It’s not a crime against film, but no masterpiece. My reaction when I first saw it (81ish, at a college film fest) was that this was a somewhat pretentious F/SF theatre-of-weird “idea” piece from the time when people were crashing down from their 60s trips.
The most remarkable thing about Zardoz is that it was made at all. Imagine what the studio pitch must have been like: “There these savages, see? And then a giant head comes floating down from the clouds and tells them ‘the gun is good and the penis is evil…’”
Here are a couple scene reenactments - https://twitter.com/PhilSzostak/status/926320180346499072/photo/1
As for Mr. Connery, he seemed to specialize in characters of above-average intelligence…except during his pre-Bond days. In Action of the Tiger (1957), he plays a drunken sot first mate who tries to rape heroine Martine Carol. In Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), he is a mere henchman. And in On the Fiddle (1961), he is the dimwitted goofball sidekick of scamming Alfred Lynch.
From IMDB: “In the 1960 television adaptation of Colombe, Connery’s character Julien believes his brother Paul (Richard Pasco) is having an affair with his wife Colombe (Dorothy Tutin), and kisses Pasco on the mouth to find out what makes him such a good kisser. Even though, this was a non-sexual kiss, it is still believed to be one of the first male-on-male kisses on television.”
I recall an article in Starlog magazine that was about ‘space ships’. (I remember really liking the space ship Dark Star.) It said that the flying head in Zardoz was supposed to be the head of one of the kings in the Argonath in John Boorman’s production of The Lord Of The Rings. When that didn’t happen, Boorman used the head as the ship in [i[Zardoz[/i].
I have always had a soft spot for the 1976 Robin and Marian where Sean plays a late middle aged Robin Hood returning to England looking for laughs and adventures and to try and continue his relationship with the former Maid Marian (Audrey Hepburn) even though she has become an Abbess while he has been away.
After some basically slapstick hijinks the film changes mood twice at the end. The climatic fight scene is deliberately mundane and “real life” portrayal with two out of shape men, in a muddy field, breathlessly slugging slowly away at each other.
The film ending is a tear jerking piece of tragic romance.
TCMF
If you haven’t seen Sword of the Valiant, don’t bother. Sir Sean is in it for a few minutes – he has his head cut off, then his body walks across the room and re-attaches the head – and you’ll feel Oh, thank God, Connery is here to save this stinker, plus He’s doing this for the money at the same time, which is hardly the point of this “movie.”
There are some good points about Sword of the Valiant (which is a movie version of the Medieval classic Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight), but, unfortunately, there a lot more bad ones. Chief among these is Miles O’Keefe’'s Sir Gawaine in his Dutch Boy Paints haircut*
*Or, as MST3K has it, “Miles and Miles O’Keefe” . O’Keefe unmemorably played Tarzan in the abominably bad Bo Derek version of Tarzan of the Apes. O’Keefe had a tropism for bad films
They were not going to keep doing Connery on SNL celeb jeopardy. Norm McDonald was going to do Burt Reynolds. But Norm was fired for bashing OJ during weekend update during and after the trial and a close friend of OJ at NBC got Norm fired.
He had dementia at the end:
An interesting FB meme I came across today:
Sean Connery died on 10/31/20.
1+0+3+1+2+0 = 7 = 007.
I watched Zardoz since I’ve been thinking about Connery and have always seen the still of him with the “red nappy”.
Yeah, so it feels like Kubrick movie…except without Stanley Kubrick making it. I actually think Zardoz works fairly well while at the same time being mostly a complete mess.
I don’t think it is as bad as people say it is but it seems fairly clear that Boorman is not the genius that a movie like Zardoz requires. If Stanley Kubrick has had the script given to him and a lot of time to work with it, it could have been an amazing movie.
Instead, it is mostly weird and contains many dull sections. Still, it’s an interesting movie and I agree with Ebert that:
“Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it. In the movie’s own terms, this much can be said for sure: It may not make you an Apathetic, but it will certainly age you by two hours.”
As soon as I heard the news about Trebek on the news last night I thought of this post. I am sure other posters have mentioned it also, but quite a coincidence they shuffled off this mortal coil within weeks of each other.
2020 strikes again.