Once Upon a Time in the West • 1968 • Directed by Sergio Leone

Frank: Nothing matters now… Not the land,
not the money, not the woman…I came here to see you.
Harmonica: So you found out you’re not a businessman at all?
Frank: No, just a man.
Harmonica: An ancient race…






In 1966, after the commercial failure of his first two movies, (and well before the smash international success of The Conformist and Last Tango In Paris), fledgling director Bernardo Bertolucci found himself at a professional and personal dead end, and fled, as he often did, to repair to the movies and re-energize himself. He decided on a screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and, in one of those happy coincidences that seem to figure in the back stories of so many film classics, present in the projection room were, not only TGTBATU’s newly successful director Sergio Leone, but a young critic looking for an ‘in’ in the film industry, future horror maestro Dario Argento. When asked by Leone why he liked the film so much, Bertolucci blurted out that he admired the fact that Leone, like John Ford, rather than prettifying horses in profile, filmed ‘their arses from behind”. After a stunned silence, the Ford-worshipping Leone replied “We must make a film together sometime”. While this suggested partnership might have gone against the grain of the young Marxist’s usual filmic tendencies, Bertolucci was (like his entire generation of European directors) also an infatuated Hollywood film buff; and, as he later admitted, “I dreamed… of making a film that (simply) gave pleasure to everyone”. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, as the film which grew out of this chance meeting was arguably (with the possible exception of Ford’s The Searchers) the greatest Western ever made: the epic, astonishing and mesmerizing Once Upon A Time In The West. 

Bad Guys: Looks like we brought one too few horses, haw haw haw...     Harmonica: Nope, you brought two too many...

A perfect cast and director take a break during the
filming of Once Upon a Time in the West

The unlikely trio then spent the next few months holed up together brainstorming — all three enthusiastically revisiting their favorite movie moments, with Leone acting out his vision of the nascent film in a what must have been a hilarious combination of mime, Italian, and his non-speaker’s notion of movie-English. From these spirited sessions (oh, for one of those now omnipresent ‘making-of’ video crews to have dropped by Sergio Leone’s Rome apartment) grew a treatment which used the legendary tropes of the Hollywood Western as a backdrop for an elegiac, melancholy tribute to the passing of an era: the day of the rugged-individual western anti-hero giving way to the encroachment of the modern era, personified by the relentless approach of a continent-spanning railroad. “The damn thing has caught up with me again” remarks an old-timer as he passes a rail crew at work; while this theme became commonplace in the ‘70s, largely through Leone-phile Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant quartet Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, it was quite the fresh concept in 1967. The treatment was then brought to life by frequent Leone collaborator Sergio Donati, whose elegant, mournful (and eminently quotable) dialogue brings an otherwise missing mythic resonance to OUATITW. It is a tribute to the astonishing clarity of Leone’s vision and storytelling craft (and Donati’s superb screenplay) that OUATITW is not the dry intellectual exercise that might, from its genesis, have been predicted; but rather a seamless absorption of its influences into an absolutely original and riveting whole; a sensual, visually resplendent treat for the senses that packs an unforgettable emotional wallop at its center.

“It is essential that all the details seem right, never invented. A fairy tale captures the imagination most when the setting is as realistic as possible”
—    Sergio Leone

A world weary Jill seeks a new start, in a fast-disappearing West...

As rancher Brett McBain prepares a welcoming feast for his soon-to-arrive bride Jill — a beautiful but world weary New Orleans prostitute lured to the backwater town of Sweetwater [conveniently located about a half a mile from Monument Valley] by McBain’s promises of wealth and a secure family life — he and his entire family are brutally slaughtered by Frank, a brilliant and ruthless assassin in the employ of crippled railroad baron Morton, who covets McBain’s ranch for its crucial water-bearing location on the last leg of his railroad’s advance.

Hope of a new life turns to desperation, as Jill's new family is slaughtered by Frank on their wedding day...

