Legend (1985)

Directed by: Ridley Scott | 94 minutes | adventure, romance, fantasy | Actors: Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, Billy Barty, Cork Hubbert, Peter O’Farrell, Kiran Shah, Annabelle Lanyon, Robert Picardo, Tina Martin, Ian Longmur, Mike Crane, Liz Gilbert, Eddie Powell, Mike Edmonds

An almost forgotten film from the oeuvres of two big Hollywood names: Tom Cruise and Sir Ridley Scott. How is that possible, you might ask. Is the simplest answer in this case also the best: that ‘Legend’ is not a good movie? When the film went on sale in 1985, it was widely seen as a failure. However, ‘Legend’ is certainly not that bad. But not bad doesn’t make it a good movie. It’s a beautifully crafted fairy tale, which, despite all the heroic adventures, the magical elements and the eccentric characters, never really manages to win over the audience. And what is the audience of the film anyway? When you think of a fairy tale you mainly think of children, but the themes are too dark for that, but which adult can tolerate the constantly rhyming goblins? It’s hard to empathize with the two main characters, Princess Lily (Mia Sara) and the free-spirited Jack (Tom Cruise), so you don’t really care how they turn out and the movie never really takes off. .

Both Cruise and Sara drown a bit in the fairytale setting of flower meadows, trees and lakes, where they frolic about happily, until everything goes wrong pretty quickly. At that moment you know from Lily that she is a princess and from Jack that he lives in the woods. Little or no background is sketched before they are plunged headlong into the adventure. It’s the generic story of good vs. evil, the innocent virgin the villain preys on and a quest for the hero to save the damsel in distress. This time the magical object is the horn of the last unicorns on Earth. The resulting story is a hodgepodge of all kinds of fantasy stories (for example, readers of Tolkien will immediately recognize barely veiled references) and well-known fairy tales, which perhaps came into their own better in their original context. Even Cruise’s famous grin (a lot more pointed here) doesn’t save him from a role that doesn’t allow him to put his own spin on it.

New characters pop up every now and then, each more bizarre than the next, including Hawthorn Gump (David Bennent – ​​Oscar from ‘Die Blechtrommel’), the clearly Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell-inspired Oona (Annabella Lanyon) and the annoying gnome Brown Tom. (Cork Hubbert). Oh yes, in addition to the nerve-racking doggerel, there are also a few songs sung, none of which are memorable. ‘Legend’ gets a much-needed boost when the Lord of Darkness finally arrives. Actor Tim Curry (until then best known for ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ – later as Pennywise the Clown in ‘It’ (1990)) is almost unrecognizable behind layers of make-up, although his deep voice is used to the full. Scott takes an inordinately long time to show Darkness in all its red evil glory – and Curry is arguably the best thing about the entire movie. Donned with huge horns on his head, he steals every scene he’s in and his lip-smacking attitude towards Sara (who was mostly underage during the shoot) is mind-blowing.

As is often the case with Scott, there are several versions of the film in circulation. The blu-ray has two: a beautiful HD version of the European cinema version and a longer “Director’s Cut”. Unfortunately, the latter version cannot be admired in high resolution: this is a copy that was only discovered by chance in 2000, but nevertheless has a few interesting additions. For example, Darkness can be seen earlier and also interacts much more with Lily. With about 25 minutes of additional material, it’s well worth checking out the Director’s Cut as well. Even though the image quality is less, the Director’s Cut feels like a more complete and therefore better film.