I adore Conan the Barbarian. For years I’ve been telling people that my favorite movie is 8½, say, or On the Waterfront, but it’s time for me to stop lying to myself and to my friends.
I’ve seen the 1982 classic Conan the Barbarian at least 20 times and can recite most of the movie word for word, something I do with very little prompting after a few drinks. I know that Conan isn’t a great work of art, but it is artful, and it’s shot through with instances of greatness—yes, greatness, in the old-fashioned, Harold-Bloom sense of the word.
Conan was invented by the pulp writer Robert E. Howard during the 1930s. The movie Conan the Barbarian, inspired partly by Howard’s Conan stories and partly by the comic books that they spawned, was conceived during the late ‘70s as a career vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oliver Stone drafted an early version of the screenplay, and there was talk that Stone might direct Conan the Barbarian, or co-direct it, possibly in partnership with Ridley Scott, but year after year, Conan didn’t get made. The rights eventually changed hands, and the new director, John Milius, who had penned the screenplay for Apocalypse Now at the age of 25, rewrote Stone’s script almost entirely.
Conan the Barbarian was hugely successful at establishing Schwarzenegger in Hollywood—so much so that the movie has been eclipsed by Schwarzenegger himself and has become an “Arnold movie,” maybe even the ultimate Arnold movie. People tend to confuse Conan the Barbarian with its follow-ups, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja, both of them directed by Richard Fleischer, and both solidly generic.
Conan the Barbarian, however, is too peculiar to be called “generic.” For one thing, Milius opens with an epigraph: that reliable old quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Milius intends for us to see Conan as an embodiment of those words; Conan is a prehistoric barbarian whose parents and people are slaughtered, who is sold into childhood slavery, and who, after a decade of turning an immense, literal gristmill, develops into a mass of rage and muscle, motivated entirely by the desire for revenge.
Before Conan’s father is killed—horribly, but I won’t say how—he tells the young Conan a story about giants deceiving the gods and taking for themselves the knowledge of steelmaking. The vengeful gods destroy the giants, but “… In their rage,” Conan’s father says, “the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. And we who have found it are just men. Not gods, not giants: just men.” Conan’s journey is an epic search to understand “the riddle of steel” and the meaning of strength.
If all this analysis seems misplaced and pretentious, well, the movie is a little pretentious. It’s difficult to make a truly bad piece of art unless you’re trying to make an extraordinary one, and Conan the Barbarian is both bad and extraordinary. Milius’s mistakes are so large that at times the movie’s aspirations seem absurd. Conan the Barbarian takes clichés at face value and is terribly acted. It also brought into the world such infamous lines of dialogue as, “Two or three years ago, they were just another snake cult.”
And yet, the movie is beautifully shot, and when none of the actors are speaking, Conan the Barbarian finds its eloquence. Conan himself has only two lines of dialogue during the movie’s first half-hour and frequently communicates simply by whetting his sword, furrowing his brow, or glaring. The movie is an ode to human physicality, and it’s Schwarzenegger’s body, not Schwarzenegger, that fills the lead role. Milius has compared the movie to a ballet, and most of the cast are athletes, rather than professional actors. Two exceptions are James Earl Jones, who brings nuance and authority to a few thematically important speeches, and Max von Sydow.
Part of what I find so arresting—so overwhelming, actually—about Conan the Barbarian is Basil Poledouris’s orchestral score. Poledouris’s music dramatically fills the silence created by the lack of dialogue, defines the movie’s emotional currents in a way that the actors cannot, and creates battle scenes that seem to belong to a brutal, Wagnerian Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The score even supplies leitmotifs to the movie’s major characters.
“Movies,” the arch-critic Pauline Kael once wrote, “are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them,” and Conan has always lived on the borderland between art and Kael’s “trash.” Robert Howard’s Conan stories take place after the sinking of Atlantis and before known history, in a universe where all empires decline and all civilizations fail. For both Howard and Milius, Conan is a romantic vision of what human beings once were, and what they remain, under the mask of civilization.
Robert Howard wrote the Conan stories while living at home with his parents. He suffered from depression all his life, and he shot himself at the age of 30. I can’t help but feel that Howard was thinking of himself when he described Conan as a man of “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.” Howard’s Conan towers above other men, remains an outsider even after becoming a king, and makes pronouncements like “Someday, when all your civilization and science are … swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.”
Here is my favorite piece of Conan lore: during the first day of filming, Schwarzenegger fell from a mound of rocks and was cut badly enough to need stitches. Milius told Schwarzenegger not to clean the blood off his face, because the injury looked so realistic. The pain won’t last, Milius said. But, he added, “this movie will be forever.”
