What a time 1982 was.... to be a comic book addict and Robert E. Howard-ophile, with a shellacked completed jigsaw puzzle of Frazetta's "Death Dealer" up on his wall and a stack of paperback reprints on his shelf (including Howard's non-Conan stuff, like all those grisly stories about sailors' bare-knuckle boxing). Suffering the 15 year-old virgin blues in a world gone mad with conservative backlash, Howard was like a proto-punk bidding us hold on until.... into this hell rode a horseman. Herald of the new world! Conan! The Thulsa Doom serpent cult in the film was a perfect analogy for the hippie movement, with its focus on converting young people to blood orgies and training them to kill their parents, and the whole twin serpent motif very pagan and old school unchristian, (twin serpent motifs are common hallucinations in drug experiences, and exist today in our conception of the double helix and in the symbol of the American Medical Association). For kids wondering why they weren't growing up drowned in orgies like their older brothers in the 1970s, the Thulsa Doom crowd was the perfect demonization tool.
Directed by John Milius from a script he co-wrote with Oliver Stone, you could fit the dialogue in this movie on the back of a bar napkin, while the orchestral score probably took down a whole old-growth forest on its own, and that's maybe why it works so well. Conan doesn't even say a word until his famous answer to the question 'what is best in life" -- "To crush your enemies, to see 'dem driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of der wimmen."
The film would be a thunder-headed downer though if not for the lively, lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. She's not in it nearly enough, but that's why the film works so well as a revenge scenario, since we experience the horrible pain of Conan's childhood for the first half hour of running time--forced into slavery, forced to kill like a pit bull, forced to watch his parents be murdered and his people destroyed by Thulsa (James "Vader" Earle Jones)--and then, shortly after finding her, he loses Valeria, also to Thulsa. Oh man but you're pissed at old Thulsa by then!
Though time has worn my vengeance-craving edge down to a dull memory, the scars of being a sexually frustrated, physically un-mighty teenager linger on, as does the memory of the exaltation I felt watching Conan, the sense of vindication (which would not come again in any movie until Fight Club). Finally, here was a hero we teens could get behind. He was swinging for our team, crashing our older sibling's orgy and trashing the joint, and if there's any place that howls of bloodlust are still okay, it should be in the theater, with the old ladies behind you going "sshhhh!" We may not have been raised pushing a dumb wheel in the middle of nowhere for seemingly no reason, but we could relate, in our hatred of school, of third period geometry class. Conan was our liberator. School's Aowt foah Summah!
Back to Valeria for a moment. When she and Conan bond in a luxurious fur-covered tent after robbing the tower of serpents, we feel him finally beginning to relax, and the whole unbearably rough and dismal film unclenches its fists for the first time and our heart melts as these two orphaned lone wolves find a temporary peace. Though we see lots of Bergman's hot dancer thighs, some breast here and there, and of course Schwarzenegger's acres of muscles, Milius clearly doesn't intend their sex scene should titillate so much as warm our hearts a bit, sincerely and without mawkishness, and as such, it's one of the best sex scenes of all time, with just as much detail on faces and textures--furs, fires, tent walls, jewels--as nudity and moaning, and it's all "earned" so to speak, through character development. Valeria's fierce devotion and her beautiful monologue about passing other people in couples in tents in the night breaks our hearts because we feel that way too, and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because in this case Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon after she found it. Laugh all you want, but this was our Titanic!
Re-visiting it on DVD is cool, because there's a lot of stuff a boy who saw this film a million times on duped, cropped VHS would finally get to see again after the one time in the theater. I was always pissed that the visceral early raid on Conan's village, which blew my mind in the theater, was cropped to the point it was impossible to follow on the pan and scan, and it's been so long since I've seen even that it all seems new, especially in the new remastered extended (!) version, which includes a monologue wherein Conan remembers picking blueberries with his father, and in it he seems for the first time both eloquent and at peace, a bit straight out of The Seventh Seal but that's okay --it's earned, even if it does kill the mood of slowly building menace. My sharper adult eyes and the high res of DVD now notice the importance of a huge jewel stolen from Thulsa Doom, which Conan gives to Valeria which she wears around her neck from then on, and which he later takes back and wears after she's killed; and the way Doom's riders in the beginning of the film know to take off their helmets in respect to Conan's mom, via admiring the handle detailing of an animal skull on her slain husband's awesome sword. In its weird militaristic way (Milius is a great one for armor and warrior codes) this nearly dialogue-free film is damned eloquent.
