Comments | uvula_fr_b4: By popular demand??

uvula_fr_b4

By popular demand??

Oct 16, 2012 10:22

On the commentary track to Magnum Force (1973), the second of the five Dirty Harry movies starring Clint Eastwood, the co-screenwriter, John Milius (who also co-wrote, uncredited, the screenplay for the first movie in the series, Dirty Harry [1971]), said that the scenes of the two women throwing themselves (separately, mind you) at Harry Callahan ( Read more... )

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Comments 6

Oh THAT John Milius! marlowe1 October 16 2012, 18:20:05 UTC

Here's the highlights of the Conan movie commentary...

Re: Oh THAT John Milius! uvula_fr_b4 October 17 2012, 03:50:04 UTC

Man, I hated the first Conan movie (saw it in the theatre as a first release), and at that point I had only read some of Marvel's color comic, Conan the Barbarian, and their b&w, more "adult," magazine, The Savage Sword of Conan. Even so, I knew that Thulsa Doom was Kull's nemesis, and that Thoth Amon was Conan's.

Such things mattered immensely to me then.

Didn't help that some smart ass in the audience said, with his tongue very much in cheek, "Whoooaaa," in response to the pretentious narrator (on-screen character??) declaiming about the "Tree of Woe," and made my mom crack up. She got my dad to laughing, they got everybody around them laughing, and I furiously bit my lip to not laugh because these bastards had wrecked a character that I already liked a lot, and it was so not funny.

Never bothered seeing any other Conan movie, even though Roy Thomas co-wrote the story for Conan the Destroyer (1984) -- with Gerry Conway, no less. Somehow, I can't imagine a Gerry Conway take on an REH character, even with Roy Thomas along ( ... )

Re: Oh THAT John Milius! marlowe1 October 17 2012, 20:44:26 UTC

You might like it better now. At very least it's not utterly boring like the new version. Conan the Destroyer was a bit of a step down (and PG-13 too I think) but it gave us that weird era when Hollywood was trying to sell Grace Jones as a movie star.

And really, I can think of no one better to play Conan than Arnold. He comes off like an idiot. His accent makes him sound even dumber than you would assume with his muscle bound look and yet, he's a very smart and clever guy which is one of the things that Conan always impressed me with was that Conan was a basic barbarian type but he was usually the most brutally Machiavellian character.

Re: Oh THAT John Milius! uvula_fr_b4 October 18 2012, 04:08:30 UTC

The thing that I liked -- and like, frankly -- about Thomas' scripts on CtB, SSoC and King Conan (I picked up the first 8 issues off the racks as they came out in 1979-81; it was retitled Conan the King with #20, and was cancelled with #55; doesn't look like Dark Horse has started reprinting them yet) is that, overall, he showed Conan starting out as a sword & sorcery JD (Barry Windsor-Smith, before he used the "Windsor" in his by-line, first drew him almost like "Elvis the Barbarian" -- a style he quickly scrapped, praise Crom), and something of a himbo, and gradually getting wisdom and plain old common sense pounded into his thick skull ( ... )

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