After a desperate Jill ransacks the ranch in a futile attempt to find McBain’s supposed wealth, she decides to head back to Bourbon Street in defeat. Unbeknownst to her, two mysterious guardian angels, (the enigmatic Harmonica, who has a long standing score to settle with Frank, and wily outlaw Cheyenne, who is smitten with Jill, and resentful of being framed for the massacre) have figured out why the homestead is so valuable, and encourage her to stand her ground while they settle accounts with Morton and Frank. This blatantly typical Western plot is delivered with such grand and overpowering style however, that it is not until after many repeated and awe-struck viewings that the seasoned viewer begins to wonder just how the film, with its long, silent pauses, screen-high close-ups of iconic faces, absurdly attenuated showdowns and multitude of references (and downright steals) from classic westerns, works at all. But work, and work magnificently, it does; for in this, his masterpiece, Leone’s still unequaled ability to ground his ”fairy tales” in a setting of lovingly rendered visual detail and haunting sonic ambience is on full display.

In The Good The Bad and The Ugly, it’s the crunching of boots and hooves on the rocky landscape and the sensual workings of weaponry that pervade the soundscape; in OUATITW, it’s the sounds of nature that form its aura of destiny, menace and timelessness. No less than the great Ennio Morricone (whose lush, romantic score is one of the great soundtracks in cinema) graciously suggested (inspired by his interest in Musique Concrète), that the only accompaniment to its 10 minute classic opening scene — in which a trio of gunsels, including Western character greats Woody Strode and Jack Elam, wait for Harmonica at a deserted train station — should be a ’symphony’ made up of creaking doors and floorboards, whistling wind, buzzing insects, dripping water, and the now instantly recognizable squeaking of the station windmill (which was nearly erased from film history by an over-eager grip who attempted to oil it, and which now enhances the film’s DVD menu). 

A Fistful of Character Thesps, in full, glorious Leone closeup... Woody Strode, Jack Elam and the second most famous fly in movie history, Lionel Stander, Frank Wolff, and Keenan Wynn

Key also to OUATITW’s power is Leone’s uncanny ability to infuse his deadpan sincerity with a touch of sly parody, and, with impeccable timing, push scene after scene to an exaggerated level of emotional intensity, (OUATITW is often, and accurately, described as operatic) that, in lesser hands would have quickly devolved into unintentional humor. Even OUATITW’s most blatant lifts, such as the sudden cessation of the cicadas’ buzzing which signals the terrible violence to come (a direct grab from The Searchers) are so completely sifted into Leone’s potent mix of sight, sound and emotion that they seem, to the hypnotized first time viewer, to be utterly new. It has also been suggested by Donati (who, like many of the mercurial Leone’s collaborators, viewed the maestro with a peculiar blend of love and loathing) that Leone, who, by all accounts often tried to project a cultural savvy that he did not in fact possess, actually didn’t recognize many of Bertolucci and Argento’s film references, resulting in his completely original treatment of them. Given the genius of OUATITW, it hardly seems to matter.

It is easy to dwell on the stunning setpieces that form the structure of OUATITW: the opening time-stands-still train station duel, the sun-bleached, hissing dance of death of the McBain family massacre, the final showdown between Harmonica and Frank,

Tonino Delli Colli's camera starts in medium shot, follows Claudia Cardinale from the train, into the station, and out the other door to lovingly pan across a dreamlike view of the Old West of Sergio Leone's imagination. Travelling boom shots don't get any better.

and, of course, the astonishing extended traveling boom sequence that follows Jill’s arrival at the train station, follows her through the ticket office window, and, to the swelling strains of Morricone’s Jill’s Theme, rises to reveal the dusty town of Sweetwater in a shot that seems, in a few moments, to evoke our entire imagined history of the Old West. Key however, to the impact of these sequences, and of the entire film, is its perfect, historic, and, in at least one case, nearly accidental, casting.

"Jesus Christ, it's Henry Fonda!"