13 responses
Thanks for this. My husband likely will not be as thankful as I’m contemplating going all in and just buying the thing.
I had no idea Oliver Stone was ever near the Conan movie. Wonder what that would have been like?
While I sympathize with your efforts I have to remain solidly underwhelmed by this film. Maybe it was seeing the debacle Conan became in the comic that helped, and the actual stories written by Robert Howard are such that this film insults the memory. This film is so anti-Conan that it’s very hard to appreciate even the few things that worked (for instance, despite her horrible dialogue, Sandahl Bergman’s role as Valeria outConans Conan himself in actions, attitude and words). This film makes me utterly grateful that the stories remain in print because Robert Howard created a remarkable character, and he’s nowhere to be seen in this film. Yeah, I know, I’ll be in the minority here. That’s a given when measuring the misguided passion evidenced from fans of this film.
I agree with what you said about the score…it’s the best. It reminds me of atom heart mother from Pink Floyd…a true classic.
I’ve long counted this film as one of my favorites. And as a reader who greatly appreciates the original short stories written by Howard, I consider it to be a good representation of the man’s mythos. To my eyes, this film is art. Perhaps not the highest and most refined, but art nevertheless. So many of the copycat barbarian-flicks that came afterward were little more than mindless amalgamations of sex, steel and synthesizer tracks. Milius’ Conan film was the first and remains the best of it’s kind.
I too have this on my list of favourite films….it’s great to enjoy the cinematography (especially the opening scenes of Thulsa Dooms followers riding through the trees to the snowy village)and beautiful scenery in Spain. I realise it doesn’t quite follow the theme Howard portrays in his books, but its a great second place, and nice to have the opportunity to watch a film which still makes me smile. I only wish Milius had made the second film, and still hold out that Arnie may give up politics and collaborate to complete the triology….I would be an extra!!!! Womever reads this blog…watch the film, its great!!!
As I sit here watching Conan the Barbarian for the 50th time on DVD I realize how much I still love this movie. It’s fun. It’s simple without any pseudo political correctness. I love bad movies just to find the gems hidden in them.
Some people said here they would like to know how the OLIVER STONE version would have been. Well, you all can discover that. In http://www.conancompletist.com we have the script written by STONE to download for your reading pleasure. We also have a list of all the deleted scenes from the Milius’ film. And a forum.
You are all invited!
Best regards.
you should read the book then, or at least check out some of frank frazetta`s work featuring conan
Folks it’s quite simple. Conan the Barbarian was what we’ve been itching to see for years. It was and still remains as, the ultimate MAN FILM. It’s not politically correct. It’s not watered down. It’s not tailored for a specific audience. It’s the ultimate macho flick. I love it. Almost 30 years later and i still get a kick out of it. “Anvil of Crom” is the name of the movie’s score by Basil Poledouris. It still does it for me today. Schwartz was the perfect build/look for the part. Nuff said. I love the graphic comics, novels, & movie (the Destroyer was pathetic. All i got from that was Wilt Chamberlin’s name ringing in my head. BOMBATA!) Long live the Conan Legacy. CROM!
There’s no line here, no “bad” or “trash”, even thinking in those terms or along those lines is pretentious. This film IS art, very much along the lines of the Sergio Leone films with Clint Eastwood. It is a beautiful piece of film work.
The fact is that silly muscle-men like Arnold and his many actor friends and gung-ho macho gun-nuts like Milius are just as capable of making great works as the rest of us.
@Rick Tucker: At first it found your closing a little condescending, but then again “misguided passion” is, in a way, what the movie (and its making) are about. Similarly to Star Wars (which, judging by the plot, should have been horrible and cheesy), the movie has some undefinable quality that carries over to people and inspires this seemingly disproportionate adoration. You can certainly argue that you have simply moved on in what you appreciate in a movie, but you can’t explain it away.
And I concur with the article, the shooting and music are certainly part of what sets Conan apart. And Schwarzenegger, who, while far from being a great actor, brings not only his impressive abs, but also his force of personality to the role.
I can’t understand the people that consider the film silly. If you please, I would like to know your opinion on why Conan “fails at times” that miserably, or why “2 or 3 years ago it was just another snake cult” is such a horrible line if not plain exposition dialogue. The worst thing about the movie would be what others consider its best; the camel punching. But apart from that, all the elements are thematic, with very little postmodern concessions. And that theme is not a “macho allegory”, just nietzschean phylosophy, followed very closely throughout the movie. Along with the sacredness in the imagery and soundtrack, and the mythic structure, it makes it my favorite movie. I don’t care that much about acting but honestly I think it’s serviceable. Though I have the feeling much of the “goofiness” of the movie comes from the casting and specially Schwarzenegger.
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