Legend: Part 2 of 2
Burning Down the House, Lost Legend, Critical Meltdown, Goodness Restored
For Part 1 of my Legend retrospective, click here.
In recognition of one of nature’s most dazzling spells–unveiling hours more light a day–Video Days celebrates March with five sword and sorcery films from another time.
Visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund had been consulted to solve how Ridley Scott might cast actors of average stature as the little people of Legend. “At one stage I wanted Mickey Rooney to play one of the characters but at 5’2” next to 5’8” Tom Cruise he didn’t look that tiny. Edlund came up with a method of shooting everything on 70mm and taking that negative and shrinking the actors to any size we wanted to make the illusion more realistic. The budget for this alone was enormous and affected everything so I had to axe it and take the gamble on finding an ensemble of good, small actors.” Swiss actor David Bennent (17) and British actor Annabelle Lanyon (23) were cast as the sprites, Gump and Oona. Billy Barty, who was old enough to have appeared in The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a Munchkin but strangely hadn’t, accepted the part of Screwball, while Carl “Cork” Hubbert, another little person, was cast as Brown Tom. American stage actor and Obie Award winner Alice Playten had been cast as the goblin Blix when Scott phoned to ask what she thought of the drawings she’d been shown for her character. Playten confided that she thought of Blix as Keith Richards. Scott and Bottin agreed that the rocker had a great face and used him as their model for Playten’s makeup. To play the unicorns, six white Andalusian horses were acquired in Spain, and in thirty hours, driven to France and ferried across the English Channel to their job site.
Legend commenced filming on March 26, 1984 at Pinewood Studios. With sixteen weeks on the 007 Stage in the can and ten more days to go, on June 27, natural gas utilized to light the bonfire of the faeries sequence had accumulated and caught fire, abundant polystyrene on the set serving as fuel. In a stroke of good fortune, the inferno broke out while cast and crew were at lunch, and there were no human fatalities as the building burned to the ground. Speeding up the construction of the stage they were scheduled to move onto, Scott acknowledged losing only three days of filming, the remaining forest scenes picked up at Pinewood in October. The 007 Stage would be rebuilt in time for the new James Bond film A View To a Kill (1985). Once Scott and Terry Rawlings–dubbing editor on The Duellists who’d been promoted to film editor to solely cut both Alien and Blade Runner–began assembling a work print of Legend into a version that could play for an audience, Universal penciled in a U.S. release date of November 6, 1985.
Ridley Scott admitted to having been a little envious of how terrific The Company of Wolves (1984)--a postmodern take on the Little Red Riding Hood tale based on the novel by Angela Carter–looked with its storybook forest in comparison to its cost, but also noted how the movie had struggled to cross over from the U.K. to the U.S. The director told Cinemafantastique, “American audiences couldn’t seem to grasp the denseness of the plot or the sequential build up of the story, which is one reason why I have eliminated a lot of the subtext and detailing from my original cut of Legend.” According to Rawlings, the first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes, which Scott and his editor trimmed to an efficient 113-minute version the director deemed ready to put before a test audience, in Orange County, California. The screening went poorly. Very poorly. Scott’s cut had screened at the Venice Film Festival in late August 1985, but Universal made the decision to move off its planned November release in the States to give Scott time to triage what wasn’t working.
The biggest alternation to Legend in the U.S. was the decision to jettison an orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith and replace it with a score by electronic band Tangerine Dream, whose musical accompaniment for Tom Cruise in Risky Business may have been considered MTV-friendly and a part of that film’s appeal among teenagers. Goldsmith had clashed with Ridley Scott during the scoring of Alien, the director rejecting some of the composer’s work in favor of cues Goldsmith had written years earlier for Freud (1962) and cutting Goldsmith’s music out of the end credits entirely, inserting Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, Romantic. Goldsmith, a fourteen time Academy Award nominee with one win, for The Omen (1976), would have had to fly to Europe to hear his music for Legend in a theater. David Bennent, who’d performed Gump with his own (German) accent, had his voice dubbed by Alice Playten, giving the character what studio executives considered an accent palatable to Americans. William Hjortsberg came back to write a title crawl explaining the world of Legend (“Once long ago, before there was such a thing as time, the world was shrouded in darkness,” it began). Several of the cuts were intended to refashion Jack from an unwilling hero into a hard-on warrior. In Scott’s version, the boy employs his wits to distract Meg Mucklebones (Robert Picardo) from attacking him in the swamp, while in the version made for the U.S.A., Jack simply cuts her down with his sword as quickly as he can. A 95-minute version of Legend would open in limited release in the U.K. on December 6, 1985, but the version that Americans would see was chopped down to 89 minutes.
