Singing Steel
When I was about twelve, my father gave me a paperback called Conan. The first in a series, the names Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert E. Howard are listed as the authors, but it's Howard (1906-1936) who created Conan of Cimmeria and wrote twenty-one tales about him. Carter and de Camp edited those works and had them published in altered forms, making slight changes or even cutting out language deemed by them as inappropriate for contemporary (1960s and 1970s) readers.
Despite these filtered versions, I encountered the raw intensity of Robert E. Howard's character, a barbarian traveling through civilized lands during a long past era separated from our time by some cataclysm.
Conan has the damnedest experiences. In one story, contained in that book my father gave me, "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan seeks to rob a temple of its most valuable asset, a fabulous jewel, but in the process he encounters an alien life form enslaved by the priests. The alien relates to Conan his bizarre story, his home planet, his journey to Earth, his misery from being used as a god by priests exploiting his utter strangeness. After such an experience, occurring in Conan's late teens, one can't expect him to want to live an ordinary life.
This spirit of adventure characterizes the Sword and Sorcery genre, a literary form but also featured in a small number of films, including three Conan movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger played Conan in two films, the second directed by Richard Fleischer, who directed Red Sonja, also starring Schwarzenegger as the come-to-the-rescue-in-the-nick-of-time selfless hero assisting Sonja (Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen in her first role).
Sonja's family is killed by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, the leading lady in Conan the Barbarian and perhaps well known from her dancing in All That Jazz). A goddess appears to Sonja and bestows strength upon her and the bloodlust necessary to go after the Queen, whose murderous and catastrophic agenda includes the getting of a deadly weapon, a green sphere used to create the world, but something that can also be used to generate earthquakes--a weapon of mass destruction, in other words.
The priestesses in charge of the sphere (only women can touch it, while men vanish instantly) are almost all killed by the Queen's men, who take charge of the sphere. One priestess escapes, found by Schwarzenegger. He locates Sonja, who happens to be the dying priestess's sister. Sonja, upon finding out that Queen Gedren is behind this, sets out to take her vengeance and prevent the end of the world.
It's not a very good movie, but one thing standing out is the costume design by Danilo Donati. The word baroque comes to mind in describing the weirdness of some of the costumes. The Queen's soldiers have metal skulls in their helmets. There's a fairy tale quality to the dress, with Sandahl Bergman's Queen looking especially amazing, with a golden face mask outlining her cheeks and nose, leaving her striking and arresting gaze visible.
Brigitte Nielsen's acting in, granted, her first film, is terrible. She's better when she remains silent, or is fighting. The film cost 17.9 million dollars (in 1985) and lost a lot of money--there was no Red Sonya 2. I appreciate, though, the effort to make a film in an under-explored genre, a film using mattes by Albert Whitlock to convey a sense of massive scale for some of the imaginary structures. The fabulous costumes, a few of the action scenes (especially one in which Schwarzenegger drops in on some of the Queen's soldiers eating their chow and kills about a dozen of them), and Sandahl Bergman's magnificent, lithe, catlike movements add a lot of interest to the viewing experience.
Sonja was a comic book character based on Robert E. Howard's character Dark Agnes de Chastillon, who appeared in three stories. Like Sonja, Agnes has red hair and is short-tempered, although she lives in sixteenth century France. Howard's extensive works, including stories, poetry, and letters, have been thoroughly resurrected into uncensored versions, published in numerous books in the last twenty years. As with H.P. Lovecraft, it's become a recognized thing that Howard and so many other pulp fiction writers of his time, is an important American writer, on a par with Jack London.
Red Sonja, the film, is an emanation derived from Howard's imagination, but at a distance, remote from his own time, like we are from the time of Conan.
Vic Neptune
When I was about twelve, my father gave me a paperback called Conan. The first in a series, the names Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, and Robert E. Howard are listed as the authors, but it's Howard (1906-1936) who created Conan of Cimmeria and wrote twenty-one tales about him. Carter and de Camp edited those works and had them published in altered forms, making slight changes or even cutting out language deemed by them as inappropriate for contemporary (1960s and 1970s) readers.
Despite these filtered versions, I encountered the raw intensity of Robert E. Howard's character, a barbarian traveling through civilized lands during a long past era separated from our time by some cataclysm.
Conan has the damnedest experiences. In one story, contained in that book my father gave me, "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan seeks to rob a temple of its most valuable asset, a fabulous jewel, but in the process he encounters an alien life form enslaved by the priests. The alien relates to Conan his bizarre story, his home planet, his journey to Earth, his misery from being used as a god by priests exploiting his utter strangeness. After such an experience, occurring in Conan's late teens, one can't expect him to want to live an ordinary life.
This spirit of adventure characterizes the Sword and Sorcery genre, a literary form but also featured in a small number of films, including three Conan movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger played Conan in two films, the second directed by Richard Fleischer, who directed Red Sonja, also starring Schwarzenegger as the come-to-the-rescue-in-the-nick-of-time selfless hero assisting Sonja (Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen in her first role).
Sonja's family is killed by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, the leading lady in Conan the Barbarian and perhaps well known from her dancing in All That Jazz). A goddess appears to Sonja and bestows strength upon her and the bloodlust necessary to go after the Queen, whose murderous and catastrophic agenda includes the getting of a deadly weapon, a green sphere used to create the world, but something that can also be used to generate earthquakes--a weapon of mass destruction, in other words.
The priestesses in charge of the sphere (only women can touch it, while men vanish instantly) are almost all killed by the Queen's men, who take charge of the sphere. One priestess escapes, found by Schwarzenegger. He locates Sonja, who happens to be the dying priestess's sister. Sonja, upon finding out that Queen Gedren is behind this, sets out to take her vengeance and prevent the end of the world.
It's not a very good movie, but one thing standing out is the costume design by Danilo Donati. The word baroque comes to mind in describing the weirdness of some of the costumes. The Queen's soldiers have metal skulls in their helmets. There's a fairy tale quality to the dress, with Sandahl Bergman's Queen looking especially amazing, with a golden face mask outlining her cheeks and nose, leaving her striking and arresting gaze visible.
Brigitte Nielsen's acting in, granted, her first film, is terrible. She's better when she remains silent, or is fighting. The film cost 17.9 million dollars (in 1985) and lost a lot of money--there was no Red Sonya 2. I appreciate, though, the effort to make a film in an under-explored genre, a film using mattes by Albert Whitlock to convey a sense of massive scale for some of the imaginary structures. The fabulous costumes, a few of the action scenes (especially one in which Schwarzenegger drops in on some of the Queen's soldiers eating their chow and kills about a dozen of them), and Sandahl Bergman's magnificent, lithe, catlike movements add a lot of interest to the viewing experience.
Sonja was a comic book character based on Robert E. Howard's character Dark Agnes de Chastillon, who appeared in three stories. Like Sonja, Agnes has red hair and is short-tempered, although she lives in sixteenth century France. Howard's extensive works, including stories, poetry, and letters, have been thoroughly resurrected into uncensored versions, published in numerous books in the last twenty years. As with H.P. Lovecraft, it's become a recognized thing that Howard and so many other pulp fiction writers of his time, is an important American writer, on a par with Jack London.
Red Sonja, the film, is an emanation derived from Howard's imagination, but at a distance, remote from his own time, like we are from the time of Conan.
Vic Neptune
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