The pirated VHS copy of Conan the Barbarian that I cherished when I was 12 was cruddy and discoloured even before I wore it out with twice-daily viewings. The image, tinted jaundice-yellow in some places and seasickness-green in others, was striped with thorny lines of static that made you feel as though you were watching the movie through barbed wire. I knew it wasn’t supposed to look like that because I’d already seen it on the big screen a year earlier. One afternoon in September 1982, I had persuaded my father to take me after school to the ABC cinema in South Woodford, east London. I gave the movie the hard sell: it had Arnold Schwarzenegger, the goofy muscleman we’d liked in Cactus Jack, as well as lots of whopping great swords and a baddie who could turn into a snake! I showed Dad the glossy stills printed in Starburst magazine, and waved my copy of the novelisation in his face. In fact, there was only one detail I kept hidden from him: the AA certificate, which prohibited anyone under the age of 14 from seeing the film.
I wasn’t fazed. I wore my burgundy leather jacket that day and stocked up on Juicy Fruit in preparation for some emphatic gum-chewing. Those factors alone would surely be enough to add three years to my age. The danger as I saw it was not that I would be refused entry but that I might very well be mistaken for James Dean.
That wasn’t quite how it panned out. The woman at the ticket desk gave me the once over.
“He’s not 14,” she said.
“I know,” Dad replied. “So what?”
She broke the bad news while Dad took a step back from the counter. He sighed heavily, huffing and puffing and saying “Dear-oh-law” and “We drove all this way” and “Oh blimey”, which I knew was serious because in our family we didn’t say “blimey.” We said “blimus.” It was a Carry On Cleo joke.
My father is an East End geezer straight out of central casting: shaved head, rough edges, bags of front. The sort of firework you don’t want going off indoors. But I had seen him angry plenty of times and this wasn’t the real deal: it was surprise and inconvenience worked up artificially into a performance. Possibly he had in mind a lesson learned from Mel Brooks’s Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety, one of his favourite films. There’s a scene where Brooks and Madeline Kahn, finding themselves on the run from the police, try to sneak through customs disguised as an elderly kvetching couple. “If you’re loud and annoying,” Brooks tells Kahn, “psychologically people don’t notice you.” And he’s right. The demonstrative drunk on public transport is usually guaranteed a wealth of personal space and the pick of the best seats.
That must be why Dad caused enough of a fuss for the cashier to decide that it might just be easier to let us in.
“Go on,” she said with a wink. “But sit yourselves at the back, alright?”
As we crept into the dark, the short film before the main feature was just finishing – it was a documentary about the medicinal uses of snake venom – and Conan the Barbarian was up next. Basil Poledouris’s thunderous, stirring score boomed out of the crummy speakers in Screen Two and for the next couple of hours I was in a disbelieving trance. What do I remember of the film itself? Watching it again now, I can only say: pretty much everything. I can hum every note of that score. And the violence is branded on my memory, from the casually brutal killing of young Conan’s mother at the start of the movie – her severed head drops past the camera in a blur while the boy is still holding her hand – to the sight of Schwarzenegger punching a camel. (You will search in vain for a “no animals were harmed during the making of this film” disclaimer in the end credits.)
What I hadn’t minded at the time was John Milius’s laborious direction, or the plodding, meat-and-potatoes script that is credited to him and Oliver Stone. But then in many ways this is the archetypal adolescent-boy movie, from the epigram taken from Nietzsche to the lip-smacking shots of phallic symbols (swords, snakes, arrows). Their only rival for closeups is Schwarzenegger himself, who looks adorable despite the baby-oiled, bowling-ball biceps; I’m amazed to find that the schoolboy crush I had on him is revived today as I watch. There’s a giddy innocence in his eyes here that would calcify within the decade into a businessman’s shrewdness. He appears to be actively enjoying himself, which would be a difficult claim to make about Jingle All the Way.
The majestically feline, feminine aura of James Earl Jones, as the villain Thulsa Doom, is as intoxicating as ever. And how bizarre that during the climax he appoints himself Conan’s parent (“For who now is your father if not me?”) a mere two years after that same rumbling voice had made a not dissimilar announcement to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.
It had slipped my mind that the late Max von Sydow pops up as King Osric, exuding gravitas despite looking, in his fur-trimmed crown and robe, like a skid-row Santa. But I hadn’t forgotten all the flesh on display. So much naked flesh! I’d never seen anything like it. There’s even a full-blown orgy scene where, rather quaintly, the organisers have supplied an enormous cauldron of steaming pea soup. Has anyone ever fancied a bowl of soup after an evening of group sex? I can’t answer that. Nor can I explain how I survived the embarrassment of watching that orgy scene at the age of 11 with my dad sitting beside me. Blimus, indeed.