When the Los Angeles Times reached out to Ridley Scott in January 1986 to comment about his film’s post-production woes, the director was not amused by implications his movie was in trouble. “I came out of advertising and marketing. So I believe when you do something to communicate, you must aim for the widest audience possible. To ignore that audience is utterly foolhardy.” Rather than force Tom Cruise to compete against himself–Top Gun set to open a week ahead of Memorial Day weekend–Universal scheduled Legend a month earlier, for April 18, 1986 in 1,187 theaters in the U.S. Critics summoned more derision for the film than the test audience had. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel completely wrote it off. “Oh, sure, I could tell you more about Legend–about how the princess turns into a Dark Ages disco queen and writhes in terror in front of a red devil. But I don’t want to remember any more about Legend than to make sure I include it in my ‘worst films of 1986’ list and never rent it when it comes out on video cassette.” Siskel gave the movie 1 ½ stars out of 4. Roger Ebert was more complimentary in his pan, for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Despite all its sounds and fury, Legend is a movie I didn’t care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can’t save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishments.” Ebert pinned it with 2 stars out of 4.
For readers of LA Weekly, Michael Dare dug the dagger in deep. “A magnificent example of visual storytelling and not much else. You get the feeling that if director Ridley Scott could have told this story with no words whatsoever, he would have done so gladly. Instead of a nice little bedtime story, he’s constructed a nice enormous bedtime story, a 5,000-pound Twinkie guaranteed to give an unparalleled sugar rush to all.” Whatever could be written about Legend, the competition it opened against stunk. Cannon Films chucked Charles Bronson into another substandard action thriller, Murphy’s Law, while Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo starred in Wise Guys, a mob comedy directed by Brian DePalma with no laughs in it. The Money Pit, Police Academy 3: Back In Training and Gung Ho were hanging around in their fourth, fifth and sixth weekends of release. Legend opened #1 at the box office and without any new competition in its second weekend, held that spot. After four weekends in release, Top Gun and the films of early summer shoved Legend out of the top ten. Ridley Scott’s 113-minute cut was thought to be lost, but in a credit to Universal, a pristine answer print was discovered in 2000 and with the director’s approval, issued on DVD in 2002, with Jerry Goldsmith’s score restored. (Buyer beware, the 89-minute version of Legend is in circulation among streaming services).
The 113-minute version is the only acceptable version of Legend. It offers the viewer a few treats, first being the opportunity to spend as much as twenty minutes more in the storybook forest designed by Assheton Gorton, without a pixel of computer generated effects. Everything we see from duck feathers to demons were shot live and most of it looks fantastic. In an era when Ridley Scott was in friendly competition with Adrian Lyne and his brother Tony Scott to see which director could light a set in more spectacular fashion, Legend stands as an achievement in cinematography, Alex Thomson having lit Excalibur (1981) and Year of the Dragon (!985). The director’s cut allows us to spend enough time with Lili to not only detect something like a character–a precocious brat, perhaps even a Book of Genesis-styled temptress–but offers fewer distractions from Tom Cruise, whose presence as a nature boy is misbegotten, to put it mildly. Cruise–playing someone other than an American high school student for the first time in his film career–is a good actor being very badly directed. Surrounded by artifice on a soundstage, he’s asked to play the dutiful farm boy Westley from William Goldman’s novel and soon-to-be major motion picture The Princess Bride (1987) but without any of Westley’s athleticism or joie de vivre, two of Cruise’s strengths.
Rather than creating a myth chock full of fresh motifs for a new generation, Scott shoplifts from Disney and stripmines Star Wars. Legend is so sold on the Luke Skywalker-Princess Leia-Darth Vader model that it never questions if the story needed a boy and a girl. Lili enters a magic forest, defies nature by touching a unicorn, and could have easily been the character sent on a hero’s journey to set her blunder right. Jack’s presence in the story is as unnecessary as Jennifer Connelly’s young heroine in Labyrinth (1986) turning a corner and finding Keanu Reeves sitting there. By pretending that all of Cruise’s scenes are being played by Mia Sara, Legend can masquerade as a good film. Rob Bottin’s work is beyond peer, with Robert Picardo turning in another small but perfect performance in Bottin’s makeup, having played Eddie Quist in The Howling and the obnoxious aliens in Explorers (1985). The film was drawn up to top everything that had come before it, for example, having Picardo leap out of water in full prosthetics as the swamp hag, but the picture is shot and edited in a way that seems embarrassed of its technical ingenuity, refusing to share it with the viewer. Unlike Alien or Blade Runner, Legend largely resembles every other otherworldly film of its era, something critics latched onto and left to discover the film on their own, viewers can pick up on.
Video rental category: Fantasy
Special interest: Sword and Sorcery