Because of all the hack job imitations that followed in the wake of Conan's success we've become conditioned to dismiss films like this as mindless, but Conan demands separate treatment from the deluge of crackerjack tripe that followed, like: Deathstalker, Yor, Sword and Sorcery, and Beastmaster. John Milius is no hack, after all, despite his crazy militarism, he's a close collaborator of artsy fuckers like Coppola and Paul Schrader, and Dino De Laurentiis was able to give the film a huge budget, and it's all up there on the screen: thousands of extras, vast beautiful serpentine sets, dozens of horses, a huge temple exterior staircase on a hilltop and a vast interior mountain cave with a marble orgy chamber that looks like something out of an early Argento (designed by Ron Cobb, of Star Wars and Alien fame). Whatever happened to beautiful, boldly original art direction like this? What have we lost since 1982? I think I know, but if I told you, I'd go to hell.
On widescreen DVD you can see there's actually lots of corpses hanging upside down along the walls in the orgy scene, though you'd expect an orgy scene to be more smoky and with more writhing. But I love the special effects here, which occur without rupturing the soundtrack, which plays almost nonstop thunderous versions of De Falla's El Brujo and doesn't break from the track to announce hey look, "Doom is turning into a snake!" or a giant snake has just woken up, or the sandy wind surrounding Conan's body--covered in writing ala Kwaidan to protect him from evil spirits---is writhing like shadowy reptoid men with long wind tails. The animated bits are slight and beautiful, clearly frame-by- frame hand-painted, using the actual sandstorm wind in the scene as the jumping off point for whirling figurative specters (see below). Not since Forbidden Planet and never since has this sort of thing been done with such class.
Nothing quite illuminates that you're old like realizing the last time you saw Conan you saw him and Valeria as adults and now you see them as children. Arnold's youthfulness and pre-catch phrase sincerity make him quite charismatic; this is the film he made before launching into superstardom with The Terminator and as with that film, it's a true original, made with lots of care and imagination and research, that should never be confused with the imitative junk that followed.
A lot of us Conan fans were initially wary that a German body builder who'd been in one film, Pumping Iron as himself, would be too flippant, too jovial, too A-Team if you will, to be a good Conan. We figured he'd make sure through his contract that he doesn't actually kill anyone, just beats them up and tells them to drink milk and stay in school and don't do drugs. So we were all surprised by the gleeful amorality and downright thuggishness of his barbarian. That's one of the things that makes Conan great -- he ain't no role model. On two different occasions Conan basically breaks into someone else's party, trashes the joint, kills loads, kidnaps a girl and/or kills a priceless pet snake and steals jewels, all without direct provocation. He doesn't wait for them to draw first; he kills people in cold blood, punches out a camel who was just standing there (Conan bumped into him), pushes beggars, steals property and throws witches into the fire. You wouldn't see the A-Team doing that shit. And he doesn't just conk them on the head and then lament about killing to Gabriele, like Xena used to do. He chops off their heads and kicks over their candelabras. He's been dealt a raw deal by fate and he's out to steal and kill to his heart's content, as he's entitled. And there's no dutiful cop trailing him, determined to take him down no matter what the cost. There's no annoyingly liberal captain of police telling him to do things "by the book." Conan is wronged and owed a debt by the social order and the cults therein while at the same time not asking for the liberal government's help in getting it --he's a true conservative antihero, ready and able to lead us out of the 70s.
And so, to our surprise, we loved Arnold to death. Every line he speaks in the film became cherished and repeated ad nauseum by we the fans: "Can we go over theah? Wheh the others do not see?" he asks Jack SUCCUBUS Taylor. "Oil the sowahd... and feed the hoahse," he tells feisty sorcerer Mako, himself a great fountain of quotability through his weird accentuation of random words ("Learning and writing were made... available"). And when he asks about the standard he seeks, Conan points his two giant fists together and says, awestruck, "two snakes... facing each otha... but theah ONE!" My friends and I could crack up for hours saying lines like that in our German Arnold voices: "Crom, I have never pwayed to you befoah!" I don't mean that at all as a put-down. We all love Arnold. And he does a great job. He invests himself. He does most of his own stunts, as does Sandahl and Gerry Lopez.
Time doesn't permit me to praise Lopez, also a fountain of quotes ("Dinner for wolve"). A surfer Milius bonded with making Big Wednesday. Lopez speaks in the broken English expected of an Asian-looking actor at the time, but isn't stupid and when he occasionally breaks into Cali bro-style enunciation, it's a joy. With Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder, Bergman a Fosse dancer and Lopez a surfer--none of the three actual trained actors--there's a kind of outsider status amongst them that works beautifully for conveying their outsider status. They are not just "high adventurers," not bland actors cast for their looks, or adults with a sense of responsibility --just young, motivated, fit people willing to try anything. They are athletes, barbarians, outsiders, thieves. They were as we felt we would become once the goddamned civilization that made us go to goddamned school every day and learn geometry was burned forever to the ground and the world became scorched and run by warring gangs of the road. Until that day came, we would wait, and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over, and stockpile shields and swords. It was only a matter of time before Columbine.
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