Crossing Blades
Ridley Scott’s The Duellists

3,142 words

In the late 1980s I lived in Brixton, South London. The London in England, that is, not the one in Kentucky or the dozen or so other Londons that are dotted across North America. Occasionally, on a Saturday night after the pubs closed, my friends and I would pile over to the all-night movie show. The famous cinema there was called The Ritzy—formerly The Little Bit Ritzy—and it was a flea-bitten old pit, a relic from the pre-TV golden age of British cinemas. With its sticky carpets, red velvet seats rubbed raw from decades of use, garish brocade and flaking gold-painted cherubs set on fake Doric columns, The Ritzy was a film set in itself.

They would put on all-nighters, sometimes horror, sometimes Westerns, mob flicks, whatever. These marathons began at midnight and ended whenever the last movie’s credits rolled, and it was a cinematic endurance test some didn’t make it through awake. I went there one night to a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it was the first and only time I’ve seen the famous audience this movie attracts. They turned up in drag, stockings and suspenders, corsets, dressed up as Dr. Frank-N-Furter or one of the other garish, ghoulish characters from this crackpot, low-budget, cult piece of schlock. They carried water-pistols, umbrellas, and confetti, and chanted out every line in time with the movie. The Ritzy was always thick with a cannabis haze, so second-hand smoke sometimes rendered it hard to make it through an all-nighter, no matter how much coffee you had put away. The foyer at The Ritzy kept the java coming on an industrial scale.

The program one night featured early films from famous American directors, sometimes even debuts from film-makers who would go on to become Hollywood legends. From that night, I remember Boxcar Bertha, a gritty movie set in America’s Depression era, and Martin Scorsese’s second feature. Star Wars fans will undoubtedly know THX 1138, George Lucas’ directorial debut and very creepy sci-fi (the best kind). Then there was The Duel, Steven Spielberg’s first movie in the director’s chair and a stern warning about the dangers of road rage, as a car driver becomes involved in an on-road battle with a huge and demonic truck. But it was a film with a very similar title to the latter that I still remembered years later.

The Duellists was Ridley Scott’s first movie, and was released in 1977. It wasn’t really under the wing of a recognized studio, but was more one of those semi-independent productions the American new wave of the 1970s had earned the right to have. That revolutionary decade in Hollywood is the subject of a very good account, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, and remains my personal favorite for reasons Scott’s debut exemplifies. The Duellists did only modestly well at the box office, but its small budget paid its way. It was a critical success, winning best new movie at Cannes, and has become something of a cult favorite since. Based on a 1908 Joseph Conrad novella set in the Napoleonic Wars, the film concerns two Hussars who duel not once but several times over a 20-year period. When Conrad’s original story was serialized in London’s Pall Mall magazine, it ran as The Duel. For the American market, however, this was changed to A Point of Honor. This title is less effective, as the tale is about duelling as a psychological battle as much as an actual one, and honor takes second place to obsession.

Scott came across Conrad’s tale, which he claims was a preparatory sketch for a longer piece on the Napoleonic Wars (Conrad’s unwritten War and Peace, perhaps?) and was intrigued. The director had already had to shelve a movie called The Gunpowder Plot, about Guy Fawkes, and was keen to do a period piece. The film’s screenplay was written by a gentleman named Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, who I had never heard of and did little else after this. He deserves credit here, however, as he has balanced source and onscreen dialogue to perfection. The script takes just enough of Conrad’s original dialogue and adds not too much of the spice of the modern. Although there is an introductory voiceover to the movie, it is not taken directly from Conrad’s tale, the opening of which sets a scene that any Hollywood producer would have found hard to resist had Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski himself made the pitch:

Napoleon I, whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.

Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage.

Conrad’s tale was based on a true story. The legend of a set of duels between two French officers, Pierre Dupont de l’Étang and François Fournier-Sarlovère, had long passed into army legend, and these gentlemen fought some 30 duels against one another over many years. The Duellists was actually shot in and around Fournier’s home village. This duelling pair were the basis for the two Hussars we see both in Conrad’s novella and Scott’s film: Gabriel Feraud and Arnand D’Hubert.

The two officers, the fiercely Bonapartist Feraud and the dapper and reserved D’Hubert, are played by Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine respectively, but the strength of the cast does not end with these two consummate actors. The Duellists, its two American stars notwithstanding, is a fine ensemble showpiece for the English acting profession of the late 1970s. Edward Fox plays a chevalier, Albert Finney makes a cameo appearance as a district commissioner, and the excellent Tom Conti plays a rather esoteric, flute-playing surgeon whose only professional cause for complaint is that he spends more time patching up officers after duels than he does with the sick. Keitel and Carradine retain their American accents against this backdrop of Englishness, a good move as it lends them the air of the exotically different without taking the risk of an unconvincing accent.

