John Milius treats a pulp barbarian with total seriousness, and for long stretches it pays off, carried by Basil Poledouris’s thunderous score. The middle sags, the snake is rubber and the lead cannot yet act, but it has a weight its imitators never found.
John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian takes Robert E. Howard’s pulp swordsman and treats him as if he had come out of scripture. The script, by Milius and Oliver Stone, has no small talk in it; people speak in pronouncements or not at all, and for long stretches nobody speaks. It is slow, it is humourless, and its star cannot yet act. It is also, at its best, stirring in a way few films of its kind have managed, and if the genre is yours it is worth the evening. It is 130 minutes long and certified 15.
It opens with a sword being made. Conan’s Father (William Smith) hammers a blade in the snow and tells his small son that steel is the one thing he can trust, and Basil Poledouris’s score comes in under him, drums, brass and a male chorus, as if the forging were a coronation. Then riders led by Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) burn the village, and the boy is chained to a great wooden wheel and left to push it for years. The cut from the child at the wheel to Arnold Schwarzenegger at the wheel is the film’s first joke and its first act of faith, and it got us: we laughed, and then the chorus came back and we found we had stopped. Poledouris wrote something close to a continuous score, and it carries every scene the dialogue cannot.
Schwarzenegger in 1982 is not an actor. He is a shape, and Milius films him as one, against skylines, hauling chains, on thrones. Given a line he reads it off the back wall; given a task he is entirely convincing, and the film sensibly gives him many more tasks than lines. Jones goes the other way. His Thulsa Doom hardly raises his voice, talks about flesh and steel in a tone of grave reasonableness, and is more frightening for it. Sandahl Bergman’s Valeria, a thief Conan meets on a rooftop in Zamora, moves better than anyone else here, and her scenes with Schwarzenegger are the only ones in which he looks like a man rather than a monument. Gerry Lopez’s Subotai supplies the few grins. Max von Sydow’s King Osric has one scene, mourning a daughter who has gone over to Doom’s cult, and it is the best-acted five minutes in the film.
Duke Callaghan shoots wide and still: plains, snowfields, a low horizon and small people against it, and indoors he lights by torch, so that faces come and go in the dark. Ron Cobb’s sets do as much as the music. The Tower of the Serpent is a black cylinder with a pit at its foot; Doom’s mountain temple is terraced in white and gold and looks like a holiday resort run by a death cult, which is about right. John Bloomfield puts Doom’s lieutenants in helmets crested with snakes and horns, and Conan in furs or nothing much. Carroll Timothy O’Meara cuts to the music rather than against it, holding shots long and letting scenes end some time after they have finished, and that is where the trouble starts.
The middle hour is slow in a way that is not always on purpose. Once Osric sends the thieves after his daughter (Valérie Quennessen), the film spends a long time crossing country, climbing a mountain and watching white-robed followers file about, and somewhere on that mountain we were bored, properly and restlessly. Milius does not do jokes, and a film this solemn needs one now and then to let the air out. The giant snake in the tower is a rubber tube with a face, and the camera stays on it long enough to make sure. The ideas the film is proudest of, about steel and flesh and what a man should trust, are said three or four times, and saying them is as far as it gets.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and it is where the film finds its grief and earns its finish. Set against the sword-and-sorcery films that followed it through the 1980s, most of them cheap and jokey, this looks like the real thing: a film that believes in its barbarian and lets the orchestra do the believing where its star cannot. Watch it on the largest screen you have, with the sound up. The long silences were written for an orchestra, and at low volume they are only silences.
