Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

Even though I'm a far-left lefty, I don't really subscribe to the contemporary conventional wisdom that conservatives can't make good or interesting art and entertainment, mostly because crackpot libertarians have been making weird, wild stuff since the dawn of the artform. And as the modern culture wars have shown us, liberals can make some truly abysmal, self-congratulatory garbage that neither moves the needle toward progressive change nor works as a piece of art. Weirdos usually make good, or at least interesting, stuff. Normies usually don't. And weirdos and normies are on every possible side of every possible political, moral, or aesthetic belief.

John Milius is one of those classic libertarian crackpots of the pre-social media age. I find his political beliefs ridiculous and his fixation on macho masculinity silly, but the guy's a madman who has written and/or directed a lot of really interesting stuff. As a screenwriter, he has written, cowritten, or contributed ideas to such films as Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson, John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Ted Post's Magnum Force (cowritten with fellow libertarian crackpot weirdo Michael Cimino), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Steven Spielberg's 1941, Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice and Geronimo: An American Legend, and Phillip Noyce's Clear and Present Danger. He also created and cowrote HBO's Rome series and wrote one of the nuttiest Miami Vice episodes (about a biker gang who follow a Viking code). (Milius' Trump official/right-wing filmmaker daughter claimed on Twitter that Rome was canceled at HBO by a "lib woman" who "hated" Milius. Truth is, it was a male executive who canceled the show due to its exorbitant production costs, but truth never gets in the way of the Republican narrative.) As a writer/director, his masterpiece in my opinion is 1973's Dillinger, with Warren Oates in the title role, and his other directorial credits include The Wind and the Lion, existential surfing movie Big Wednesday (I really need to see this one), Red Dawn, Farewell to the King, and Flight of the Intruder. And, of course, Conan the Barbarian.

Conan is a big, dumb, majestic, ridiculous, violent, weird, macho, and horny fantasy epic of a kind they hadn't made before and sure as hell never made again. It looks great, it's pulpy and trashy but also has a big-budget desert epic sheen, it has loads of intentionally and unintentionally funny moments, and it made Arnold Schwarzenegger a movie star, turning him from a famous bodybuilder who also appeared as a musclehead in the occasional movie or TV episode (he's great in Bob Rafelson's Stay Hungry) into the biggest Hollywood action star for the next dozen years. It also surely would have been sanitized for a PG rating if it had been greenlit even a year later, with the copious sex and nudity removed and the ultra-splattery violence tamed a notch or two. An R-rated fantasy movie was still possible in '82 Hollywood. This was not the case by 1984. (This actually happened to the 1984 sequel, Conan the Destroyer, which had its sex scenes removed and violence trimmed to get that family-friendly PG.)

While the novelty of seeing an R-rated fantasy movie in 2022, when every mainstream Hollywood movie is made for children and/or infantilized adults with baby brains, is pretty satisfying, it was a bitter disappointment for young me. I was five years old in 1982, and I was so incredibly psyched for this movie. Newly literate, I had been devouring comic books, and my Conan comics were at the top of my favorites list, along with Mad, Cracked, and Crazy, and the horror anthology comics I picked up at supermarkets and garage sales. I even had a child-friendly comic book version of the movie (currently selling for nine bucks on eBay). I was beyond ready for Conan the Barbarian, and the trailers frequently aired on TV were amping me up to dangerously Conan-crazed levels until the day I finally paid attention to the rating. Rated R? Noooooooooo! How could Crom do this to me?

To make matters worse, a year or two later, we got one of those free weeks of HBO that cable packages used to do once or twice a year to entice people to subscribe. Guess what was showing that week? Yep, Conan. And my parents watched it. With one of my uncles. And they wouldn't let me watch it. This is some fucking bullshit, man! My mom gave me a rundown of what happened the next day, but my yearning for Conan continued. When a heavily edited version finally started appearing on channels like TBS, I was old enough to be mildly interested but also old enough to be disappointed by the lack of boobs and gore. It ran frequently in those days, and I have somehow seen every scene from Conan in both censored and uncensored versions on numerous occasions without ever seeing the entire film in one shot, until last night. I even watched the Schwarzenegger/Milius DVD commentary with my brother one Christmas when we were in our late twenties, which is as intentionally and unintentionally hilarious as Conan itself. (Sample dialogue: Milius: "Hi, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger." Schwarzenegger: "Hi, I'm John Milius. And if you believe that, you will also believe that there are a lot of Richard Simmons Juniors running around.")