The film opens near Strasbourg in 1800, the year Napoleon took power, and a small farm-girl drives a pack of geese down a woodland path. Geese, fierce defenders of territory, but notorious for squabbling among themselves, much like the army. The girl comes face-to-face with a glowering Hussar, and we cut to the first fight. It’s worth watching this 90-second duel to get the taste for the movie, as Feraud and a villager (apparently played by the son of the great English actor, Sir Alec Guinness) fight with rapiers. Note how little time is spent actually clashing blades as the two combatants circle one another and feint. This is not Erroll Flynn, although the fight arranger on The Duellists married the grand-daughter of the man who did the sword-fight choreography on Flynn’s films, which certainly kept sword-fighting in the family.

When Feraud grievously wounds the man—who turns out to be the nephew of a local dignitary—D’Hubert is sent to arrest him at a salon. Back at Feraud’s apartment, the lieutenant taunts D’Hubert, insisting on fighting there and then in the garden. D’Hubert accepts, and from that moment his future is sealed as he is trapped inside the design of someone not altogether stable. Feraud’s unquenchable anger will remain so throughout this protracted duel, and it quickly becomes clear that Feraud will not stop unless he himself is stopped. Throughout the film, wherever D’Hubert is stationed, so too Feraud appears like a Greek fate, sword in hand and absurd perceived slight at the ready.

Conrad’s masterful character-building easily sustains the movie’s central tension. While the whole war of psychological attrition burns steadily inside Feraud, the gradual process of enlightenment emboldens D’Hubert, who was hardly timid to begin with. A soldier rising through the ranks precisely because of his calm efficiency in the field and composure under fire realizes that his sense of himself is being unseated by an upstart son of a carpenter with a death wish. There is a class aspect here, as D’Hubert is upper class without being fully aristocratic, while Feraud comes from the artisanal class. But both have epiphanies as they come to realize the role their adversary plays in their lives. Preparing to draw up his will before one of the duels in Conrad’s original, D’Hubert sees what he is doing and who it is making him become:

Then Captain D’Hubert crumpled up the blank sheet of paper headed with the words ‘This is my last will and testament’, and threw it in the fire with a great laugh at himself. He didn’t care a snap for what that lunatic could do. He had suddenly acquired the conviction that his adversary was utterly powerless to affect his life in any sort of way, except, perhaps, in the way of putting a special excitement into the delightful, gay intervals between the campaigns.

D’Hubert has already won one duel, against himself. While his wife recounts some tale of domestic woe, D’Hubert realizes he has not listened to or understood a word she has said. It is Conrad’s talent as a writer of psychological subtlety not to tell us what concerns the officer, now a General, and why his mind is elsewhere. D’Hubert has crossed over into Feraud’s circle of obsession, and seen his fate there:

The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute, came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless destiny.

At the end of dueling, D’Hubert is slightly shocked to find that “life appeared robbed of its charm, simply because it was no longer menaced.” All the atmosphere supplied by Conrad is present in Scott’s film, and The Duellists is the perfect combination of a master story-teller and a master visualizer.

Despite the fact that D’Hubert has been drawn into the pathological obsession of a madman through no fault of his own, his superiors have no sympathy whatsoever. The situation has come about, for whatever reason, and now it is a matter of honor. Ethically and literally, D’Hubert is in the army now. Each time D’Hubert is promoted, Feraud matches his elevation in rank. This removes one unwritten rule of dueling: that fights may not take place between officers of different rank. Carradine does a fine job of portraying a man scouring himself for any signs of cowardice, of weakness, of wishing to escape his fate even though it is not in his own hands.

Actors, as we know, just can’t wait to say the nicest things about their fellow thespians, and Keitel and Carradine make, as it were, perfect foils for one another. But Carradine’s appraisal of Keitel in this movie is attested by a performance as psychologically aggressive as others he has played. I wrote about Keitel for Counter-Currents, in 1973’s early Scorsese movie Mean Streets, and as a police inspector in Nic Roeg’s 1980 movie Bad Timing, and he is one of Hollywood’s great unsung actors. Keitel was aggressive, said Carradine, and it was intimidating. An actor of limited range, Keitel must be one of those whom his colleagues secretly feel uncomfortable working with because he has a tendency to steal scenes simply by brooding.

Ridley Scott was not a nervous debutante in the director’s chair. American film unions had strict demarcations covering what roles a film crew played, and the director and camera operator were different jobs officially as well as a standard part of film-making. Scott, however, had come from advertising, and was used to directing and shooting at the same time. It surprised some of the cast, but the results are exceptional. The unsteady, jerky camerawork during the second duel, in the garden, ratchets up the tension in a way that poised shooting would not.