Henry Fonda was unimpressed by the early, hastily produced English version of Donati’s screenplay (later beautifully translated for the screen by expatriate actor Mickey Knox) and had turned down the role of Frank; old pal Eli Wallach, who had been equally skeptical about accepting his career-defining role in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, persuaded Fonda to sample Leone’s work in the director’s company. After a day-long screening of the entire ‘Dollars’ trilogy, Fonda reportedly emerged from the dark and said ”Where’s the contract?” Still, after several weeks of out-of-sequence filming Fonda didn’t yet have a clear notion of Leone’s intentions, until the time came to shoot the massacre, which culminates in Frank gunning down a small child in cold blood. Fonda later described what he knew the audience’s reaction would be: “Jesus Christ, it’s Henry Fonda!” Playing utterly against type, Fonda’s Frank is no stock villain; moody, brilliant and sensual, Frank understands that his gunfighter world is disappearing, and that business will soon become the new tool of the criminal, but in the end, after usurping the power of the dying Morton, Frank also understands that he’s not Morton at all, and rides off to his final meeting with Harmonica with the doomed dignity of the villain in a Greek tragedy.

Charles Bronson's Harmonica, and the late great Moebius' loving tribute, the iconic French comic strip Blueberry.

As the laconic gunfighter with a past, Charles Bronson created an archetype that populated countless westerns to come, and was immortalized in the classic French comic Blueberry by Jean (Moebius) Giraud; but the role was first offered to, or considered for, Clint Eastwood, James Coburn, Terence Stamp, and incredibly, Warren Beatty and Rock Hudson (!) before Leone finally offered it to Bronson; who made it very much his own, and created his own iconic screen persona in the process. 

Jason Robards as the roguish and romantic Cheyenne, Jill's Guardian Angel...

Jason Robards was considered by the producers to be both too unreliable, and too much a stage actor for the part of Cheyenne, yet his roguish bandit who “ain’t the mean bastard people make me out to be” is the heart of OUATITW’s rich, and un-cloying sentimentality, playing off the stoic Harmonica with an eye-twinkling humor that suffuses the film’s leisurely, and often very funny, middle sequence on Morton’s train. 

Gabriele Ferzetti as Morton, the dying tycoon, who, succumbing in a losing battle for control with his vicious minion Frank (Henry Fonda), his lust for wealth and power now forgotten, only longs to reach the sea with his train before he dies...

As Morton, the doomed industrialist who dreams of reaching the sea with his railroad line, Gabriele Ferzetti (L’Avventura) is so convincing in conveying the dying tycoon’s agonizing realization of his dream’s swift disintegration, that, despite his many misdeeds, we are moved to pity as he crawls out into the desert to die, thinking, in his delirium, that a puddle of water from the steam engine is his longed-for Pacific Ocean.

Claudia Cardinale as Jill. The author rests his case...

And as Jill, Claudia Cardinale (along with being, in that moment, quite possibly the most beautiful human being ever to grace the screen) delivers Jill’s difficult mixture of innocence, cynicism, and self-preservation with an intelligent, poignant believability that never descends into hooker-with-a heart-of-gold territory.

Nothing matters now… Not the land, not the money, not the woman…I came here to see you...
In a classic duel that traces its roots back to ancient Greece, Harmonica and Franks meet for the last time...

While it is at once a film which can be read as cowboy fairy tale or epic historical drama, knowing parody or as the ultimate film buff’s spot-the-reference trivia game, in the end, One Upon a Time in the West is beyond categorization; it exists in its own rarified atmosphere, a dreamlike fantasy wrought with unparalleled craftsmanship whose reputation, as the years pass, only grows with each new generation of viewers. There, is, literally, no other film like it.

The author wishes to express his appreciation for, and highest recommendation of, Christopher Frayling’s monumental Leone biography “Something To Do With Death”, whose extraordinary insights and biographical information were so helpful in writing
this article.


