to an ancient alien race, perhaps originating from the stars. Some of the stories will make more pointed references to Lovecraft creations such as Dagon and the demonic book known as The Necronomicon and, yeah, others have almost no tenuous grip on the subject at hand, it seemed to me. There are, however, a few tales which are absolutely fitting  in with the spirit and atmosphere of the tales and, as you would expect, Howard has his own way of doing things...

The editor makes the point, in his introduction, that Howard’s version of this ‘horror brand’ is less likely to result in the descent into madness for his main protagonists... Howard being someone who would have his characters meet the lurking dread in a less passive and more heroic manner. Indeed, by way of an example, there is a ‘round robin’ collaborative story near to the end of this volume which was issued as a challenge to some writers from Fantasy Magazine. The story is called The Challenge From Beyond and it’s started off by C. L. Moore and the writers A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long all add excerpts of the story as a chain to bring it to a conclusion...

It’s interesting to note that the authors of the piece really don’t do too much to hide their own style and although the story certainly gets from point A to B, the small chapters all seem to have a different energy to them. Once Moore has set things up and Merritt further has the main character’s mind transformed through the power of a well worn, black stone cube... we get to Lovecraft’s section where the whole thing is turned to absolute bleak terror and a fate worse than death for the main protagonist as he finds his mind swapped across the cosmos with an alien creature, with absolutely no hope of returning to his body. But then Howard comes in and suddenly, the hero is pretty happy with his lot because he is in an alien body with a human thinking mind and, taking just a shard of rock, overpowers the various aliens on their own world and becomes their God. So, yeah, not a passive madness but a conquering spirit for sure. What really annoyed me about this story, however, is that the year before I read a book called The Complete Fiction of H. P Lovecraft (reviewed here) and this tale certainly wasn’t included... how the heck is that complete then?

And it’s a hit and miss affair, as you would expect but there are certainly some things of note. For instance, Howard uses a black, monolithic stone to run a common thread between some of his unrelated tales and there’s more than one story in here which has people transformed from his present day in the 1930s and back to ancient times to have an adventure, before returning to their modern day guise. One of these is actually, although people may want to argue with me on this (and I don’t care), a Conan story. People Of The Dark was written a month or so before the first of Howard’s more widely acknowledged Conan tales and tells of a man who, on his way to murder a rival in love with a pistol, gets magically transported back to ancient times at the same location and spins a tale which is a metaphor for the one going on simultaneously in the 1930s. Granted it’s all told from the first person but much if it is told by the barbarian character Conan who also, of course, invokes his God Crom. So, frankly, I don’t know why this isn’t included in collections of the Conan stories just because it’s considered by some a prototype (perhaps even by Howard himself) because it seems pretty plain to me.

And talking of Conan, there’s even reference in another story in here, again set in more contemporary times to when it was written, where the black ring of one Thoth-amon is invoked. So, yeah, there are Conan references in these tales as well as the Lovecraftian mentions.

Now, in the 1970s, I remember there were one or more story collections which were basically tales of different Howard characters that were transformed, by unscrupulous publishers who shall not be named here, by changing the character and location names to ones found in the Conan tales and reprinted as Conan stories. I believe the story in this collection entitled The Gods of Bal-Sagoth may indeed have been a victim of this practice at some point over the decades... and possibly more than one of the tales in this story may have been further transformed, perhaps.

There are some other tales which almost seem like dry runs for Conan stories by Howard here too... as you might expect. More than one story included here is a little close in structure or idea to existing Conan tales which may have come later and, certainly, the tale here entitled Worms Of The Earth, which tells a tale of Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts... and his vengeance unleashed on certain agents of the Roman army, seemed to me to bear a striking structural similarity, in a much simpler and less round about form, to Howard’s one and only Conan novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, if I’m not mistaken. I can see where he may have built on the idea at play in this tale.

