The Duellists (1977)

          After establishing himself as a formidable director of television commercials, Ridley Scott made the leap to feature filmmaking with this handsome adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short story titled “The Duel,” which was based on real people who existed in Napoleonic France. A small-scale drama exploring huge themes of honor, military conduct, nationalism, and personal obsession, the movie boasts gorgeous costuming and production design, impressively evoking early 19th-century Europe even though the film was made for less than $1 million. (In fact, budget constraints probably added to the verisimilitude, because Scott shot the movie on existing locations instead of sets.) From start to finish, The Duellists offers a feast of artful images, with Scott emulating the lighting style of 19th-century paintings and treating every shot as an opportunity to demonstrate his gifts for pictorial composition. Clearly, Scott’s visual acumen impressed many, since the picture won the Best Debut Film at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival and helped Scott secure his career-making job as the director of Alien (1979). Alas, for all its elegance, The Duellists is a hopelessly cold film. The motivations of the characters are dramatized well enough, but human feeling is smothered by meticulous imagery—at this point in his career, Scott seemingly lacked the skills needed to extract passion from his players.

          In his defense, the movie was badly miscast. Originally set to star Oliver Reed and Michael York, the picture instead features Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel. Both actors are so inherently modern (and so inherently American) that they seem like they’re playing dress-up. Another problem is that the story is an intellectual exercise rather than a proper drama. When the movie begins, savage French officer Feraud (Keitel) skewers an aristocratic opponent in a duel. Another officer, d’Hubert (Carradine), is sent to arrest Feraud, but Feraud—who is obsessed with dueling—invents a slight as pretense for drawing d’Hubert into a fight. And so begins decades of on-again/off-again combat between the men, with their battles ending in draws until a peculiar resolution puts an end to their lifelong quarrel. Scott captures the surfaces of this strange story, but never the inner lives of the characters, so the question underlying the narrative—asking why one man seeks to foment conflict while the other seeks to resolve it—receives only perfunctory attention. As a result, The Duellists is quite dull and repetitive, which is a shame, since it’s easy to imagine a full-blooded version of the same material casting a powerful spell. Nonetheless, The Duellists is interesting to watch as the opening act of a great directorial career, and it holds many delights for fans of pictorial splendor.

The Duellists: FUNKY

Alien (1979)

          Writer Dan O’Bannon was a film-school pal of John Carpenter’s, but his career foundered after the duo expanded Carpenter’s thesis film into the commercial feature Dark Star (1974). While Carpenter was making the low-budget shockers that launched his career, O’Bannon was mired in stillborn projects like an unproduced version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, and at he ended up living on his friend Ron Shusett’s couch. Luckily, Shusett was an aspiring writer-producer intrigued by O’Bannon’s idea for a claustrophobic sci-fi/horror flick about an outer-space critter that preys upon a spaceship’s crew. (The concept borrows liberally from myriad sources, with the 1958 B-movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space often cited as a direct influence.) O’Bannon and Shusett fleshed out the story, which at one point was titled Star Beast, then sold the package to producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hil, whose new company Brandywine Productions had access to Twentieth Century-Fox. Giler and Hill, both screenwriters, did more narrative tinkering, but Fox didn’t get excited until the studio’s Star Wars (1977) exploded at the box office. Alien was the next outer-space picture on deck at Fox, so the project finally got momentum—and as more people joined the party, the level of artistic ambition continued rising.
          Ridley Scott, then a veteran of countless TV commercials but only one little-seen feature, was hired because of his keen visual sense. Just as importantly, Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who worked on the same stillborn version of Dune as O’Bannon, was recruited for creature and set designs; his creepy “biomechanics” style infused the resulting film’s alien scenes with perverse grandeur. Representing a rare case of the development process doing what it’s supposed to do, Alien kept evolving, rather like the creature in the story, until finally, on May 25, 1979, audiences got their first look at a perfect marriage of exploitation-flick elements and art-film craftsmanship. Scott fills every frame of the picture with meticulous details, building excruciating tension by keeping the titular beastie almost completely offscreen until the film’s finale. He also created one of scare cinema’s greatest jolts with the unforgettable “chest-burster” scene.
          So despite underdeveloped characters and an occasionally murky storyline, nearly everything in Alien works on some level, from the sleek title sequence by R/Greenberg Associates to the terrifying climax featuring Sigourney Weaver wearing the smallest panties in the known universe. The production design’s mix of utility and grime is utterly credible; the score by Jerry Goldsmith is eerily majestic; and the interplay between actors Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Weaver nails under-pressure group dynamics. The movie that O’Bannon and Shusett once pitched as “Jaws in space” sits comfortably alongside Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster as one of the most cinematically important horror shows ever made.

Alien: OUTTA SIGHT