 

Jules et Jim • 1962  
Directed by Francois Truffaut

“I begin a film believing it will be amusing -- and along the way I notice that only sadness can save it.”
– Francois Truffaut

“Jules and Jim talked, and listened to each other.. they accepted their differences with tenderness..they enjoyed little things together... People called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza”

Francois Truffaut, one of the original surfers of the French 'New Wave', followed his hit biopic The Four Hundred Blows, the screenplay for Godard’s seminal Breathless, and his own gritty noir Shoot the Piano Player with his acknowledged masterpiece: a giddily romantic paean to friendship and idealized romantic love, the irresistible Jules and Jim, a film which, serendipitously, also became a

Henri Serre, Oskar Werner and Jeanne Moreau as the doomed threesome of Francois Truffaut's masterpiece Jules and Jim

prescient and timely depiction of the collision between youthful idealism and the demands and realities of growing up; delighting baby boomers at the dawning of the counterculture revolution with its loving embrace of personal, artistic and sexual freedom, and, as the decade progressed, resonating deeply with a generation rapidly realizing that freedom for its own sake could be very costly, and that maintaining and practicing youthful ideals into adulthood was a difficult and risky business

Jeanne Moreau gives new meaning to mercurial, flighty and moody as Catherine, the irresistibly effed-up love object of
best friends Jules and Jim...

“You told me ‘I love you’ / I told you ‘Wait’ / I almost said ‘Yes’ / You said ‘Go”….

Jules and Jim begins with these clipped, breathless words, spoken by Jeanne Moreau, and they neatly and wistfully summarize the heady swirl of anticipation, happiness and dashed hopes that will  follow. It tells the story of two men, both writers: Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) who meet as friendly strangers in the Bohemian world of artists, anarchists and free-thinkers of 1912 Paris, and form a friendship that survives World War I, professional competition, separation, and most heartbreakingly of all, their mutual passion for the mercurial, flighty, and irresistible Catherine, played to fascinating, charismatic perfection by the incomparable Jeanne Moreau. Intrigued by a bust of a woman they encounter in a seaside

The likeness of ideal beauty that entrances Jules and Jim, and sets up the fatal entanglement to come...

art gallery, Jules and Jim fall in love with its enigmatic smile and promise of love and mystery. Soon after, they meet that smile in the person of Catherine, and embark on a decades long, ever-shifting ménage à trois that progresses from a joyfully innocent mutual friendship, to an affair between Jules and Catherine, to an all-too briefly idyllic post war marriage between Jules and Catherine, to Jules’ ill-fated attempt to satisfy the ever restless Catherine by welcoming Jim into their home as Catherine’s lover. A series of passionate affairs, flirtations, betrayals and unfulfilled expectations propel the film to its still shocking conclusion, as Jules and Jim, whose friendship never wavers, try to navigate the increasingly troubled waters of Catherine’s disintegrating stability.

The giddy happiness of youth, perfectly captured in this iconic still from Jules and Jim.

Just as Michel Subor’s deceptively flat and concise narration conveys a wealth of information in a few beautifully chosen words (Truffaut and Jean Gruault adapted their wise, witty, razor-sharp screen play from an autobiographical novel written in old age by famed journalist and art collector Henri–Pierre Roché), so Truffaut constructs the film itself, taking us through a twenty-year narrative in a breathless succession of profound and telling vignettes. Each of these trenchant scenes, hugely enjoyable in itself, often (especially in the film’s first half) laughter-filled and full of youthful abandon and promise, seems nonetheless to contain a subtle and melancholy gesture or event that presages the tragedy to come: the gentle rainfall that ends the trio’s last truly innocent time together (in a seaside villa) and chases them back to Paris; the fire that almost consumes Catherine as she blithely burns old love letters before moving in with Jules;

Jeanne Moreau, poised to take a foreshadowing leap into the Seine...