My favourite story in this collection, however, has little to do with Cthulhu. It’s called Skull Face and it’s obviously been ‘inspired’ by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, if Fu Manchu was called Skull Face and was a hideous, resurrected Egyptian sorcerer mummy. Starting in the opium dens of Limehouse, the main protagonist actually starts off as a henchman, of sorts, owing the titular character the debt of his life but, soon, the beauty of an oriental girl and the heroism of another character inspire him to attempt to kick his hashish habit and team up against the atrophied but powerful, demonic wizard. It’s one of the longer stories in this volume but certainly the jewel in the crown, as far as I’m concerned. Although, I did find it interesting that, in another story called The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, the two adventurous heroes have to avoid looking at a demonic manifestation causing destruction around them to their enemies, much like the climax of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

And that’s about it from me on this one. The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard is a handsome tome with a beautiful cover (on the hardback at least) depicting a Cthulhu terror and, on the wraparound, a man fleeing for his life as it doggedly pursues him. The tales are not all nearly Cthulhu enough, for my liking, for the tome to use such a title but, it doesn’t really matter all that much as it’s a fine collection and Howard is as good a writer when he’s telling tales that don’t involve his famous Cimmerian, as when he’s depicting the Hyborian Age. Definitely worth a read and some space on your bookshelf if you are a Robert E. Howard fan, for sure.

Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian

Blood And Crom

Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian -
The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus
by Robert E. Howard
Pulp Lit Productions
ISBN: 9781635912715

Robert E. Howard wrote his completed Conan stories, of which there are around 20 (and that’s including a few novellas and one novel), between the years 1932 and 1936. The last story, Red Nails, was published shortly after his death. When he was 30 and his mother had become gravely ill, he was filled with despair and shot himself, thus ending a quite prolific literary career filled with many different characters of varying genres. Indeed, it might be said by some that he invented the ‘heroic fantasy’ or ‘sword and sorcery’ genre with others following in his path (Tolkien’s The Hobbit was first published in 1937).

I have, of course, read all of Howard’s Conan stories before, a number of times (not to mention Conan tales by other writers over the years). The last time I read them it was in a two volume paperback edition which collected the stories in the chronology of the character’s exploits. However, I wanted a nice hardback edition and, well, I can’t say I chose the absolute best edition with this Pulp Lit Productions version, Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian - The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages which, I’ll go into first because, well there is a lot of positive stuff here so, lets get the silliest thing out of the way first.

When I bought this edition of the book, for reasons I’ll go into soon, I was under the impression that I was rebuying all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales but, as the editor of this edition points out in his introduction, two stories are not present. One of which is a quite famous one, The God In The Bowl. Apparently this was Howard reworking one of his earlier stories and retrofitting it to his Conan character (much like I’ve seen certain money hungry authors adapt other Howard tales into Conan stories, over the intervening decades) and it wasn’t, like the other missing story, ever published in Weird Tales and, well, this is supposed to be an anthology of Conan tales published in that magazine. I could almost live with that if it weren’t for the fact that one Conan story and also one monograph on The Hyborian Age by Howard, also included in this admittedly handsome tome, were published in other publications. This felony... and I think it such because of the rules of exclusion of the two remaining Conan tales... is further compounded with the book starting off with three non-Conan short stories, one of Kull The Conqueror and two featuring Soloman Kane. This, it says, is to give us an understanding of how the writing style grew and advanced into Conan but, frankly, I’d have been more able to see this with the inclusion of those two missing Conan stories. So, yeah, that’s my only real negative here and I’ve said my piece on that.

The positives are much more interesting though because the book has been designed in a way to more or less match the reading experience as it would have been presented month after month in Weird Tales. Not that the stories are split into multiple parts but they are double columned on the page with the original interior illustrations reproduced... and with Margaret Brundage’s cover art included, albeit in black and white form, when the covers of a particular issue were highlighting Howard’s Conan contributions (two full colour Brundage art paintings are also used for the front and back covers). What I will say about Brundage’s work is... the paintings are absolutely beautiful and, in no way a reflection of Conan as a character, even by the standards that these kind of muscular characters were portrayed as back in the 1930s. The likeness of Conan is very weak in these but, it has to be said, her lithe and, almost always semi naked, women are a wonder to behold.

Another good thing about this volume is that it’s a real education into the haphazard and non-chronological way in which these things were, not just published but written. These are published in the exact order in which Weird Tales published them and so the first Conan story here is The Phoenix And The Sword. This is indeed one of the earliest Conan stories written and here Conan is already at the farthest end of his career, in that he is already the usurper King Conan of Aquilonia. The preceeding tales dot around from various different points in his career... thief, buccaneer, general, king etc... without much thought from either the magazine’s publishers nor, it has to be said, from Howard, as to the chronology of the character, although there is a perceived order when you read through the tales somewhere in there, trying to get out. Helpfully, the editor writes a small introduction to each story to place the timeframe in Howard’s output in the reader’s mind and, at the end of each story, there is a note on which page to turn to next if one wants to read the stories in the order in which Howard actually completed them, as opposed to their publication order. Reading them in their publication order this time, for the first time, gave me a real insight into what I thought had always been a long term plan in Howard’s mind. There are often passages which refer to Conan one day becoming king of a region and, where I’d always assumed that this was something he’d been working towards, I’d not realised that he had already written at least two of those tales where he was a monarch.

