Ladyhawke
Michelle Pfeiffer enchants in epic-looking and absurd medieval fantasy
Video Days is Mad About Michelle in the month of April, with ten films starring leading lady Michelle Pfeiffer, born April 29, 1958 in Santa Ana, California and celebrating her 67th birthday this month.
LADYHAWKE (1985) is an American made faerie tale that filters the potent elements of the European faerie tale–make believe, loss of innocence, primal darkness–and leaves the viewer with the weaker components, like clichéd characters and a “happily ever after” ending. Two-dimensional to the point of coming across as lazily written, this decaffeinated fantasy does have a lavish and often spectacular look, mystique and a light romantic mood that forgoes sex or violence, for those who find those distasteful, but is so pieced together it never takes off.
American screenwriter Edward Khmara had authored six screenplays before his seventh, a fantasy adventure titled Ladyhawke, went to market in 1978. Set in the 12th century A.D., it was about two lovers cursed to spend their days separated: a knight who transforms into a wolf at sunset, and a maiden who morphs into a hawk at sunrise. A pickpocket who escapes from a fortress integral to the curse being broken becomes involved with them. Anthea Sylbert, the costume designer who’d segued into an executive career at Warner Bros. and was then VP of production, recommended Khmara’s script as a writing sample to a young producer named Lauren Shuler, who in 1980, was looking for a screenwriter for one of her projects. Shuler fell in love with Ladyhawke and committed to producing it, optioning the script and selling Warner Bros. on developing it. Lacking the prestige to interest a top director, Shuler solicited the help of Alan Ladd Jr., founder of the Ladd Company, an independent producer which had a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Ladd got the script to Richard Donner, a veteran television director who’d graduated to the event films The Omen (1976) and Superman: The Movie (1978).
With financing in place from the Ladd Company, Shuler successfully lobbied Warner Bros. to give her the script back. In March 1981, Donner was announced as director, with Donner and Shuler as producers. Ladd added David Webb Peoples–who’d punched up Hampton Fancher’s script for Blade Runner (1982)--to the payroll. Australian playwright and journalist Michael Thomas spent a year working with Donner on rewrites before the director drafted Tom Mankiewicz, a “creative consultant” on Superman whose consulting included writing most of the shooting script, uncredited. (For Ladyhawke, the WGA would credit the screenplay to Edward Khmara and Michael Thomas and Tom Mankiewicz, from a story by Khmara). Shuler and Donner had zeroed in on shooting the picture in Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain. Though the price would’ve been right, bureaucratic red tape stalled preparations. The logistical hurdles prompted Donner to direct a comedy that seemed like a slam dunk–The Toy (1982)--while Shuler went into production with her first film as producer, Mr. Mom (1983).
Donner and Shuler settled on filming Ladyhawke in northern and central Italy, which offered crumbling castles and with the Dolomite Mountain range, exquisite scenery. The project nearly fell apart again when the Ladd Company, pushing all their chips into The Right Stuff (1983), dropped out as financier. Donner and Shuler raised the $16 million production budget from Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. the studios splitting the risk, with Fox distributing the picture internationally and Warners in the U.S. Kurt Russell, most recently of The Thing (1982), was cast as the knight, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who’d not only survived but thrived as the leading lady of Grease 2 (1982), cast as the maiden. Pfeiffer was offered Ladyhawke while focused on her role as a gangster’s moll opposite Al Pacino in Scarface (1983) and had turned it down, uninterested in focusing on her next job. Unemployed several months later, the actor reconsidered. To play the pickpocket, Donner was keen to cast Sean Penn, so deep into his Method performance in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) he couldn’t be reached by telephone. Shuler scored a coup in Matthew Broderick, whose year included starring in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway and the summer blockbuster WarGames (1983).
To supplement John Wood as the evil bishop, Rutger Hauer was approached to play captain of the guards. Hauer wasn’t interested, and Ken Hutchison took the part. Ten days before shooting was scheduled to begin in August 1983, Kurt Russell asked out of the picture, later admitting he hadn’t realized how physically demanding it was going to be. Rutger Hauer was available, had worked with swords and horses, and after making a four-day trek from Amsterdam to Rome in his mobile trailer, arrived at Cinecittà Studios to play the knight. A 10th century fortress known as Soncino Castle was used for the pickpocket’s escape, including scenes of Broderick navigating the sewers. Torrechiara Castle, a 15th-century fort near the city of Parma, was utilized for castle interiors, while the Castle of Rocca Calascio, a mountaintop fortress in the province of L'Aquila, was the residence of the monk played by Leo McKern. Ladyhawke opened in April 1985 in the U.S. and other than a review by Pauline Kael in the New York Times, landed very favorable reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up, crediting the film’s combination of magic and romance. Audiences would favor a trio of comedies–Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Moving Violations, Just One of the Guys–but Ladyhawke managed six weeks among the top ten grossing films. More importantly, it became a favorite among fantasy film fans.
Naysayers zeroed in on Broderick’s quip-laden dialogue, and the synthesizer-heavy musical score by Andrew Powell, a composer/ conductor for the prog rock band Alan Parsons Project, with Parsons producing the soundtrack, as lending Ladyhawke an ill-fitting contemporary sound. Neither deter enjoyment of the film and along with its casting, actually set it apart from a block of sword and sorcery pictures like Conan the Barbarian (1982), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), The Beastmaster (1982) and Krull (1983). Broderick is excellent, a bright presence in what could’ve been a film mired in muck, giving a physically comedic performance he seems to take as a greater challenge than the one offered by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Broderick not only brings considerable wit to the film, but does so acting alone or with a hawk. The cinematography by master of light Vittorio Storaro, who lit Apocalypse Now (1979), is resplendent. Richard Donner knew how to shoot an epic, with lavish compositions in anamorphic widescreen, which 21st century televisions allow us to appreciate at home. As for the music, it’s bearable as long as Storaro’s lighting is at play.
Donner, who’d be promoted to a Warner Bros. director in residence with The Goonies (1985) and the Lethal Weapon (1987-1998) series, has a habit of over-dressing his pictures, and this one includes soldiers standing around the bishop’s castle like Yeomen Warders at the Tower of London, a visual element for sure, but silly. The script doesn’t give its villains any currency, which Alfred Molina demonstrates in three scenes as a sinister gamekeeper. The film really needed Molina to stick around to antagonize Rutger Hauer. The curse at the film’s center makes zero sense, a feudal landowner certainly capable of enslaving a maiden, while hiring men to imprison the knight, breaking the spirits of both. A villain with the magical powers he apparently wields would be powerful, and exciting, like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. Ladyhawke isn’t remotely as magical. A world where poor souls can be transformed into forest creatures should be mysterious, which Edward Khmara’s script apparently was before the “sorcery” was taken out of “sword and sorcery” in rewrites. Hauer has no chemistry with Broderick, whose pickpocket isn’t given a compelling reason to hang around the knight. Faerie tales can be notoriously thin on narrative, but Ladyhawke assumes the curse at its center was wonderful enough to carry a two hour film.
Video rental category: Fantasy
Special interest: Magic Spell