Catherine’s sudden, foreboding leap into the Seine after the trio see A Doll’s House that seems to confirm Jim’s assessment that Catherine is ‘a woman with vision, and will never be happy on this earth’. This foreshadowing is particularly remarkable in the subtle touch of the first of George Delerue’s countless great scores: listen to the eerie threatening chords, barely audible, as we see Catherine for the first time, one of many contrapuntal touches that fill Truffaut’s little symphony of emotions. Truffaut is also aided in no small measure by three superb performances. Oskar Werner, as the brilliant, childlike Jules, became a star in Jules and Jim; and enjoyed a lengthy and distinguished career playing a variety of characters who all

The late, great Oskar Werner shares a moment of fleeting marital bliss with Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim...

share a common thread of uncommon decency;  Jeanne Moreau, fresh on the heels of her star-making turn in Roger Vadim’s Liasons Dangereuses, cemented her International reputation with her portrayal of a woman whose admirable independence and fearless self-exploration mask an all consuming and self annihilating inner terror. (Worldwide, countless romantic young men, including your writer, left the cinema more than willing to endure heartache and suffering if it meant being loved by such a ravishing
and exotic creature.) 

Passion proves to be irresistable but unsustainable as Jim and Catherine play out their affair in the shadow of Jules' sorrow...

Henri Serre, whose Jim lacks the demonstrative flamboyance of his Menàge-mates, is often neglected in appreciations of Jules and Jim, but his quintessentially French diffidence and cool hide a core of quiet passion, slow to ignite and hard to put out, and his performance is the emotional and narrative center of gravity of the film.

While typically New Wave in its nervy disdain for traditional propriety of narrative and pacing, Jules and Jim is never lightweight or self-indulgent, and Truffaut’s ability to imbue his gayest moments with washes of quiet melancholy and his saddest passages  with equal measures of barely contained effervescent joy and humour are the emotional underpinning and sustenance of this unusually sentimental and vulnerable example of Nouvelle Vague. What Jules and Jim does share with its New Wave compatriots is its unabashed and unfettered delight in the act of filmmaking itself, but even here, Truffaut excels and surpasses. With all its use of antique film clips, bits and pieces of other art forms, odd framing and wipes, abruptly ending scenes and sudden shifts of mood and tone, Jules and Jim never intrudes on its viewers with its devices, and shows none of the subversive self-consciousness of say, Godard in his more self-referential moments; while it may be fun to pick apart stylistically from a distance of 35 years, upon first viewing, Jules and Jim never seems less than a seamless and entrancing whole.

Against the backdrop of Truffaut's beautifully rendered pre-war Paris,  Jules and Catherine announce their impending marriage.

With its passionate embrace of the pleasures of creativity, daring exploration of unconventional relationships, rejection of political and social norms and irrepressibly freewheeling spirit, it is no wonder that Jules and Jim struck a chord with a youthful pre-Woodstock audience; its vibrant portrait of European youth entering a new century, and their questioning, irreverent explorations of art, philosophy and life itself in a world of seemingly limitless possibilities, spoke eloquently to a generation who assumed that they had invented the concept of restless, unfettered youth, free of hypocrisy and social convention. What is remarkable is the way Jules and Jim’s story arc so eerily and accurately reflects the breaking apart and dissolution of those ideals: Truffaut, in 1962 (three years before the ‘Summer of Love’ and seven before Altamont) could have scarcely anticipated the direction the decade would take, and yet, as the 60’s took on an increasingly somber and reflective tone, Jules and Jim became more meaningful than ever to its audience. In its early passages, the controlled anarchy of Raoul Coutard’s airy, spontaneous black and white cinematography, the exhilarating music of Georges Delerue and Boris Bassiak, (whose song Le Tourbillion, sung late in the film by Bassiak and Moreau, embodied, for many fans, the mood and meaning of Jules and Jim), and the electric chemistry between Werner, Serre and Moreau, all recall the adventurous

Boris Bassiak and George Delerue's Le Tourbillion, sung by Catherine, and accompanied by her occasional sneak-away squeeze Albert (Bassiak) became a hit, and is firmly planted in the hearts of Jules and Jim's world-wide legion of fans...