The Duellists was made for under a million dollars, and sacrifices had to be made. It was a no-build set due to these financial constraints, but that proved a winning formula when one sees the result of Scott’s use of pre-existing and ancient structures. Some directors build their sets, Scott went out and found his. Although the film is set in the Napoleonic Wars, there is no battle scene. “We couldn’t afford one,” Scott said. But there is no such battle in Conrad’s story, and Scott may have simply been deflecting studio demands for a blood-and-guts battlefield scene. But The Duellists concerns a psychological clash as much as a physical one, and there is actually not all that much dueling time onscreen in the final edit. But these scenes are grippingly tense, the viewer dragged into every cut and thrust.

For its budget, or lack of it, The Duellists is remarkable in its final form. It is a very complete film, which pleases the viewer on every level. Actor David Carradine said of the movie that, “Films can be ruined if you have too much money.” A truth that has been confirmed time and again in the years since. The exterior lighting is used to full effect, and even the rather clunky lens filters used to produce brooding skies contribute to the shots, some of which are painterly. There is a long section set in and around a château, and in the late 1970s this type of accomplished period filming was still relatively novel. Kubrick had done a superb job of lighting period interiors two years previously in 1975 with Barry Lyndon, and Scott’s film is equally pleasing to the eye.

The duelling scenes are brilliantly staged, crunchingly aggressive, and subtly choreographed. At the outset of one duel D’Hubert suddenly raises his finger to Feraud and turns away, his nerve seemingly having deserted him. He stands for a second, raises his hand to his face – and sneezes. It is so entirely natural I wonder if it was a lucky ad-lib, but it gives an immediate authenticity to the scene. Sneezing is an ordinary thing to do. So is duelling.

The two men fight with sabers on foot and on horseback, as well as with pistols, and at one point fight to a literal standstill. But throughout their deadly rivalry remains a fixity of purpose, known to himself already by one of the combatants, and quickly dawning on the other. A sentence from Conrad which does not make the script surely stuck somewhere in Ridley Scott’s mind, as it gives the psychological—or even psychopathological—tone for the whole movie:

A duel, whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of honour, or even when reduced in its moral essence to a form of manly sport, demands a perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood.

Nothing ever explains Feraud’s death wish, whether for himself or his opponent. The surgical flautist recounts having met a man with a theory of his own about the two duelists, as this gentleman “affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggesting that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.”

Meeting Edwards Fox’s old chevalier once again many years after the vendetta began, and after Napoleon’s defeat and the return to the throne of Louis XVIII, D’Hubert learns of Feraud’s arrest for Bonapartism. D’Hubert makes the point that the whole army was Bonapartist during the war, but Feraud is to be executed. D’Hubert pleads for his enemy’s life, and Feraud’s name is removed from the list of those to be killed for treason.

D’Hubert presents an outward aspect of loyalty to a code both military and personal, but one wonders at his real motive for pleading successfully for Feraud’s life. He says, rather nobly, “I wouldn’t be able to shake off the notion that I’ve ruined a brother officer.” He also requests that his special pleading be kept from Feraud. But D’Huibert keeps it too, close inside, knowing that while Feraud had him in his power out in the open field, D’Huibert now commands Feraud’s fate invisibly. It is a moral canvas on which the final duel is painted.

To issue spoilers would be to invite the reader to instruct me to prepare my seconds and meet at dawn on the heath. That would not, however, be advisable, as although I escaped with my life from my last (and only) duel, my opponent was not so fortunate. I had been cast as a Prussian Captain in a University production of a Noël Coward operetta, Bitter Sweet. One scene demanded a swordfight between me and the hero, whom I dispatched with a fencing foil, no easy task. A chap from a London stage school had taught me and the other actor a rudimentary swordfight in a couple of hours, and the result was a success, in the context of amateur dramatics. If you haven’t leapt in the air while standing on a table as a blade flashes beneath your cavalry boots, you haven’t lived.

The Duellists is an extraordinarily good debut from a man destined for cinematic super-stardom. It is also an adaptation of which its author would have been proud, and proof that there is gold in those hills when it comes to the adaptation of even the minor works of the great novelists, as many directors have proved since. The Duellists is also very beautiful to look at, with the interior lighting a masterclass in chiaroscuro. Scott’s cinematographer, Frank Tidy, had travelled with him from the world of advertising, in which interior lighting is an art.

As with the scriptwriter, who seemed to have this one good shot in him and that was that, Frank Tidy vanished almost with trace after a film he helped to make so evocative. Two years after working with Scott, Tidy worked on a version of Dracula so bad he remained uncredited, and after a wholly anonymous career the only later film of his I had even heard of is Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. It’s a mystery to me as to why only Ridley Scott went on to greater things after a directorial debut which was such an accomplished team effort.

Scott, of course, would become famous before the decade was out for two science-fiction movies about as far from the dueling field as one could wish for. But the finale of Alien is very much a duel (and the space-ship was named Nostromo, after one of Conrad’s most famous novels). The famous climax of Blade Runner is also duelistic, an element which does not appear in the book on which that film was based, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Perhaps the central theme of Scott’s debut, that of a duel to the death, stayed with the director in his later work. En garde!