The Riddle of Steel

Beginning with the Lancer editions of Howard’s stories in 1966, there was a steady increase in the interest in the Sword & Sorcery genre, and in Conan in particular. The books kicked off the wave of S&S that went through the 70s and into the 80s, while the character and genre spread out into comic books and video and tabletop games. It was probably inevitable that eventually Conan – the poster boy for Sword & Sorcery – would find his way onto the big screen.

There was interest in a Conan movie as far back as 1970, as Hollywood knows a hot property when it sees one, and the 70s were a far more adventurous time for filmmakers than today. Budgets were cheaper, and censorship had been lifted, paving the way for the exploitation/grindhouse films of the era. Producer Howard Pressman really got things going in ‛75, and soon enough they had nabbed up-and-coming screenwriter Oliver Stone to produce a script, and they made what would prove to be the most important casting decision in the character’s history – they attached Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger to star as the lead.

It’s hard to remember now, but at the time Schwarzenegger was a mostly unknown actor, having played in only a few small films with little in the way of dialogue. He had made an impression with the bodybuilding film Pumping Iron, but he was by no means a known quantity. He was a 34-year-old actor with a jawbreaking name, a thick accent, and a meager resume.

For better or worse, Conan was his breakthrough role, and the icon of the bodybuilder with the thick accent and few words became cemented in the popular consciousness as the archetype of the Sword & Sorcery hero. Even now, almost 35 years later, the image and iconography of the film has proved ineradicable.

 

It endures because – no matter the liberties taken with the source material – the movie is actually really good. The original script by Stone was highly fantastical, featuring Conan descending into hell and fighting legions of demons. Director John Milius pared this down to a much more real-world adventure, with only some fantastical elements. The result is a bloody, savage, highly entertaining adventure that is cleanly and clearly in the spirit of Howard’s work. Even if he might have cringed at the alterations to his characters and settings, the results are a film Howard would have no doubt enjoyed.

Part of this is the script, with the classic quotable speeches: “Conan, what is best in life?”, or “What is the riddle of steel?” It was written with a grim, fatalistic tone that did not skimp on either the violence nor the deeper philosophies that lurked behind the world and its characters. It treated the Hyborean Age as a real place, and took it and the characters seriously. Unlike other fantasy films of the day, there was little to no humor, no camp, no fuzzy cute sidekick to make toys out of. The studio had some trepidation about releasing it as an R-rated film, but Milius refused to compromise.

Another element, undoubtedly, was the score by the late Basil Poledouris. The studio had originally been planning to record a rock-based soundtrack, but Milius wanted a deep, classical, operatic score, and Poledouris delivered with what is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest works of film music ever written – one that still makes waves and inspires imitators more than three decades after the release.

Not a lot of movies maintain cultural relevance so long after their day. Conan remains so because whatever else it did, it tapped into the grim, violent energy of the original character. No, Arnold did not and does not look like the way the character was described. But he embodied the brooding savagery of Conan in a way that connected with audiences. Milius paid more attention to Frazetta’s artwork than to Howard’s stories, but he created a world that looked and felt real. That was gritty and bloody and dark, inhabited by characters that were neither good nor evil, but only trying to survive.

The film was a hit, bringing in over $100 million dollars against a budget of around $16 million (a figure that seems incredible now). Two years after the film was followed by the much-less-good sequel Conan the Destroyer, and Conan would not appear in a film for another 27 years. The initial success kicked off a surge of schlocky S&S movies that ran through the 1980s, forever associating the genre in many minds with cheap effects, bad dialogue, and oiled-up musclemen. Sadly, this wave of poor imitators inflicted damage on the genre that has yet to be undone.