Even the novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, which sees Conan lose and then, through a hard quest and series of battles, regain the throne of Aquilonia, was published before the last, posthumous story, Red Nails, which sees Conan back in time as being a thief and adventurer again.

Anyone who’s read these wonderful tales will, of course, know how ahead of his time Howard was in terms of the violence and raciness of the tales. Compared to some of the pulp classics of the day such as The Shadow or Doc Savage (my favourite), the pages of Weird Tales were running red with the blood of crushed heads and bodies smote in half by Conan’s broadsword. Short, pacey sentences such as “The man’s brains spattered in his face.” were not uncommon in these tales. And the Margaret Brundage paintings were definitely on point when it came to the profusion of naked damsels with curves wobbling through the text.

Another thing I noticed, or rather deduced, was the promotion of the evil sorcerer Thoth Amon character after Howard’s death. Anyone reading the Marvel comics or writers such as L. Sprague De Camp’s additions to the Conan saga will know Thoth as his constant and devious literary nemesis. However, after making his first appearance as a periphery character who escapes his own bondage and never once met Conan in The Phoenix And The Sword, he is only mentioned, briefly in passing, in a couple of other stories. He never meets Conan and you never know whether either of them are on each other’s radar. I believe he turns up in The God In The Bowl but, like I said... that story is not included here and I don’t remember much about it. So his rise to super villainy, not to mention appearing as a main character in the second Conan movie, is definitely something that Howard would probably have not done himself.

Talking about the films though... although they are kind of pastiches of the original tales with a lot of stuff just created for the screen, you can certainly see where certain moments came from in terms of what Howard himself wrote. For instance, the crucifixion scene, complete with Conan biting on the neck of a vulture feasting on him as he hangs on a cross, is from the tale A Witch Is Born. The scene where a wizard turns a man’s arrow into a snake in The People Of The Black Circle is obviously something which the writers of the first movie looked at when concocting the demise of Valeria in that film, as is the battle with the giant snake where Conan pins its jaws together with his dagger.

Indeed, the movie version of Valeria herself seems to be an amalgam of at least two characters in Howard’s original chronicles of Conan. Valeria is very much a feisty and strong female co-star of the final tale in this volume, Red Nails. However, she also has more than a lot in common with Conan’s lover, Belit, the pirate queen from The Queen Of The Black Coast, including the long speech which is almost verbatim in the movie about coming back from death to once again aid Conan, something which she indeed does at the end of the tale, when the Cimmerian buccaneer finds himself in trouble.

There are other things of interest in the text too. For instance, the city of Dagon, which comes right out of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu tales (Howard was a contemporary correspondent of the writer and wrote his own Cthulhu tales too), turns up in the Conan story The Devil In Iron. And, from my point of view, I couldn’t help but think that the giant metal God from this same tale might well have inspired Ray Harryhausen’s giant metal creature Talos in Jason And The Argonauts (I know Harryhausen wanted to have a crack at Conan, at one point in his own career).

Another item of interest is the way in which the writing changes on occasion. There are two of the tales which feature a less than happy ending (although Conan always escapes with his own skin, obviously). And a couple of the tales aren’t always as focussed on the Cimmerian as they are on other characters. This would include one which is... and I thank the editor for pointing it out in an introduction... about the politics of the Old West but, instead of writing it in one of his Western yarns, Howard uses it as a metaphor in Beyond The Black River. But this really is a cowboys and indians sort of piece. Another example of the text suddenly straying in terms of the norm, would be in the penultimate couple of chapters of Hour Of The Dragon. Having stayed at Conan’s side for pretty much the entirety of the novel, the reader is suddenly redirected to Conan’s enemies and the last, big battle of the novel between the various armies is told from their point of view rather than the victorious Aquilonian forces and their allies. Which is kind of interesting and one wonders where Howard would have gone with the way the tales were written from here, had he not cut his own life so short.

And that’s all I have to say about the original, ‘pure Howard’ Conan stories as collected in Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian - The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. Other than this edition comes with a free download of the book, both as an ebook and as an audio book, if you purchase this. You know my thoughts on the pros and cons of this volume so caveat emptor... and all that. You make your choice now with at least the knowledge of all that’s contained in this edition. Personally I enjoyed it very much... it would have been just perfect though, if the remaining two stories had been included.

