Legend (1985) Review

Official trailer

Darkness wants the last unicorns killed so that night can be permanent. A boy who lives in the forest takes a girl to see them, she touches one, and the world freezes over by morning.

I’m a sucker for how this film looks, and the 7 is for a picture that’s pure atmosphere and knows it. There’s almost no plot here and the script isn’t trying to supply one. What it’s trying to do is build a fairy tale as a physical place, and on that measure it succeeds completely. I could stare at that forest for hours. Staring is about all the script lets me do, though.

The three points come off for a hollow middle. The characters are archetypes with nothing underneath, Tom Cruise is a forest boy with no interior life, and once the visual argument is made in the first act the film has to fill an hour before Curry can appear.

Scott Built the Forest and Then It Burned

Scott wanted an enchanted forest and decided location shooting couldn’t give him control over it. So he built one on the 007 Stage at Pinewood, the largest soundstage in Europe, with fourteen weeks of construction.

The trees were sixty feet high with trunks thirty feet across, sculpted from polystyrene over tubular scaffolding, with five further soundstages carrying the other sets. Scott was reportedly still worried it wouldn’t read as real days before shooting began. Then, near the end of the forest shoot, the stage burned down. It went while the crew were at lunch. That’s the only reason nobody was killed, and it took with it a set of planned overhead and fly-through shots that were never filmed. The crew moved to the other stages, and the needed section of the forest was rebuilt at Elstree for the final sequences.

What survives on screen is a forest that looks like an illustration. Constant shafts of light through dust, floating pollen, water in the air, petals moving on no wind. It’s not a real place and was never meant to be one, and it’s the most convincing invented environment in eighties fantasy.

Alex Thomson photographed it and the technique is simple and relentless. Light comes from behind and above in visible beams, every interior is filled with something for the beams to catch, and nothing is lit flatly at any point. The air is doing as much work as the sets.

Tim Curry Is Working Under Enormous Constraints

Rob Bottin designed Darkness, and the result is red skin, cloven hooves and three-foot horns that were hollow and still heavy enough to strain Curry’s neck and back across a long shoot.

The application took hours and the removal took over an hour of sitting in a bath while adhesive was dissolved. Curry has described losing patience once and tearing his own skin removing it too fast.

Through all of that he gives a performance of real subtlety. Darkness is seductive instead of raging, amused, courteous, and persuasive when he argues to Lili that he’s only the necessary half of the world. The voice is doing almost all of it, because the face can barely move.

Curry is the reason I’ll put up with the whole middle stretch. Watching him purr and reason from under all that latex is a pleasure, and I think he makes the best case in eighties fantasy for casting a voice first and worrying about the face later.

Scott found him by rewatching The Rocky Horror Picture Show while considering Richard O’Brien for a different part. That’s the casting decision people remember the film for, and it’s the reason anyone remembers the film at all. There’s a lesson in the design as well. Darkness looks exactly like the traditional Christian devil, which most fantasy avoids as too obvious, and the obviousness is why he works. The audience needs no explanation of what he is, so every second of screen time can go to what he wants.

The Two Scores Are Two Different Films

Jerry Goldsmith wrote a full orchestral score for the European release. Universal, worried the picture wouldn’t reach American teenagers, replaced it for the domestic version with electronic music by Tangerine Dream, along with contributions from Jon Anderson and Bryan Ferry.

The two versions are different films. Goldsmith gives it the weight and grandeur of a fairy tale being told seriously. Tangerine Dream gives it a floating, synthetic, dreamlike quality that pushes the film toward the eighties and away from timelessness.

I prefer Goldsmith, and the preference is about what the images are doing. Scott shot this as a Grimm story, and orchestral scoring matches that intent. The electronic version isn’t bad, and it’s a different argument laid over pictures that weren’t built for it.

Both are now available. The director’s cut restores Goldsmith and runs a hundred and fourteen minutes against the eighty-nine of the American release, and it’s the version worth seeking out.

The Hollow Middle

After the freeze, the film settles into a rescue. Jack assembles a party of elves and dwarves, they travel, they’re captured, they reach the lair. It’s the least interesting stretch and it takes up most of the running time.

The problem is that nobody wants anything complicated. Jack wants Lili back, Lili wants to undo her mistake, the fairies want to help, and Darkness wants the dark. There’s no conflicting motive anywhere in the film except inside Lili for about four minutes.

The middle is where my attention drifts. Once the party sets out, I’m admiring the set dressing and waiting for Darkness to come back, and a fairy tale shouldn’t leave me checking on the villain like an absent friend.

That four minutes is the best writing in the picture. Darkness dresses her, dances with her, and she considers it. Mia Sara plays real temptation, and for a moment the film has a character making a decision instead of executing a plan.

Tom Cruise is the casualty. He was twenty-two and about to become the biggest star in the world, and Jack is written with no flaw, no doubt and no history, so there’s nothing for him to play. Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey and Robert Downey Jr. were all considered and none of them could have solved it either.

Mia Sara was sixteen when filming started and turned eighteen before it finished. That tells you how long this production ran. She’s the only performer in the film given anything resembling a contradiction, and she’s the one nobody talks about.

Why It Failed and Why It Lasted

Twenty-five million dollars, twenty-three and a half back, and a domestic take around fifteen and a half million. It was a commercial failure in a year when Scott was coming off Alien and Blade Runner. Part of that is the release history. Venice in August 1985, Europe shortly after, and the United States not until April 1986 after the recut and the new score, by which point there was no momentum to inherit.

What preserved it is the design. This film sits on a list of pictures the critics got wrong because the initial reviews were about the story, which is thin, and the durable value is in the images, which nothing has surpassed. I side with those critics on the story and against them on everything else.

Every fantasy film that came after with a practical creature and a built environment is drawing on this and on The Dark Crystal. Bottin’s Darkness in particular has outlived a thousand digital demons, because a real object in a real light does something a rendered one still cannot.

Should you watch Legend?

Yes, and watch the director’s cut with the Goldsmith score. The story won’t hold you and it’s not meant to, and that thin middle is what keeps it at a 7 for me. What you’re there for is a constructed forest, a red demon under three feet of horn arguing his case, and a fairy tale that commits entirely to being one. For those things alone I’d put it on ahead of most of the decade’s fantasy.

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