Book vs. Movie
Conan the Barbarian
By Russ Bickerstaff
August 24, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Conan The Barbarian
In the early 1930s, Texas pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard invented a character for a series of fantasy stories that ended-up framing a whole new era in historical adventure fiction. With a series of stories about his barbarian hero Conan, Howard helped carve out the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy adventure fiction. (There are those who say he invented it.) Conan’s exploits had met with some commercial success prior to the author’s suicide at the age of 30 in 1936. It took some time for the dramatic potential of Conan to be recognized by Hollywood. Nearly half a century after the first stories saw print, a charismatic bodybuilder who had little talent for acting launched the more successful end of his screen acting career with a couple of successful Conan films in ’82 and ’84. Nearly a couple of decades later, the character is revisited for another big-budget film. How do the original stories compare with the films of the 1980s and the character’s latest cinematic incarnation?
The Original Stories
Robert E. Howard’s Conan predated Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and even Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, While heroic fiction was actually pretty common at the time (some of the most prolific surviving work in that genre being Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stuff,) there really hadn’t been anything regularly produced for commercial consumption resembling sword and sorcery fantasy or epic historical fantasy. With so many towering figures in the genre being British, it seems pleasantly incongruous that the contemporary end of the heroic fantasy genre would’ve been popularized in the early ‘30s by a kid from Texas. Howard had grown-up fascinated by the works of Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and, perhaps most importantly, Thomas Bulfinch. A healthy interest in mythology and encouragement from teachers saw Howard embark on a career as a professional author.
Though Howard went on to create a number of characters, his most enduring and wildly popular is the barbarian Conan. Though he is envisioned as a warrior from the mists of ancient history, the character has a distinctly American disposition about him. He’s not some hero from ancient nobility, mortal, immortal or otherwise. Nor is he an ordinary person cast into an extraordinarily epic situation. True, he first appeared as a middle-aged king in a story The Phoenix and the Sword, but the story firmly establishes that he was a king who had been born a barbarian and claimed his title by killing the previous king. This was an old-fashioned hero who had come to greatness through good old-fashioned hard work and determination - a real up by his ragged fur-lined bootstraps kind of a guy.
That first story also establishes the mystical end of the character’s exploits as he is confronted by an otherworldly force inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. With both sword and sorcery firmly in hand, Conan was a hit. That first story appeared in Weird Tales, a horror/fantasy anthology once referred to as, “the magazine that never dies.” (It continues to be published to this day long after most other anthologies have died off.)
Howard went on to write a great many Conan stories that came to be published in Weird Tales. Howard wrote quite a few of them before the first one was even published. Though they all described the life of the same man, they varied quite a bit in formula and setting. There were war stories, adventure stories and even at least one mystery. What’s more, they appeared in a nonlinear order. The first story with Conan as king was followed by a tale of a younger barbarian who had made his living as a thief. Various ancient cultures mixed in the background of the stories, set in a fictitious era tens of thousands of years ago that Howard referred to as the Hyborian Age.
In a series of some 25 different stories, (21 of which were completed, 17 of which were published in the author’s lifetime) Howard illustrates the life of a savage barbarian. Conan wasn’t selfless or intellectual (though he is well-traveled enough to have learned a multiple languages.) Nor was he the kind of noble savage to comically rendered in the work of James Fennimore Cooper. Over the course of two-dozen stories, Howard seems to suggest that the artifice of civilization is ultimately unsuited for the kind of adaptation that survival requires.
That which is “civilized” is often seen as being more sinister than that which is simple, savage and freed from the bonds of morality. Civilization brings with it the seeds of its own destruction - kind of a sophisticated premise for sword and sorcery fantasy to tackle. Much of the genre seems more concerned with aping the heroic stories of ancient mythology. This appears to be fantasy drawn more from Darwin than Bulfinch. Admittedly, not all of the stories reach that level of accomplishment. There’s some hack work in there as well, but the fact that the stories glance in a deeper thematic direction at ALL distinguishes them from much of the pulp adventure fiction of the era.
It’s kind of a brutal world that Howard is outlining here, but it is not without its beauty. Towards his later years, we see Conan as a patron of the arts - a man who understands that his conquests don’t amount to much and a man who has honestly come to appreciate the virtues of civilization. Jumping around as Howard’s narrative does, we never get a clear picture of the hero’s life from beginning to end. It’s all a bit muddled, but it reflects the irreverence for artificial narrative order that befits an uncivilized hero, which is actually really cool if you think about it.
Beyond the more intellectual appeal of the series, there’s a kind of a world-weary sense of adventure about those early Conan stories that made them really compelling. Conan was seen in frozen tundra, chaotic wilderness battlefields and dizzyingly complex ancient cities, both living and long dead. In a remarkably concise span of words, Howard managed what most other fantasy authors have difficulty producing in volume after volume of so many long-winded, long-running fantasy novel series. The likes of Tolkien, Lewis, Brooks, Norton and so on all have sizeable followings, but it took them quite a long time to come to a point. (It is likely that Conan would’ve hated those stories.) In short, crisp prose, Howard created a beautifully sweeping saga that leaves plenty of room for the imagination to roam without the grotesque need to over-render things that seems to afflict so many fantasy authors.