The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage

Brundage Domination

The Alluring Art of
Margaret Brundage -
Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art
by Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock
Vanguard ISBN: 9781934331507

I remember seeing my first Margaret Brundage cover printed in a large format, hardback anthology book about the early days of science fiction maybe 40 or more years ago. It was for one of the Conan stories, Queen Of The Black Coast in the 1934 issue of Weird Tales. My one big takeaway, at the time, was that no matter how splendid and inviting the female figure in the illustration looked, the guy in the picture didn’t look a heck of a lot like Conan, even for the period it was illustrated when perceptions of body types were much different to what they are today (I now know the model for the picture is Margaret’s once husband ‘Slim’ Brundage). During Autumn of 2020, I re-read the complete run of the Conan stories that were published in Weird Tales again (a review will be forthcoming at some point this year, in a special Robert E. Howard Prose and Movies themed week on this blog) and with it, I rediscovered the beautiful artwork of Brundage once again.

It’s true, to my eyes the male figure still looks nothing like the descriptions of Conan in the stories (I think Frank Frazetta probably gave us the truest rendition of Howard’s powerhouse Cimmerian) but the girls are something else and, now I have this book, The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage - Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art, I find that it was mainly the profusion of scantily clad and often totally naked women rendered lovingly by Brundage in pastels which were the main selling point of Weird Tales... a magazine she started doing covers for in the early 1930s through to the late 30s/early to mid 40s. I was also surprised to learn that, asides from the novelty of a female cover artist plying her trade with such erotically provocative imagery, she was also something of the trendsetter of this style, with most magazine cover art which came before her being of sci-fi style machinery, rockets etc. for these kinds of publications.

Alas, despite the fact that we have this lovely and brilliant book with her illustrations in it, there seems to be a lot of information lacking about her actual life. We do know that she was born in 1900 in Chicago and had a hasty marriage (with a protracted aftermath) to ‘Slim’ Brundage, who she met while working at The Dil Pickle Club, a hotspot of bohemian art and socialism. I know she was a six foot tall chain smoker and that she went for the cover artist job for Weird Tales in order to support her young son and crippled mother. When the owners of Weird Tales were bought out and relocated, various factors including the transportation of delicate, fragile pastel work to those offices of the new publishers meant that she no longer had a job. She clung on to life tenaciously though, leaving her cover artist days behind her and becoming involved in various political organisations, sadly outliving her son by a few years.

There are other details which I won’t summarise here (hey, read the damned book) but what little facts are available, plus a hell of a lot about the political and social background of where Margaret was and who she was seen with at various stages of her life, is lovingly put together for this publication. There’s even a second ‘book within a book’ which organises a lot of this info into more of a chronology and really fleshes things out, which is called The Secret Life Of Margaret Brundage or: Slim & Margaret: A Bohemian Romance of the Chicago Renaissance by J. David Spurlock.

As well as all this stuff though, there are many beautiful full page renditions of her artworks, in their original form without any of the typography plates later seen on the cover versions. There are also page sized reprints of all her magazine covers as they appeared here too and it’s these replicas of well over 60 covers (and not just her ones for Weird Tales) that are the buried treasure compiled within these pages. Along with a few surviving photos of Margaret herself (not many, she was a woman who seemed allmost inadvertently shrouded in mystery) plus the odd photo from the kind of nudie girly magazines that Margaret would be using as reference for her images (I’m glad to see nothing changes in the world of art... I used to do the same thing for fashion drawings when I was at college).

There’s also the odd, fantastic anecdote along the way and the design of the book is such that some of these appear as asides to the main text in some nice, solid layouts. For instance, H. P. Lovecraft seemed somewhat disapproving of how naked girlies could help magazine sales (and I don’t believe she ever illustrated one of his covers) whereas Robert E. Howard seemed totally in love with her illustrations. I also love the fact that, once the writers had cottoned on to her style of content that raised the sales, they would start working scenes with naked damsels into their tales for a better shot at getting the coveted cover spot with their story. There’s a sad anecdote about Brundage calling in at the Weird Tales offices and crying the day away along with the guy running it when they heard of Howard’s tragic suicide in 1936. He was certainly her favourite writer of the whole Weird Tales bunch.

