A moustache, a loincloth, a flying totem and a verse from Eliot. With ingredients like these, a classic of craft science fiction was cooked with intellectual alibis that prevailed before the rise of Star Wars. Although, of course, not everyone will be ready to assign the classical name to such a peculiar artifact as Zardoz, which is today celebrating its first half century of existence (and controversy).
In February 1974, almost 50 years ago, British filmmaker John Boorman retreated to the Irish countryside to deal with the worst failure of his then-nascent career. Zardoz, his first project after the international success of Deliverance, failed at the box office despite its large budget, a script of which Boorman was particularly proud, and the performance of Sean Connery at the peak of his career the poster fame. .
What went wrong? In the words of renowned critic Gene Siskel: practically everything. Starting with the “narcissistic blindness” that had led the English director to transform a “completely trivial” science fiction epic into a “confusing exhortation to debauchery and a crazy excuse for death.” In Siskel's opinion, Boorman had contracted two of the worst cinematic diseases: self-indulgence and excess. For him, Zardoz was a narrative and aesthetic fiasco.
Sean Connery in the most famous image from “Zardoz”: with long hair, a gun in his hand, high boots and… those clothes. Silver Screen Collection (Getty Images)
Half a century later, Siskel's opinion, like that of Pauline Kael, Jay Cocks, Roger Ebert and so many other experts who hated the film without nuance and persistently ridiculed it, causes some confusion. We have become accustomed to considering Boorman's film as a “cult” work, that is, a rarity for film fans with impartial and sensitive tastes, a discreet celebration of minorities, in the wake of Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984), The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Big Heist in Little China (John Carpenter, 1986) or The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976). As critic Jonathan Rosenbaum would say, we are so postmodern that we have lost the habit of taking cinema literally, accustomed to reading in a twisted, condescending or ironic reading, and Zardoz is perfect for that style the reading.
Boorman was serious
But the fact is that Boorman had no intention of committing simple hooliganism. He wanted his film to be taken seriously. He was aware that he would be adding a merciless helping of countercultural kitsch and demented esotericism to the stew, but that didn't mean he gave up on the fact that Zardoz represented a new evolutionary step in that “metaphysical” science fiction that Stanley Kubrick wrote in 2001 had brought to life: A space odyssey.
Boorman was born on the banks of the Thames in Shepperton, near London, in January 1933 (he has just turned 91) and grew up obsessively reading books in the back room of the pub run by his married couple parents the middle class, led without education. Superiors. At the age of 20 he joined the British army. He ended up serving as an instructor and was almost sent to the Korean War.
His great anecdote from his youth is that he was court-martialed for “promoting desertion and defeatism” among the soldiers he trained, while being critical of his country's foreign policy and its shameful subordination to the US imperial project . In his defense, he argued that much of the opinion expressed in the barracks was based on an article in the Times, a respected newspaper that could not be described as unpatriotic. He was acquitted.
After leaving military life he worked in a laundry and began training as a television producer, first at Southern Television and later at the BBC. At the age of 30 he made a successful documentary, Six Days to Saturday (1962), which looked at the daily operations of a football club, Swindon Town, then playing in the English second division.
John Boorman, director of “Zardoz,” in front of a poster of his creature while promoting the film. Sepia Times (Sepia Times/Universal Images Gro)
Catch Us If You Can (1965), a strange and suggestive vehicle for the pop group Dave Clark Band, was his first feature film. Then came Point Blank (1967), an elegant and amoral thriller starring the great Lee Marvin as a hired killer with a paradoxical sense of justice, and the no less remarkable Hell in the Pacific, again with Marvin on board.
At the age of 35 and with just three films under his belt, Boorman had already established a reputation as a versatile professional with good taste. United Artists offered him the opportunity to embark on his first “auteur” project, working on his own script and without any creative interference, and this crystallized in the highly regarded Leo the Only (1970), a special one Homage to the cinema of Federico Fellini. with Marcello Mastroianni in the role of an idle heir and ornithology fan who, with more will than judgment, tries to intervene in the lives of the residents of a modest London neighborhood. He won the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival and with it carte blanche for even more personal projects.
The disturbing defense, in which Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty descended by canoe into the bitterest hell of rural America, proved his ability to combine critical prestige with box office success. Although he received three (unsuccessful) nominations for the Oscars, in the end, as he himself noted a few years later, the 46 million he earned were his best endorsement, the blank check that put him on the level of the first swords in the industry he lifted . .
How to waste your prestige on two films
In 1972, he left Warner Bros., Defense's distributor, and signed an even more lucrative contract with 20th Century Fox. Shortly before, he was close to agreeing on a pharaonic adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” with United Artists. In his view, rings should bring to light the entire metaphysical substrate of Tolkien's work and turn it into a cinematic spectacle “that stimulates thought.”