Despite all my talk about the R rating and movies for adults, Conan the Barbarian plays like the fever dream of a 1980s American boy hopped up on comics and movies and TV. You've got sword fights and thunderdome-style battles to the death and demons and giant snakes and regular-sized snakes and dudes turning into snakes and skeletons and evil cults and horseback riding and jokes and gags and bows and arrows and sprays of blood and beheadings and a green stew with body parts in it and maniacal laughter and an evil villain and a wizard and a new location for almost every scene and a naked lady every 10 minutes. This is the kind of shit that would have made five-year-old me's head explode. It's big, loud, stupid fun, and somehow Milius' libertarian fantasies and macho posturing only make it bigger, louder, stupider, and more fun. This is by far the most entertaining movie Oliver Stone has been a part of (well, he also wrote De Palma's Scarface, but it's at least a tie).

Yes, that Oliver Stone. I am far from a Stone fan, but it's pretty amusing to think of the liberal Stone and the conservative Milius teaming up for a Conan movie. Except they didn't really team up. Stone was hired to write the screenplay before Milius got on board, and he was even being considered as director, despite having only directed two horror movies that were pretty big flops (Seizure and The Hand). His screenwriting career, on the other hand, was pretty hot, with his script for Midnight Express winning an Oscar. Stone's own directing career wouldn't take off until 1986, when he made both Salvador and Platoon.

Back to Conan. Stone wrote the screenplay on a cocaine and painkiller binge, and it was pretty out-there, with a post-apocalyptic futuristic setting and a finale that would have seen Conan take on an army of thousands of mutants. A feasible attempt to put Stone's version onscreen would have more than doubled the budget, so super-producer Dino De Laurentiis asked Milius to rewrite and direct it instead. Milius kept several of Stone's scenes but dropped the sci-fi setting and put his own particular libertarian/Nietzschean superman stank on it and turned it toward his own vision. Despite ostensibly occupying opposite sides of the political fence, Stone and Milius are both huge fans of macho posturing, authoritarian protagonists and antagonists, surfing, OTT uber-masculine aesthetics, and, at least in the early '80s, cocaine, and they have remained friendly over the years, so the blending of their artistic points of view is not that awkward. I'm sure I vote more often with Stone, but I tend to enjoy Milius' work a lot more, so I'm glad he ended up directing it.

Is Conan the Barbarian the only film to open with a Nietzsche quote to also feature a character punching a camel? Yes, and that's only one of dozens of reasons to give it a whirl. James Earl Jones makes a great villain as Thulsa Doom. I don't tend to think of Jones as particularly scary, but something about putting him in a long, black wig combined with the intensity of his gaze really puts him at the top of the '80s villain heap. And he shoots a friggin' snake from a bow in place of an arrow! Sandahl Bergman is also really good as Conan's lover, partner, and fellow warrior Valeria, and Max Von Sydow gets a great, hammy cameo as King Osric. Sydow always knew exactly what kind of movie he was in and exactly how to calibrate his performance to fit the tone. Watch him in the Bergman movies and then watch him here or in Flash Gordon. The guy understood every kind of movie and how to act accordingly. And Arnold is Arnold. He has the look, he has the presence. Why does Conan have an Austrian accent? Ignore that question, the same way you ignore why an American guy named John Matrix has an Austrian accent in Commando or why a guy is named John Matrix in the first place. It's movie magic, baby.

Wanna feel old? The little kid who plays young Conan in the opening scenes, Jorge Sanz, is 52 years old. 

 

The Great Impersonation (Alan Crosland, 1935)

The semi-obscure The Great Impersonation is a curious and entertaining blend of rollicking adventure movie, spy thriller, political drama, Gothic horror, and romance, landing on multiple genres without ever staying in one place for long. Though not a neglected classic, it's hardly a dud and should be better known.