Another thing I took away from this was an insight into her working process. She would be sent a ‘cover story’ for publication due in two months time (she would work on one cover a month) and that would be the one story from the magazine she would read. She’d then send pencil sketches of possible covers for a few scenes and then get the green light as to which one to work up into a cover. Occasionally there would also be changes after the cover was done... by her own admission, she wasn’t that great at hands (they look alright to me but what do I know, to be honest, the hands are not the first thing the eyes are drawn to in a Margaret Brundage illustration).

There’s much more here too, especially about her political leanings but, for me and probably a lot of people, it all plays second fiddle to the wondrous, provocative and truly gorgeous art which is lovingly reproduced on the interior pages of this beautiful book. A book which is adorned with the usual critic quotes on the back which, when you look more closely at them, you realise aren’t what they appear and are, instead, comments about Brundage from her contemporaries such as some of the writers of Weird Tales... another nice touch.  I’m really glad to have this one and am especially grateful to the young lady who gifted this to me at Christmas. If you are a lover of either ‘heroic fantasy’ art or the female form (or, you know, that thrilling combination of the two) then you would do well to pick up a copy of The Alluring Art Of Margaret Brundage - Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art before it goes out of print. An essential volume as far as I’m concerned.

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.

A Wordsworth to the Wise

Thought this might be an opportunity to give my readers a quick pointer to Wordsworth Editions. People may remember this publisher, who introduced us to the idea of the £1 classic back in the early nineties.

Well, they’re still going strong and their editions are still exceptionally "value for money" (ok cheap, then) ranging at prices from £1.99 to £2.99 which, when compared to the cost of many modern paperbacks and given the extraordinary array of books available from Wordsworth Editions, is truly staggering. They’ve recently released my favourite Jules Verne novel, Mysterious Island, as part of their range and I’d urge any interested parties to pick this up as soon as they can - I remember waiting ages for a special order of this novel only a few years ago and when it finally came through it cost about a tenner! Wish I’d waited until now.

Of special interest is their “Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural” series of classic reprints. There are some great “value for money” editions of some absolutely terrific titles lurking beneath the covers of these distinctive black and charcoal grey editions (with their odd embossed and spot varnished blood and skulls), many of which I might never have been aware of if it wasn’t for the existence of this company.

Richard Marsh’s truly amazing tale of The Beetle for instance, which outsold publication of its nearest rival Dracula (also available in an excellent Wordsworth Edition) by a significant margin, is on their listings... and once you’ve read it you’ll see why it outsold the Stoker classic - it’s fantastic. This was apparently the source novel for a silent film of the same title, so if anyone can get ahold of a copy or give me any information as to its status as either a lost film or something from which the footage still survives... please contact me.

If you’re a fan of recurring characters, they have some complete collections of some very interesting ones... for instance, “The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder” by W.H. Hodgson or “The Right Hand of Doom and other tales of Solomon Kane” by the legendary Robert E. Howard. Plus lots of stalwarts of the genre such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle (and not just his Holmes stories, although these are obviously all covered... my first read of the Professor Challenger stories was via a Wordsworth Edition called “The Lost World and other stories”).

Contemporary writers are also on board with this label, such as David Stuart Davies and his remarkable tales of Sherlock Holmes adventures “previously unwritten” (like The Tangled Skein, which pits Holmes and Watson against Dracula).

And for all you people who like to know where your movies and TV shows have grown from, an interesting batch of short stories await you from this sterling publisher... an M.R. James collection, for example, which includes his “Casting The Runes” most famously adapted as Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon depending on which version you know)... an Ambrose Bierce collection which features “The Damned Thing” (most recently made into a Master’s Of Horror episode)... Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (which was the basis for many vampire films based on tales of the Karnsteins - including Hammer’s three movies kicking off with The Vampire Lovers)...Lafcadio Hearn’s “Oriental Ghost Stories” (which includes the tales which were the basis of Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece Kwaidan... or Kaidan, depending again on which edition you have)... the list goes on. Do some research because I think you’ll find it’s worth it.

I should probably stop gushing now... suffice it to say that I owe Wordsworth Editions an enormous debt when it comes to exposure to a lot of great tales which I might not otherwise have read. From D’Artagnan to Dr Nikola and from Robinson Crusoe to Rouletabille, these editions are not to be missed and I personally consider this particular publisher to be providing, frankly, a wonderful and much needed (in these jaded times) public service rather than running a business... although they seem to be managing to do both quite well.

For details of all their editions go here... www.wordsworth-editions.com