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After making a string of acclaimed adverts, Ridley Scott followed fellow ad man Alan Parker onto the big screen with his debut movie. The Duellists was based on a tale by Joseph Conrad (who inspired Apocalypse Now and the ship names for his 1979 feature, Alien - Nostromo and Narcissus,). As you my expect from Ridley, every scene looks gorgeous and is obviously the mark of a man moving from 30 second promotional films into the big screen world. (When he went off to make the movie, brother Tony took over his Hovis adverts. Six years later, Tony would make his own big screen debut with The Hunger.) Many shots are set up for the expected logo and voice over at the end of the shot. However, there's no velvet voiced John Shrapnel or Michael Jayston ready to plug the product. Just a certain emptiness as visually sophisticated audiences expect one thing and get another. Harvey Keitel (later to star in Thelma and Louise) and Keith Carradine are the Hollywood stars acting alongside a wealth of British thesps including Albert Finney, Diana Quick, Tom Conti, Pete Postlethwaite and Veronica Quilligan (later to play the innocent protagonist of Neil Jordan's Angel). It was first shown on British TV on August 12, 1982 at 7.30pm on ITV, a month after Alien's terrestrial premiere. These days it would be unthinkable to screen such an arthouse movie like The Duellists on such a lowbrow station at peak time but in those days, there were a mere three channels, no satellite, video was in its infancy and video games were as sophisticated as the humble Atari 2600. At the time, Scott was mourning the reception of Blade Runner which had received disappointing reviews from a confused American audience. Blade Runner opened on the big screen a month after The Duellists' debut on British TV. Okay, that's enough about its background. What's it all about? The drama takes place in France, 1800. During the Napoleonic Wars Lt Feraud (Harvey Keitel) wounds a man after a duel. His superior dispatches Lt D'Hubert (Keith Carradine) with a message that he's to be brought under house arrest, since the wounded man is cousin to a Major. For no apparent reason, Feraud takes offence at D'Hubert's "insult", and seeks satisfaction in a duel against him. Feraud is further angered when he loses the duel and seeks to carry on their enmity. Extended by 15 years (and every so often disrupted by the war), their duels become increasingly personal and savage. The two finally meet in a climactic showdown. The movie is clearly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Barry Lyndon and looks like a dry run for Gladiator's battle scenes. It deals with the themes of honor, obsession and violence. Needless to say, the futility of war and the destructive nature of revenge leads to the twist that both men have been duelling for so long, in the end they actually forget what it was that set them off on their feud. The duels are stunning, the attention to detail is meticulous and the movie won a string of awards, including 'Best Debut Film' at the 1977 Cannes film festival. Top trivia * The budget was so tight that Scott was forced to use producer David Puttnam and other crew members as extras. This was an extension of his earlier short films, a potted version of Paths of Glory in which a handful of extras (including Tony Scott) go over the wire and run round the camera before repeating the exercise. Smoke and editing hide the fact that there were so few people involved. *The Duel, as it was originally called, was to be made for French TV as a one-hour film. *The scene where the French army is bogged down was shot in a ski resort near Inverness. *After EMI turned down the script, Scott flew the project to Chicago and the company Hallmark... *After the French deal collapsed and the $700,000 budget proved too rich for Hallmark's blood, one of the bosses saw its potential as a film and suggested that Scott try and make it as a movie. *The eventual budget was a mere $900,000. Scott clinched the dealing by telling Paramount he would put up a completion bond and that he would start pre-production on the day of the meeting. He would start shooting within a couple of months. The thought of filming a movie like that in September left the suits slack of jaw. In the sun-kissed world oif la la land, making a Joseph Conrad movie in Winter sounded like a nightmare. *Scott had originally wanted to make a Western but lacked the cash to fly off to Monument Valley and the locations of other such classic John Ford Westerns.
Alien (1979) |