high spirits of many of the era’s ‘youth movies’: the film’s interludes of the happy trio at play (the soaring aerial shots of their countryside escapades and the handheld camera that follows them at play in the Paris streets, with Catherine in male drag) are echoed in as disparate places as the boisterous energy of Richard Lester’s gloriously Black-and-White A Hard Day’s Night and the playful camaraderie of the protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde. Just as Jules and Catherine are married WWI breaks out, and the advent of the war brings to Jules, Jim and Catherine an enforced confrontation with adulthood, just as the Vietnam war wrenched its carefree generation into an increasingly traumatic reality from which its ideals would not emerge unscathed. And, as Catherine careens dangerously between her desire to be an unfettered free-spirit (she admires Ibsen’s Nora for “inventing her own life moment to moment”) and her very human longing for permanence, lasting love and fulfillment, she mirrors the doubts and conflicts that were soon to settle over Jules and Jim’s adoring baby boomer audience.

Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim is one of the most earnest and poignant portraits of youthful exploration, audacious exuberance and total surrender to love in film history; unselfconsciously brimming over with both the joy of love, and the New Wave’s love of the joy of filmmaking, and continues to enchant new audiences with its achingly bittersweet beauty and fizzy, buoyant celebration of the process, no matter how perilous, of loving, creating, and of living life, ‘at full tilt’.

Marie Dubois has only one major scene in Jules and Jim, but it's unforgettable... The famous and oft-parodied 'Steam Engine'...

Conan The Barbarian • 1982  

Directed by John Milius

“I’m a Zen Fascist” John Milius once and famously remarked, and while his tongue was, no doubt, firmly planted in cheek, in its own crude way, that description goes a long way in explaining the unique appeal of this very talented and likable rogue artist. While it may take courage to be left of center in the country at large, in Hollywood, the conservative is the true maverick, and while he has enjoyed much success, as a director and screenwriter, Milius, has, in the difficulties he has encountered over the years in getting many dream projects off the ground, paid a price for his cheerful unwillingness to toe a politically correct line for Tinseltown convenience. Still, it is a big mistake to paint Milius with the broad brush of, say, the political simple-mindedness of a John Wayne or a Jack Webb, for, from the start of his career, his projects have evidenced a complexity and thoughtfulness that make such easy classification impossible. Milius’ work embraces the reality that men and women are different, and that courage and

John Milius directs Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of Conan

violence are sometimes unavoidable and necessary, in a way that does, and should, make knee-jerk liberals uncomfortable, but his work also betrays a tenderness and respect for women, and a keen sense of the limits of the macho ideal that give lie to the stereotype that generally accompanies any discussion of his oeuvre.



Milius’ first successes as a screenwriter were the harrowing western drama Jeremiah Johnson starring lefty icon Robert Redford, and his epic screenplay for Apocalypse Now, and, though Apocalypse celebrates, in a very dark and unglamourous way, the macho themes of wartime bonding and the tribal nature of the male spirit, he is unabashedly critical of the absurd, wasteful chaos and futility of the Vietnamese war, and paints a vivid and unsparing picture of the horror and madness that result from macho ad absurdium in the character of the brilliant but demented Colonel Kurtz. In Magnum Force (script by Milius) a right wing Police death squad is stunned to discover that rule-bending “Dirty Harry” Callahan, whom they expect to enthusiastically join them, is repulsed by their vigilante vendetta against the “scum” who have escaped “liberal” justice. Even at his most chauvinistic, in 1984’s Red Dawn, in which a brave group of American teenagers spearhead a guerilla revolt against a Commie invasion of the American Homeland, Milus leavens the flag-waving with a bitter and unsettling portrait of the devastating and corrosive effects of war and violence on his band of young patriots.

   Arnold Schwarzenegger as the definitive Sword-and-Sandal Barbarian...

It is, however, in his two best, and most successful films, The Wind and the Lion and Conan the Barbarian, that the depth, flexibility and unexpected warmth of Milius’ approach is most fully realized. In The Wind and the Lion, Milius’ second film as a director (after the violent and colourful Dillinger), though Candace Bergen’s abducted gentlewoman hostage may ultimately succumb to the manly and forceful charms of Sean Connery (surprise!) she is an independent, plainspoken and feisty character, who gives her Arab chieftain hubby a run for his money, and Lion becomes as much an affectionate sendup of the macho ideal as a defense of it; and, in Conan the Barbarian, one of the best adventure movies of all time, Milius’ penchant for delivering the unexpected is in full force.

