(C) onan.

Conan came about largely as a result of old-time Movie Mogul Edward R Pressman’s determination to find a starring vehicle for Schwarzenneger. He saw Pumping Iron and was apparently smitten. In essence he became the last in a presumably long line of geriatric sugar daddies for the impoverished but doubtless highly amenable young body builder. The process of getting the film made was arduous, with a number of directors considered to work on Oliver Stone's script, including Ridley Scott, before the project ended up in Milius’ lap. He substantially reworked it and set about casting, choosing Sandahl Bergman as Valeria, having been entranced by her performance in the Air Erotica segment of Bob Fosse’s feted but finally foetid slice of  self-mythologising All that Jazz. “That is a Valkyrie,” Milius apparently enthused (one might be more tempted to use the word "ejaculated") on seeing the blond and athletic Bergman, artistically, essentially, getting her kit off.

In the twentieth anniversary documentary on the making of Conan, the producer Rafaels De Laurentis (daughter of Dino) comments how on the opening of the film there was “a line of .. bikers around the block” and that, as the child pushing the wheel of pain grows and is revealed to be Schwarzenneger/Conan, a huge cheer went up in the audience. Exactly the same thing happened in a Cinema a long way from Hollywood, Barrow In Furness Odeon, where I saw it at the age of 12. In a sense this is the applause heard around the world, emanating from the USA and Britain.

Schwarzenegger fulfils a right-wing fantasy, and a film must be created for him. In other words Arnold must become the great box office star of the Eighties, this is the urgent need. Acting, indeed even clarity of pronunciation are absolutely secondary concerns, and in this sense all of Schwarzenegger’s early films in the Eighties are replays of the appeal of Pumping Iron, celebrations of Schwarzenneger’s body, the body is the star, the locus of attraction, the film's purpose. He sets an unbeatable precedent other stars have to compete with.

The film launches the mini Sword-and-Sorcery boom of the 80s, itself a replay of the Sword and Sandals genre of the 50s, the Steve Reeves movies that Frank wants to “take in” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though this is a boom in mostly straight-to-video movies (it does, however, give ace B-Movie Auter Albert Pyun his only mainstream cinema release with The Sword and The Sorcerer). The Eighties drowns in cheap Fantasy and Sci-Fi thanks to the emergence of the home video market, and mainstream Cinema increasingly begins to shift into a weird zone in which the hyperviolent, spectacularized and cartoonishly simple co-exist. Superheroes are coming back and action movies, featuring a bizarre retinue of real-life martial arts stars, body builders and ex FBI operatives (along with a handful of increasingly steroidal actual actors), are about to become the major box-office successes of the next 30 years.

Conan is slightly before this trend. Milius in his own way is a man between epochs, still touched with some of the moral, aesthetic and philosophical seriousness of the 60s and 70s (the film draws on images from Kobayashi’s magnificent Kwaidan for example). This results in a slow and portentous movie, a film both bloated with its own cumbersome pseudo-intellectualism, which is at the same time sparse and underpopulated, strangely enervated for an “epic”. The film effectively rehearses the idea of the self-made man coming back to destroy the decadent, multiracial cult (echoes of Dirty Harry’s antagonists here), which it’s hard not to read as war-loving Milius’ fantasy of purging society of the last vestiges of the Counterculture, just as Schwarzenegger himself represents a clearing away of the emasculated male protagonist of the Seventies and the promise of a bigger, tougher, dumber future.

The film contains a kind of rallying cry to the beleaguered and besieged American spirit at the start. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.

Nietzsche.