I'm going to make a futile attempt to synopsize the exceedingly complicated plot. The movie opens with a title card reading, "East Africa, 1913," which made my heart sink a little. Most 20th century Hollywood movies opening with a title card mentioning any geographical area in Africa or Asia might as well stick a second title card onscreen reading "Racism Ahead." I regret to inform you that this warning holds true for The Great Impersonation, but at least the racism here is brief and seems to come from ignorance rather than hate (anonymous loin-cloth wearing natives who beat on drums and obey colonialists). In the weeks before World War I, wealthy, alcoholic Englishman Sir Everard Dominey (Edmund Lowe) is hunting big game in Africa, but the drunken man has been separated from his guides and is being pursued by a lion. He passes out before the lion can kill him and is discovered by another hunting party in the service of exiled Austrian arms dealer Baron Leopold von Ragostein (also played by Edmund Lowe). This is a wild coincidence, since Dominey and Ragostein were classmates at Oxford who bonded over their near-identical appearances.

The unscrupulous Ragostein quickly decides to turn this freakish chance encounter to his sinister advantage. Ragostein is not just any ol' unscrupulous arms dealer. He's a member of a secret, arms-dealing global spy ring headquartered in Germany that has nefarious plans to keep England out of the war for as long as possible, destroy their munitions once they enter the war, and sell arms to everyone involved on all sides of the conflict for huge profits. Ragostein arranges for Dominey to be killed so he can assume the British man's identity, leave Africa for the UK, and make the munitions destruction plan happen. Once the ol' switcheroo occurs and Ragostein becomes Dominey, he's assigned a minder posing as his assistant, Seaman (Murray Kinnell), a high-ranking member of the arms cabal who has secret orders to kill Ragostein if the Baron's cover is blown and who has the secret info needed to complete the munitions plan.

Ragostein gets a bit more than he bargained for when he arrives in England. Dominey's home is a dark, Gothic mansion, Dominey's wife Eleanor (Valerie Hobson) is mentally unstable and hates his guts (though Ragostein patiently attempts to change this), her servant Mrs. Unthank (Esther Dale) really hates his guts, and the ghost of Mrs. Unthank's mentally ill son Roger (an uncredited Dwight Frye) haunts the place. Roger died in the bog near the mansion after a scuffle with Dominey. Or did he? Further complicating things, Austrian princess Stephanie Elderstrom (Wera Engels), on vacation in England, recognizes Dominey as her former lover Ragostein and still has the hots for him. She inserts herself into the spy plan, much to the chagrin of the Baron and Seaman. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, the spy plot heats up, with a secret HQ installed in the mansion's attic with a remote-controlled antenna that can extend out of a trap door-style opening in the roof. But is Dominey still alive or did he really die in Africa? And is everyone who they say they are? Can anyone be trusted?

Whoo baby, that's a complicated plot, and the movie is only 67 minutes long. In 2022, nearly every Hollywood movie has an idiot-simple story and is two hours and 35 minutes long. What happened to us? Get it together, Hollywood. Back in '35, director Alan Crosland skillfully handles all this complicated intrigue and somehow puts it all together in an attractive, fun, and easy to follow package, with Lowe getting the rare chance to play two separate characters who look the same without it being part of some generic evil twin angle.

I don't have much more to add about The Great Impersonation. It's a solid piece of entertainment with an unusual story, and it's competently made. The actors get a lot to do, but none of them ham it up. They play it straight, and the movie, and its admittedly ridiculous identical men switcheroo angle, is all the better for it. Recommended to anyone who wants a romantic/adventure/Gothic horror/political drama/spy thriller with a handful of decent jokes.

The Great Impersonation was director Alan Crosland's final completed film. While working on his next movie, an adaptation of the Erle Stanley Gardner short story The Case of the Black Cat, Crosland was killed in a car accident, aged only 41. William C. McGann took over as director after Crosland's death and shot the bulk of that film. Crosland's son, Alan Crosland Jr., who was 18 at the time of his father's death, would go on to be a successful TV director (he also made a few movies), beginning with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon in 1956 and ending with MacGyver 30 years later.