   Conan's gorgeous production design, courtesy of the fertile imagination of the late, great Ron Cobb

In a stroke of perfect symmetry, producer Rafaella Di Laurentiis, who has a habit of filling her high quality fantasy films (Dune, Dragonheart, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), with superior casts, lavish production values and crackling, witty dialogue, chose Milius’ left wing counterpart Oliver Stone to co-write Conan with Milius, a choice which perfectly mirrors and expresses the tension between pragmatism and idealism in Milius’ complex world view. Based on pulp fantasist Robert E. Howard’s epic 30’s adventure series Conan the Cimmerian, Conan is richly imagined and beautifully realized; directed by Milius with a sensual physicality and a deft and energetic touch perfectly suited for telling the story of Conan, the noble warrior savage (played by a pre-Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger with a surprising combination of brooding virility and a lovable, almost goofy vulnerability). 

   Clinging to his still-standing but very dead Mother;s hand, young Conan develops a life long obsession for...

,,, the demise of one of the great screen villains, Thulsa Doom, beautifully underplayed by James Earl Jones.

After the massacre of his village and the murder of his parents by the charismatic and vicious cult leader Thulsa Doom, Conan is sold into slavery. As a gladiator, he finds meaning and worth in his prized ability to slaughter all comers, wins his freedom, and embarks on an epic quest to avenge his mother’s murder, and destroy his surpassingly evil nemesis, finding friendship, even love, along the way. Freed, as was Howard, by the imaginary time period and setting, Milius and production designer Ron Cobb (Alien) create a Hyborian age that is detailed, stunning and completely believable, and with cinematographer Duke Callaghan they deliver a number of lasting and haunting images: the work wheel in the middle of the desert to which Conan the child is chained for the first 10 years of his life; the “Tree of Woe” on which Conan is crucified by Thulsa Doom, and Valeria’s funeral pyre flickering in the darkness.

   As a young Conan hears the ominous sound of thundering horses coming over the rise, Thulsa Doom's horde makes one of the great screen entrances ever...

From its stunning opening sequence, as Doom’s entwined snake standard appears over the rise of a hill, followed by his merciless advancing horde (accompanied by Basil Poulidouris’ rich, throbbing tapestry of a score), Milius’ Conan strikes just the right balance; with enough violence, gore, and sex to be true to Howard’s “Weird Tales” original while maintaining a good-natured fairy-tale quality that elevates Conan to a level of storytelling that achieves a genuinely mythical quality, and adds a welcome emotional warmth to Conan’s brutal coming-of-age saga. The murder of Conan’s mother, for example, which could have been played for gross-out shock, is, instead, a subtle and emotionally affecting moment, as the camera lingers on the young boy’s stunned face, giving Conan’s revenge quest plot a real resonance and power not found in the average sword and sorcery potboiler. But nowhere is Milius’ exceptional A-movie approach to B-movie material more evident than in the central love story between Conan and his beloved, the master thief Valeria, which occupies the central third of the film. From their first meeting in Dooms ‘Tower of Evil’ (another Ron Cobb set which is both physically beautiful and reeking with palpable evil and corruption) Milius’ attentive direction of his actors and the simple but eloquent dialogue convey an affecting and believable love story quite removed from the plot-servicing, heaving-bosom-propelled ‘love story’ common to most sword-and-sandal epics.  

One of the many things that distinguishes Conan from run-of-the-mill adventure epics is a believable and touching love story, played with real chemistry by Schwarzenegger and the sadly unappreciated Sandahl Bergman.

