The Duellists

Ridley Scott's 1977 debut is a poor man's Barry Lyndon, which coming from me is a pretty major insult. It has the same beautiful cinematography and painfully languid pace of Stanley Kubrick's snoozefest, and jettisons the redeeming qualities in favor of even more tedium. In short, it stinks.

During the Napoleonic Wars, French Captain D'Hubert (Keith Carradine) is charged to arrest a fellow officer, Feraud (Harvey Keitel), for killing a man in a duel. Feraud takes umbrage, leading to an indecisive swordfight between the two. This sets in motion a two-decade vendetta, in which the two men, whilst serving in the French army, take every opportunity they get to fight - with swords, on horseback, with pistols, anything they can think of. D'Hubert is willing to live and let live, but Feraud is obsessed with avenging his honor; and long after their quarrel should have been terminated, he continually forces D'Hubert into duel after desultory duel.

The reasoning behind The Duellists seems to be that if we have enough period costumes and enough bloody sword fights, we'll have a damned good movie. Sadly that's not the case here - not even close. Scott's direction is pretty rote; the cinematography by is nothing short of gorgeous, but like Barry Lyndon's, it's ornamental rather than engrossing. Some of the fight scenes are well-staged but others are tedious and interchangable. The movie is oddly paced, jumping across huge gulfs of time, bypassing major events, preventing the viewer from gaining any great interest or excitement - yet also langorous and dull. The movie spends little time with any of its characters aside from D'Hubert and all remain cardboard cutouts. The film's overweening irony is beaten over our heads and yet never makes an impression. The anti-climactic ending is a bit clever but it's not nearly enough to save the movie.

The film's ludicrous casting makes Ryan O'Neal's turn in the Kubrick film look like a tour de force. Keith Carradine gives an adequate performance but his character remains a flat cipher throughout. Harvey Keitel's Brooklyn accent is laughably out of place and his performance remains completely one-note - pissed off for little reason. The main female cast members - Cristina Raines, Meg Wynn Owen, and the ravishing Diana Quick - come off better, but have comparatively little screen time. A fine cast of British character actors - Albert Finney, Edward Fox, John McEnery, Robert Stephens, Tom Conti, Alan Webb - is assembled and wasted.

There's not much to commend The Duellists; it's just a lousy film all around. Scott would quickly evolve into a legendary director, with such works as Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator (none of which are that good for my money), but whatever the merits of his later works, he produced a stinking turd out of the starting gate.