The last two Conan stories made it into Weird Tales just before Howard’s suicide in 1936 - a mere four years after the character’s creation. It’s difficult to tell if Howard ever would have decided to give the series a clear ending - a clean and dramatic death for his most beloved character.
Over the years after Howard’s death, Conan slowly grew in popularity, inhabiting a number of books that had been written and co-written by other authors from fragments that Howard hadn’t finished. As the sword and sorcery genre grew, so too did the popularity of Conan. By 1970, Marvel had begun a comic book adaptation of the character’s exploits. (Independent Canadian Comic book creator Dave Sim did a much more expansive and accomplished variation on Howard’s themes in his Cerebus series.) Slightly more than a decade into the success of the original comic book adaptation, Conan was featured in his first big Hollywood film.
Conan The Barbarian (1982)
From the beginning, the film diverges from Howard’s writing by giving Conan a clear, concise origin. Here we see him as a child being taught a legend by his father, who is promptly killed in an invasion led by James Earl Jones. The character is thus robbed of his mystery in an apparent attempt by director John Milius (Red Dawn, Flight of the Intruder) to wrap the story up into a nice, little thematic package.
The theme in question comes from a variation on a quote by Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Milius spends much of the rest of the film illustrating that idea with a loose interpretation of the character of Conan. His family is killed and he becomes first a slave, then a gladiator. The whole Spartacus thing was already well played-out in cinema by the time Conan hit the screen, so much of the early part of the film feels very, very weak.
Milius saw to it that there would be very, very little dialogue in the film, which plays out in places like cheap, poorly executed cinematic opera. The battle scenes are executed like home movies - there’s no epic scale to the action. Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (1978) had much more intensity to the visual poetry of its battle scenes than what we see here.
Of course, with less dialogue, the character of Conan has less to define him beyond his basic physicality. And while it’s difficult to imagine Schwarzenegger managing to be much more than a leathery prop in the film, a bit more dialogue would have backed-up the personality of the character a little bit. As the film rounds out its first half hour, we see him becoming a successful slave gladiator before being trained in far eastern arts and (for some reason) taught from ancient texts. (Okay, learning multiple languages as a rugged traveler is one thing, but why bother having a gladiator learn from texts of numerous languages?)
The lack of dialogue in the film would be less of an issue for the character of Conan if he was brought to the screen in more of a captivating fashion. The physically uninteresting presence of Schwarzenegger is kind of opposed to the image of the character from the books. Schwarzenegger’s body is carefully sculpted - the product of endless hours in a civilized gym with very precise physical training. He’s got the muscle definition and delicate skin of a world-champion body-builder, but it doesn’t look like he’s been hammered into that form by the stresses and abuses of a life lived on the edge of death. Legend has it that Schwarzenegger had to tone down his workout routine for the film because he wasn’t flexible enough to believably wield a sword. More than anything, that illustrates why Schwarzenegger doesn’t do a terribly good job of even looking the part of a character who has lived a life in combat, in OR out of a gladiatorial arena.
Conan eventually attains freedom and moves along a series of encounters in search of revenge on James Earl Jones for killing his family. Without going too far into it (and really, why bother?) the encounters that Conan runs into over the course of the film bear numerous parallels to some of the original Conan shorts stories, but Schwarzenegger’s Conan is written and performed as a powerful, plodding muscle-bound dolt who bears little resemblance to the far more compelling adventure figure he is based on. Any cohesive story Milius tries to hammer around the character lacks the evenly balanced brevity of even Howard’s least-accomplished work.
Conan The Destroyer (1984)
A few years after the release of the original Conan The Barbarian, filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis produced a sequel to the original film. Schwarzenegger returned in the title role. Although he seemed to possess perhaps a bit more swagger than he had in the original film, the years didn’t appear to have given him much more intelligence. Here they even play on his lack of intelligence as a kind of joke, which is more or less opposed to the spirit of the original stories. Howard’s Conan was cunning - a wolf-like predator. Though undoubtedly iconic in the role, Shwarzenegger doesn’t really seem all that cunning.
While the plot didn’t follow any specific Robert E. Howard storyline all that closely, it did follow the overall format of a traditional sword and sorcery story much more closely than the original. The story opens as Conan is praying (very much opposed to the rugged, self-reliant character of the stories. Howard’s Conan once said that his God Crom did not listen to prayers, but the scene is pretty well set-up in the original film). Here Conan is praying for his lost love, Valeria, who died in the first film. There is an establishing attack on Conan and his thief companion. The fight scene is not only poorly choreographed and executed, it’s not edited particularly well. It feels more like a highlights reel from a combat sequence.
The film starts out bad and proceeds to get worse. A queen bargains with Conan to escort his daughter to find a key that’s written about in a prophecy of some sort. As the journey requires a visit to an evil wizard’s place, Conan seeks the aid of a wizard. Wizard, thief, princess and princess’s guard (played by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain) escort the princess (somewhat mysteriously called “Jenna”) to get the key. Along the way they run into a warrior played by pop star Grace Jones. To a certain extent the mixture of different personalities gives the story that feeling of ancient legend (or at the very least Basic Dungeons & Dragons,) but to a certain extent it also feels like you’re watching a bodybuilder and a pop star and a basketball star wandering around in Arizona in the early 1980s. As good as the artistic direction and cinematography are in places, their art is only limited to a few shots. The film feels very much a big budget adventure that is quite firmly rooted in the early ‘80s.
