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The Verhoeven equation, the medieval ride. It cranes down from blue skies darkened by smoke for the dawn of the 16th-century, the mercenary warrior (Rutger Hauer) strides past cannons and crosses to munch on Eucharist wafers like cookies, "you'll miss the looting, come on!" Raping and pillaging are gleeful pursuits, betrayal is the one sin frowned upon by barbarians as they're disarmed and disbanded after helping recapture a nobleman's town. Out of the mud rises St. Martin to point the way, the brute who bears the holy name is seen by the cracked cardinal (Ronald Lacey) in the middle of carnage yet haloed by a flaming wagon wheel. Elsewhere, eternal love between the virginal maiden (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the fancy-pants princeling (Tom Burlinson) is declared under a tree, a pair of decayed corpses dangle from it. (She's promptly kidnapped, the structure from The Wild Bunch has Jack Thompson as the cutthroats' former general now on their trail.) Religion and marriage and the very idea of heroism are hurled into Verhoeven's bestial pyre, his direction has the gift of overabundance—the Spanish locations and castles teem with putrid lushness. Da Vinci contraptions and bubonic pustules, the Russell timbre (The Devils) is carried most nobly by Susan Tyrrell as a tongue-wagging bawd. At the center is the heroine's trajectory as a debauched Boltraffio angel, surviving a brutal defloration by vigorously thrusting her hips, to her violator's surprise. ("You've got an innocent face but naughty feet," she's told following a zesty recomposition of the Tom Jones banquet.) "Life runs its own course..." The tenderest moment is saved for two gay blades at death's door (cf. Lewis' The Big Combo), and there's the poisoned chalice under Leigh's gaze thirty years later in The Hateful Eight. With Fernando Hilbeck, Brion James, John Dennis Johnston, Simón Andreu, Bruno Kirby, Marina Saura, and Nancy Cartwright.
--- Fernando F. Croce |