“Prometheus,” the non-prequel to “Alien” that, according to its director, Ridley Scott, still has “strands of ‘Alien’’s DNA,” has received as much pre-opening publicity as any film this summer, and why not? Despite making one disappointing movie after another, Scott has a visual ambition and a yen for grandeur that make each new production seem like an occasion. When working on a vast scale for a wide international audience, he’s rarely lost his painterly signature. A film like “1492: Conquest of Paradise” may be one huge objet d’non-art, but most of the time, even if a Scott production like “Kingdom of Heaven” fails to ignite dramatically, it contains alluring filigree.
He certainly has the right role model. After admitting that “there’s always the danger that the characters can get swamped” on a large canvas, he wrote, “My model is David Lean, whose characters never got lost in the proscenium.” The problem with Scott’s characters in films like “Heaven” or “Robin Hood” is not that they get lost, exactly, but that they’re not passionate or eloquent enough to compete with his spectacle. (You may have left even “Gladiator” wishing for more wit and élan.) Scott was at his best as an epic-maker with “Black Hawk Down,” which brought an impassioned realism to its depiction of the American debacle in Somalia.
Without a strong organizing event, Scott’s movies can fall to dazzling pieces. That includes “Blade Runner,” an enduring cult item so open to reinterpretation and, indeed, re-cutting that I lost track of the various versions—even the number of different “director’s cuts”—a decade ago. Scott and his brother Tony call their production company Scott Free, and its name is on some admirable films and TV shows, including Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” and the series “The Good Wife.” But Scott’s own movies don’t often feel spontaneous; they’re burdened with expectations.
That’s why it’s pleasurable and inspiring to re-see Scott’s gorgeous and thrilling film debut, “The Duellists,” from 1977, which kicks off “Past and Prologue: The Films of Ridley Scott,” a complete retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Think of “Barry Lyndon” as if paced by Howard Hawks. That’ll give you some idea of the voluptuous fury of this wry, volatile romantic adventure. The burnished, lustrous images of Napoleonic Europe zip by, and the Emperor’s hussars racing through them make most movie swashbucklers look conventional and cautious.
In George Stevens, Jr.’s, new collection of American Film Institute interviews, the film’s producer, David Puttnam, says, “What’s extraordinary about the [Joseph] Conrad story [‘The Duel’] is that it’s about violence for no reason. In fact, it’s about a man who invents reasons to justify his obsession for mindless and meaningless violence.” Puttnam also says, “We used the best of the crews that Ridley had used on his [TV] commercials and I had used on my previous films. It was important to do that, because Ridley’s commercials were about looks and style while my features had been about story, and thought I wanted to make a stylish film, I didn’t want to wallow completely in style.”
Taking into account a producer’s possessiveness, “The Duellists” does have qualities rare in Scott’s work, including an exciting lucidity that’s all the more astonishing because its central characters remain partial mysteries. They are, after all, men of action, and they’re never more clearly revealed than when tied together in an infernal tussle. Feraud (Harvey Keitel) is a squat, demon dueller; D’Hubert (Keith Carradine), is a slim, sweet-tempered gentlemen who has the bad fortune to tee him off. Because of a manufactured slight, which is so minimal that Feraud constantly remembers new ones, he engages D’Hubert in a series of duels spanning sixteen years. Compelled by his own honor into combat, D’Hubert gets a reputation as a fire-breather that he’d love to dampen. Feraud both represents the feral side of a code of honor they both share and becomes D’Hubert’s personal heart of darkness. The movie chronicles D’Hubert’s attempt to drive a stake through it.
Though the film is told from the point of view of D’Hubert, both men are satirized. This never-ending duel is a folie a deux. Scowling Feraud, so hungry for honor that he seems to have a ramrod running from his rump to his brain, is the eternal instigator, but D’Hubert is the eternal complier. When Feraud willfully, spitefully misreads his adversary’s deeds, he seems to be the walking expression of D’Hubert’s self-doubt. Together the men have some of the comic symbiosis of Humbert Humbert and Quilty in that other great adaptation, Kubrick’s “Lolita.” D’Hubert meets Feraud’s duelling seconds wherever he turns; it’s almost as if he were Humbert asking the disguised Quilty “Are you with someone?” and hearing Quilty reply, “I’m not with someone —I’m with you.”
Keitel, every muscle of his body taut, with eyes that develop shadows as textured as a relief map, invests the movie with a coiled-spring tension. The most he does to unwind is to throw up his arms after he scores a hit and exclaim a single “La.” But Carradine has a virile grace. In repose, with his military braids undone and his hair fallen in a golden mane, he looks like a hippie Apollo. He captures the bemused quality of Conrad’s hero, watching his life spin out before him but unable to beat the centrifugal force. Together they embody what Conrad meant when he said he wrote this story “to capture … the spirit of the [Napoleonic] epoch—never purely militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost child-like in its exaltation of sentiment—naively heroic in its faith.”
The screenwriter Gerald Vaughan-Hughes gave the supporting cast tense, epigrammatic dialogue and they deliver it as if it were Shaw or Wilde. Tom Conti is a puckish, philosophic army surgeon; Albert Finney an orotund, preening police official; Edward Fox a zealous Napoleonic colonel with a sidelong glance like an evil eye. But it’s Keitel and Carradine’s movie, and by the end they become expressive icons, with Feraud looking increasingly like an exiled Napoleon. Shrouded by mists—dew, fogs, vapors, smoke; lit by dawn, dusk, or by the chancy sun of cloudy days; surrounded by skittering geese and gallant horses, stern seconds and knots of dumbstruck witnesses, the duellists pass simultaneously into history and legend. Yet the film is never static—its fighting flares up with a suddenness that makes you sit straight up in your seat.
In retrospect, “The Duellists” is one of the most impressive directorial débuts in British movie history. It’s as if having a central, magnetizing idea liberated Scott’s imagination. In “The Duellists,” he works originally, on inspiration, as if he doesn’t owe anything to anybody. He really seems scot-free.
Photograph: Everett Collection.
