The film based on the exploits of writer Robert E. Howard was released on March 31, 1982
Double recurrence. If Conan the Cimmerian of the Hyborian era, a character created by the writer Robert E. Howard in 1932 on the pages of the pulp magazine Weird Tales and then risen to global popularity thanks to the Marvel comics by Roy Thomas (texts) and Barry Smith (drawings) , is about to turn ninety, the first film taken from its long cycle of companies celebrates forty. The March 31, 1982 in fact, “Conan the barbarian” is released in Italian cinemas (just a few days after its debut in the USA).
It is the film with which Arnold Schwarzeneggeralready a legend of bodybuilding
“Decides” to become a star beuntil officially already a millionaire (moving from his native Austria to the United States he had already successfully invested his assets in real estate) and the one with which John Milius, former screenwriter of money (Red crow you will not have my scalp, The man with seven halters , A 44 Magnum for Inspector Callaghan and a little thing like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now), for the first time managed an exorbitant budget compared to its standards (20 million dollars at the time, leavened after producer Edward Pressman sold the project to Dino De Laurentiis) to build a world that extends and exalts in a unicum all the elements already wisely sampled in his (few) previous works as a director.
Se by Dillinger (1973) retains the mythicizing fascination for the philosophy of a character above and outside the laws, in The Wind and the Lion (1975) he recovers the pride of a protagonist who fights an enemy greater than himself in the name of the freedom of his people; while in the epochal Un Wednesday from the Lions (1978), only apparently more “distant”, he takes up and pantographs an idea of epic spectacle drowned in the most poignant melancholy. The epic, moreover, is precisely the (discussed) figure of all the cinema of Milius, an author often (and perhaps still) disliked by the greatest (and worst) militant criticism for his alleged reactionary philosophy. Of course, the quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche with which Conan the barbarian opens programmatically (“What does not kill us makes us stronger”) seems to have been placed there on purpose to give credence to this theory; and the transformation of the character into an even more rigidly superhomistic figure than the literary one too. If we then add to the whole the signature as co-writer of Oliver Stone (another of the great and controversial “ideological” protagonists of a cinema that no longer exists), who seems to have conceived the script at the “trip” level under the effect of alcohol and hard drugs, the picture is completed.
Still, Milius’s vision of the Hyborian era (a fictitious age created by the writer Howard and conceived as a precedent to every form of civilization, as if to make it a melting pot -mithological and religious- of all subsequent ones), even before being a terrain of political or philosophical metaphor, it is basically a clean slate with to rethink Cinema as a machine of emotional construction, with staging structures that have their roots in the beginnings of the Seventh Art. And Conan the barbarian is (also) a form (perverse?) Of a Bildungsroman, where the hero has nothing but his limited and violent perception of the dynamics of the world and the confrontation with a superstitious idea of Faith where his has nothing benign to build an identity; or the “origin story” of a superhero so ante litteram as to transcend History itself and who, having no real “power”, cannot develop any sense of “responsibility”.
The subject of the film is the simplest in the world. Educated in the myth of strength and the veneration of the “deaf” god Crom, the young Conan is deprived of his dearest affections after a raid of marauders led by the ruthless Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) attacks his village, killing his father, beheading him underneath. his eyes the mother and reducing him to the helpless child servant of a slaver. After years of yoke, he frees himself from this condition; to become first a clandestine game fighter forced to kill for the sordid entertainment of others, then a thief (in the company of the faithful Subotai [Gerry Lopez] and Valeria [Sandahl Bergman]) and then a mercenary warrior who is hired by a king (Max von Sydow) to save his daughter (Valerie Quennessen) from the clutches of the leader of an orgiastic sect who sacrifices innocents to a serpent god who is none other than Thulsa Doom himself . That is the object of a desire for revenge that has never subsided, but also (as in the best tradition of the relationship between the hero and his nemesis) the one who in a laterally “paternal” measure is directly responsible for what the adult Conan he has always become the ghost of it.
The film is introduced and punctuated by a hieratic narrating voice (that of the magician played by the legendary Japanese-born actor Mako), but Schwarzenegger pronounces his first line (and one of the first in the film) after about half an hour; and after an almost silent incipit (inspired by Milius himself to Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevskij) where the omnipresent and phenomenal soundtrack of Basil Poledouris (made up of full Wagnerian Gothic orchestral and memories of Gregorian chants and dodecaphonic excesses) is contrasted only by sounds guttural, clangs, creaks, pops and moans, the film is unleashed among unthinkable rhythms for a “commercial” blockbuster, horror moments cloaked in a “black” eroticism (like intercourse with the seer witch), episodes of connection almost useless and perhaps deliberately modulated to further slow down its pace and defer the explosion of the unforgettable “symphonic” redde rationem in the temple, marked by silence and fire.
The images in the film are the film itself, and they live independently of their narrative or dynamic need. If at times they pulsate with impossible tricks (such as the triple fade to the wheel of torture that transforms the young Conan into Arnold Schwarzenegger with an elliptical intuition of applause), more often they turn out to be “simple” and dictated by the need to please a mainstream audience ( like the meta-crucifixion of the barbarian who bites the vulture that is about to eat under the blazing sun); and above all (sets, costumes, special effects) stands out after four decades above all the exaltation of an ethics (and epic) of the now obsolete “work of the cinema”. Of that cinema, in particular, from which the digital had not yet completely removed the fascination of the perception of the human contribution of construction perceptible in filigree behind and within the images themselves.
March 31, 2022 (change March 31, 2022 | 12:22)
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