The story actually plays out pretty well. Much of the acting is actually pretty bad, but the director frames everything well enough (combat scenes aside) that the exceptionally bad acting in places isn’t a problem in every single scene. The story progresses. The princess gets kidnapped by a wizard. The party goes off to rescue her. They do. There’s a semi-classical, semi-comic scene with a monster in a red cap and a bunch of mirrors. The wizard is killed and the group goes off to escort the princess to her destiny. The whole thing ends pretty predictably, but not without its moments. The princess retrieves the key, which turns out to be a horn meant to bring about the end of the world. The princess is to be a virgin sacrificed in the process.
Okay, so it’s not a bad fantasy story. Some of it may come across as alarmingly cheap, but there’s some particularly good art direction here. There are a few really nice set pieces and so on, but the overall epic saving-the-world-from-its-own-destruction thing ends up linking the thing up as more of an epic fantasy story than the sword and sorcery adventure stories that defined the character Robert E. Howard created.
Conan The Barbarian (2011)
From the start, the 2011 Conan The Barbarian is pretty clearly aimed at being something of a mix between the original prose fiction, comic book and film versions of the character. In a relatively well-executed intro, quite a bit of back story is executed leading into a scene between Conan’s parents on a battlefield. In what has to be one of the more grizzly childbirth scenes ever to make it to film, we see Conan born on the battlefield. Ron Perlman (in the role of Conan’s father) holds aloft the newborn Conan and there’s the opening title. Cute.
What follows is an extended half hour or so outlining some pretty crucial moments in the childhood of a young barbarian. As a young child he kills and beheads a couple of people who were evidently trying to kill him and his friends. It’s kind of a weird fusion - sort of a Batman Begins by way of 300. And though the combat is a lot more beautifully choreographed than either of the original films, it pales in comparison the intensity of some of the combat seen in films like 300.
Of course, we see Conan’s parents killed. The big difference between here and the original is the fact that we watch it play out over the course of the better part of a half an hour. The big problem with this is that while it gives our hero suitable back story for a tidy little revenge story, it robs him of his mysterious background. So much of what made the character appealing in the original stories was that sense of mystery. He’d come out of the wilderness and managed to become a thief, a pirate, a king and so on. We don’t really know what made him what he is… and we don’t care. It doesn’t matter.
With the revenge story solidly rendered, the central portion of the film - that which draws on the appeal of the overall plot structure of the original film - is established. In the process of reaching the film’s second half hour, we see a very dark cinematography that is, in places, exquisitely beautiful. This draws on some of what made the old Conan comic books work so well, particularly the larger black and white magazines drenched in printer’s ink with some particularly dark and gruesome images.
With Jason Momoa n the title role, we have an intelligent-looking Conan. The long, dark hair and piercing eyes do give the feeling of something savage and predatory. The problem is that the story doesn’t do much with that energy. And particularly as the film goes through a long, drawn-out intro detailing the big events in his childhood, we know what those eyes have seen. In fact, we have a remarkably vivid impression of it. The audience is burdened with the job of trying to connect the character and his current motivations with the events leading to the death of his parents in the first half hour or so of the film. We’re given this task to accomplish without really having that much to draw us in beyond competently rendered action and some decently composed and edited shots.
There’s more. There’s some magic here. And thanks to modern CGI special effect, it looks a lot more impressive than, say, scars suddenly appearing on a villain as mirrors are shattered or the raising and lowering of a wall found in the second film. (Honestly, it hardly seems like they tried with Conan The Destroyer.) In a more impressively-framed drama, this could’ve been staged as a really nice spectacle, but it’s used as kind of a cheap throwaway gag here to add atmosphere without adding any real significance. It’s a competently-rendered film, but hardly the kind of cinematic genius befitting the character who ushered in a whole new era of fantasy fiction.
The Verdict
There’s no mistaking that Robert E. Howard’s character was a commercial creation, appearing in popular pulp fiction of the early ‘30s, but there was a kind of fresh fusion between old legends and new perspectives on fiction in an emerging market. The character took hold in the imaginations of people just beginning to understand the meaning of being human in an increasingly technological 20th century - an era where everybody probably felt a little bit primitive.
As the character evolved through the work of subsequent authors, he changed. By the time a young bodybuilder became synonymous with the character, he’d lost much of the edge he had in those 1930s stories. We find ourselves in an era where the multiplex bears some passing resemblance to an early 20th century newsstand with countless disposable dreams to sink into. Pay some money to the person behind the counter and go somewhere else for a little while before returning to your life. Robert E. Howard’s original stories had a resonance to them that could breeze to life through pulp paper in a wholly refreshing way. None of the three films that have attempted to commit the character to the screen have managed the commercial alchemy needed to capture the same kind of energy found in those original stories.