As played by first-time actress Sandahl Bergman (the Broadway dancer had made an impressive debut two years before in the sizzling Airotica  number in All That Jazz), Valeria is another one of Milius’ very feminine, but equally strong, female heroines, and Bergman’s unaffected, heartfelt performance (do you want to live forever?) gives weight and substance to the tragic outcome that awaits them in the film’s operatic climax. While Bergman continued to work steadily as a dancer, and as a character actress in B movies and television (and is a charming presence in the making-of documentary Conan Unchained) we are left to wonder why this very engaging and attractive performer was not able to parlay this early starring role into a larger presence in Hollywood.

It is hard not to wonder if Milius was inspired by George Lucas’ use of  the great James Earl Jones as the Freudian/Oedipal villain of Star Wars, as Jones’ beautifully underplayed, hissing Thulsa Doom, trying to escape death, tells Conan in an oily whisper: “I am the wellspring from which you flow… What will you be when I am gone… my son?” His performance is, in any case, perfection. With the tiniest of expressions and the subtlest of body movements, Jones creates one of the most truly evil villains in screen history; his casual dispensing of death (check out his expression as he decides whether of not to kill Conan’s mother) and the almost fatherly way he sends his followers to their doom, make his villainy all the more sinister for its subtlety. 

   I am your Father, Luke... Errr, I mean Conan...

The other great performance in Conan is that of Max Von Sydow, another of those Euro actors who will appear in almost anything when the condo payment is due, but who never gives less than a great performance in the process. As King Osric, the aging and weary monarch (who sends Conan and Valeria on their fateful mission to rescue his brainwashed daughter (who has joined Doom’s cult, and is “about to be his…”), von Sydow conveys, in a single memorable scene, an important shared thread in the work of both Milius and Robert Howard: 

   Max Von Sydow brings the world-weary gravitas to Conan, as KIng Osric, father to a wayward princess in peril...

That while honor, valor and great deeds are all worthwhile, they all ultimately fade away.  “There comes a time” sighs Osric, “when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father’s love for his child…” Both Howard and Milius share an open admiration for the courage and professionalism of military men, while remaining deeply skeptical of the lasting results of conflict and war; and this doubt brings a melancholy undercurrent to what might have otherwise remained an essentially lighthearted fantasy.

John Milius has never made a project that did not incorporate some of his contrarian world view, and Conan is no exception. In Thulsa Doom’s ‘Snake Cult of Set,’ Milius is clearly sending up all cults and ‘movements with easy answers’ in general, and the hippie culture of the sixties in particular. As Conan playfully comes on to an effeminate high priest of the cult (played with relish in a delicious cameo by EuroTrash/Jess Franco icon Jack Taylor) in order to steal his robes as a disguise, he drapes flowers around his neck and pretends to be seeking to “reach emptiness.” 

Jess Franco Company Player Jack Taylor (inadvisedly) tries to put the moves on temporary Flower Child Conan...

Mocking as this sequence is, when Conan triumphantly hurls Thulsa Doom’s head down the stairs of his temple, Milius has his followers, one by one, sadly throw their candles into the water and file away to Poulidouris’ mournful choral chant, in what might as well be an elegy for the dead counterculture, and it is clear that Milius has a soft spot for those who seek, however foolishly, a higher meaning.

Two examples of the extraordinary visual beauty of Conan... The Tree of Woe, (Mel Gibson was green with envy) and, below..

It is hard to overstate how much better Conan the Barbarian is than any of its immediate competitors in the genre; one only has to watch Richard Fleischer’s pallid and silly follow-up Conan The Destroyer, to see the difference between the labour of love of a visionary director and the hack work of a slumming bigshot looking down his nose at his material. Conan is a robust and exhilarating epic that manages to imbue its melodrama and high adventure with some real ideas and philosophy, while never for a moment slowing down or distracting from the storytelling. Milius created in Conan the Barbarian, a colourful, riveting and often surprisingly thoughtful fantasy for wide-eyed young men (and women) of all ages, and a lasting contribution to fantasy cinema whose sense of awe and wonder continue, 30-odd years later, to enthrall us.

...and this... Courtesy of Cinematographer extraordinaire Duke Callaghan ~