Red Sonja (1985)

"Falkon, may I give you a word of advice? Put him over your knee and beat some manners into him!"

I was expecting to enjoy this film no matter what; I'm rather fond of a bit of sword and sorcery hokum, as regular readers will have noticed. I was expecting something rather similar to Conan the Barbarian, except perhaps with more lines for Arnold Schwarzenegger, this having been made after The Terminator. Instead, I found a film which was really rather brilliant.

I love Conan, but it's a cheesy film. This isn't, deep down. The script (co-written by George MacDonald Fraser of Flashman fame, no less) is much more coherent and clever, and uses the tropes of the genre in ways which are quite witty. Yes, the performances are not exactly the sort of thing you'd see at the RSC, but they're what the film needs. None of the characterisations are particularly deep, but they don't need to be.

I don't know much of the original Red Sonja, but she seems to have been a comic book creation of Roy Thomas and Barry-Windsor Smith, loosely based on a similarly named character in a short story by Robert E. Howard, who is credited here. That's interesting; I'm well aware of Roy Thomas through his many runs on many titles for Marvel, and he's always struck me as a good writer, occasionally a very good one, but essentially a writer of high quality fan fiction who prefers to play with other people's worlds and characters rather than create his own. I have no idea whatsoever if any of that applies here; the few Conan short stories by Howard that I've recently started reading are not really reflected by the 1982 film, but it works, I think, as an example of its genre. I'm going to treat this film the same, as an example of 1980s sword and sorcery cinema, without attempting to judge it in relation to the source material.

There's only one moment during the film that I found unintentionally amusing; the bridge of bones. The impressive matte painting in long shot becomes a rather less impressive model in medium shot. But I'm being picky, really. Yes, you can see the joins a bit, but it works, I think, in the terms of its time. And the visuals are often fantastic- I particularly like Tutte Lemkow's wizard with his colourful potions and psychedelic scrying thing. Magic gets presented as something really quite druggy, which works nicely. The fights are all very well choreographed, too. And I really liked the beheadings.

Brigitte Nielson gives a performance which is really rather functional (in fact, Arnie out-acts her, which is saying something!) but she's as good as she needs to be, playing a character who wants to save the world and seek revenge against the dastardly Queen Gedren, who murdered her entire family after Sonja spurned her Sapphic advances. I suppose one might raise an eyebrow at the fact that the baddie is not only gay but that the whole vendetta essentially starts with a bit of Sapphism, but I think that would be a little harsh. After all, Gedren is as camp as a row of tents.

We first meet Sonja being trained as a warrior so she can seek revenge, an obvious parallel with Conan. It's interesting, and ambiguous, how she rejects the advances of men, and seems rather wary of them, swearing only to love a man if he can vanquish her in combat. There's all sort of stuff going on here, if you happen to be both dirty-minded and pretentious like myself. After all, a sword is a phallic symbol, so Sonja has trained herself to gain total mastery over a symbolic penis. Perhaps this indicates a simple desire to be in control. Perhaps it indicates a fear of the penis, and a desire to control that fear. Perhaps it indicates both. People are complicated.

Similarly, Sonja is a fiercely independent woman, very resistant to receiving any help from men. As she very clearly insists to Kalidor. Yet on the other hand she will yield to a man who defeats her in combat, which could be interpreted as a desire for a strong man. One could argue that this is rather misogynistic- after all, the script is by men, as they so often are, and one of those men is the author of Flashman. I don't think we can necessarily assume that, though. Sonja is clearly presented as a strong woman, who takes charge of her own destiny and is clearly the central character. (The main McGuffin can only be destroyed by a woman, after all.) It's just that people are complicated, and being strong doesn't necessarily mean being alone and sexless.

Anyway, I love the swordfight between Sonja and Kalidor, which continues until they're both really exhausted. At first I thought I was watching a metaphor for foreplay, but then, as it went on and on, I realised that it was a metaphor for really, really good sex. With her on top, naturally.

So, getting back to less dirty-minded matters, I liked the film, basically. The film started off threatening to be very silly; what could possibly be more Monty Python than yellow text in a fancy font rolling up the screen to a backdrop of hills? But in the end it was only moderately silly, with a great little comedy double act in the young, arrogant Prince, with his fondness for occasional bullock-kicking, and the humble chubster Falkon. The film has a good script, looks good, and is as well-acted as it needs to be.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

"Conan, what is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"

I'm a bit OCD when it comes to consuming popular culture. If I miss an episode of a television drama, I can't watch the next one until I've seen the one I missed. I can never watch a film from part way through; I absolutely have to see the start. I wasn't always such an extreme case, though, which means that in my late teens I actually did read some of Robert E. Howards's Conan stories. I'm not sure I could do that now, for those very OCD reasons. What order are the books supposed to be in? Does it matter? Does the stuff written by L. Sprague De Camp count as "canonical"? Is there some sort of overlap with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft whose stories, I believe, were published by the same pulp magazine? Also, incidentally, why are there so very few films based on Lovecraft's stories?