The psychotropic American poster for “Zardoz”. LMPC (LMPC via Getty Images)
This interest in setting a story of broad intellectual significance in a fantasy setting eventually crystallized in Zardoz, a screenplay written by four hands with his old friend Bill Stair. Inspired by the mystical poetry of TS Eliot, the cycle of Arthurian legends and the young adult literature of Frank L. Baum (The Wizard of Oz), Boorman and Stair imagined a planet Earth at the end of the 23rd century, destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe and where two species of human survivors coexist: the Eternals, a higher caste imprisoned in an idyllic pair (the Vortex, the only truly habitable area on the planet) and where scientific advances have allowed them to achieve immortality , and the Brutals, reduced to a precarious, troglodytic existence in a vast wasteland known as the Outlands.
Fox executives weren't thrilled with the script, but decided to trust a Boorman who seemed to be in a state of grace and had also guaranteed them that one of the stars of the moment, Burt Reynolds, would be in the film would play along. The operation threatened to derail at the penultimate corner when Reynolds decided to turn down the role of Zed, the leader of the Brutals and supposed messiah of this dystopian universe, citing scheduling problems but in reality guided by his instincts and opinion wasn't sure whether a film with such an absurd approach would bear fruit.
After a tense period of waiting, the stroke of luck came that ensured that all the pieces fit together: Sean Connery, who had just turned his back on his ten-year involvement in the James Bond series after “Diamonds Are Ever” (1971). , was looking for new acting challenges and was looking forward to working with Boorman. In reality, the then 42-year-old Scottish actor would have worked with anyone willing to hire him. After a short break, he had seen the perverse effects of his long association with Agent 007: the world could hardly imagine him in any other role. Driven by this fear of extreme typecasting, Connery accepted the role Boorman offered him without questioning it, even if it entailed such onerous duties as growing a mustache for a Prussian sergeant or dressing something less than an implausible loincloth with cross-shaped suspenders, which would later become the film's most remembered image and still a source of ridicule today.
The film was shot in the Republic of Ireland, at Ardmore Studios in Bray, near Dublin, and several surrounding locations. Boorman also had the presence of another famous actress, Charlotte Rampling, who would also soon release the film that would finally establish her: Night Porter (1974).
The filming brought with it a number of minor inconveniences, such as local protests against the nude scenes filmed outdoors or the strict controls that Ireland imposed on the importation of firearms, a consequence of the IRA's activities. But thanks to Boorman's relaxed and conversational style, the production process was largely quiet. Connery settled in Bray and enjoyed the feeling of being separated from the world, the small everyday joys and the reunion with the profession beyond the strenuous circus that the James Bond films had become.
Sean Connery rests during a game of golf in 1974, the year “Zardoz” was released. Doug McKenzie (Getty Images)
Boorman did the rest immediately, in a very intensive post-production process in which he included, for example, the process of composing an avant-garde score (“real 23rd century music,” he would say) by the scholar David Munrow of the Early Music Consort. The discreet use of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 completed an acoustic landscape that Boorman wanted to describe as “overwhelming.”
The film was released in the winter of 1974, a year with major box office hits such as “Hot Saddles”, “The Burning Colossus”, “Airport 75” and “Young Frankenstein”, and by no means had the expected impact. Worse, he was the subject of ridicule and parody. Connery's loincloth and bare (and hairy) chest didn't go unnoticed.
Kyle Anderson, an expert on lysergic cinema and cult cinema, finds it astonishing that John Boorman was paid almost two million dollars to spend with complete impunity on a film as crazy, delusional and proudly cheesy as this, despite acknowledging “sublime” achievements such as z The titular Zardoz, the giant stone head who flies over the Outer Lands and is worshiped by the most violent faction, the Brutals, a group of murderers who exterminate their fellow humans like vermin while screaming, “Guns yes, penises no.”
In Anderson's opinion, the message is nothing more than disturbing gibberish, a hymn to life and a passionate call to eschew the conformism and apathy that manifest themselves in insane mysticism, irrational violence and sick and unpleasant sex. In short, ingredients that were completely misunderstood in their time but today generate a retrospective cult that increases its aura.
After his spiritual retreat in Ireland and after the wounds left on his ego by this epic failure had healed, Boorman went one step further and signed the sequel to The Exorcist (The Exorcist II: The Heretic, 1977), a film that… Even he himself loathed it, and then he would regain the honor with the astonishing and ultimately bland Excalibur (1981).
Years later, the director would recall that Zardoz had been for him a “school of failure” and a cure for humility. “When you feel like you're on top of the world, you're more likely to fall off a cliff,” he explained. However, fortunately for him, there is no failure that cannot become an object of worship when he has a Mythomanian ammunition as thick as Sean Connery walking around half-naked with a revolver in his hand, or a flying head, who flies over a dark fantasy desert.
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