I remember enjoying what I read, but very little about it because, I suspect, it was extremely disjointed. I liked the book covers, though; that I do remember. And this film faithfully recreates that aesthetic of scantily clad, sexy individuals of both sexes, sorcerers in horned headgear, loads of snakes, and really cool armour with even cooler helmets. It's a shame about all the mullets (not Arnie, fortunately), but I believe they were still legal in the early '80s. Still, the whole look of the film is bloody good. I'm now rather interested in reading about this whole world, and when I've finished this article I'll be off for a spot of Wikipeding.

But… it's really rather easy to pick holes in the whole idea of the Hyborean age, isn't it? This made-up epoch between the fall of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history is pretty much an invitation to look for anachronisms- and here we get concepts such as Valhalla, Vanir and a character called "Thorgrim" with a massive warhammer. The technology level is very much Iron Age or later; the first thing we see is steel being worked, we see corn being ground with a quern early on, and I'm trying to recall if the horses had stirrups. I suppose you can explain some of these things as being lost in some later cataclysm, but it's rather hard to explain the sight of horses being ridden. I believe that horses were fairly light-weight until at least the Iron Age, which is why their use in warfare was pretty much limited to chariots for all but the lightest of uses.

Still, let's not pick holes, fun though it is. A fictional "lost" age is probably the only way you can do this kind of hard-edged, rough and ready sort of sword and sorcery stuff. These characters are neither stupid nor uncultured (they have poetry and philosophy), but there's a roughness to them. Speech is extremely direct. There are absolutely no pleases, thank yous or any other kind of verbal politeness. Characters mean what they say and hat they mean, which doesn't make them in any way shallow, unintelligent or incapable of irony or humour. Their society may be very harsh indeed, but there's an innocent lack of guile to them, and they're perfectly capable of warmth, love and even a kind of articulacy.

Not Arnold Schwarzenegger, though. Of course not. Aside from an ill-advised semi-soliloquy just before the big set-piece fight towards the end he's a man of few words, as befits his command of English at the time. Still, the future Governator was obviously hired for his rippling muscles and required to be more of a presence than an actor, and this is a role he fulfils admirably. And it's quite an achievement to display so much charisma, and to be the undisputed star of the film, while saying so little.

Of course, James Earl Jones is much, much more charismatic, and he does this entirely through actually acting. He has possibly the finest voice in all of cinema; Thulsa Doom is an utterly delicious baddie, but he has pretty much nothing at all in common with Darth Vader in his vocal stylings. He's pretty bad-ass, demanding that his underlings be prepared to face death and "emptiness" on his whim. Presumably this means that they sacrifice themselves for him without question, knowing that their deaths are pointless and they will be utterly forgotten, and in every expectation that there will be no afterlife. Chilling.

The film manages the wonderful feat of playing everything straight while slipping in a bit of metatextual silly subtext on the sly. Conan's crucifixion is such overblown and pretentious Christ symbolism that it can only be intentional. My eyebrow was also raised during the sex scene between Conan and the prophetess. As soon as she reaches orgasm she turns into a horrible screeching demon. Hmm. Perhaps just a slight hint of male fear of female sexuality there then. There are also lots of scenes of semi-naked women chained up and on public display, meaning that I couldn't help thinking about the male gaze and all that. But I think the scene where Conan, as a slave in his cage, is allowed to have sex with (well, rape) a female slave in his cage while others watch pretty much has to be taken as evidence that it's being done knowingly. It's still being done, of course. Doing things ironically doesn't actually stop things being misogynistic.

Oh yes, and then there's the scene with the semi-clad woman jumping into a pit to sacrifice herself to a snake, which one can't help noticing is a somewhat phallic creature. Do you reckon there might be a bit of symbolism there? Of course, the snake turns out to be dead. There might be a bit of symbolism there, too. No wonder Thulsa Doom is so humiliated and angry about this later on. And I can't help noticing that the only characters at whom he aims those snake-arrow things are female. What an amazing coincidence…

It's also rather noticeable that Conan's girlfriend, a rather major character, doesn't even have a name, in marked contrast to Subotai, whom I like a lot. A also like Akiro; he's such a fun character. I love the way he narrates the film and then appears halfway through, too. It's a very well-structured script, co-written, I notice, by none other than Oliver Stone.

I enjoyed this far more than I expected. It may not be very deep but it's solidly written, and a lot more fun than it might appear to be at first glance.