Legend (1985 film)


Legend is a 1985 American epic dark fantasy adventure film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, Billy Barty, Cork Hubbert, and Annabelle Lanyon. The film revolves around Jack, a pure being who must stop the Lord of Darkness who plots to cover the world with eternal night. It is often described as a dark fairy tale and as a return to more original and sometimes disturbing fables originating from the oral tradition of ancient times before reading and writing were widespread.
Although not a commercial success when first released, it won the British Society of Cinematographers Award for Best Cinematography in 1985 for cinematographer Alex Thomson, as well as being nominated for multiple awards: Oscar for Best Makeup; Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films Saturn Award for Best Makeup; BAFTA Awards for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup Artist, Best Special Visual Effects; DVD Exclusive Awards; and Young Artist Awards. Since its premiere and the subsequent release of the unrated Director's Cut, the film has become a cult classic.

Plot

In order to cast the world into eternal night, the Lord of Darkness sends the goblin Blix on a mission to kill the unicorns in the forest near his castle that guard the light and bring him their horns. Blix and his colleagues Pox and Blunder follow impetuous Princess Lili as she visits her forest-dwelling paramour Jack O'Greene, and they kiss for hours in the forest. After failed attempts to progress their relationship, Jack takes Lili to the lair of the unicorns. This is something that would be forbidden amongst mortals, had Jack not blindfolded Lili to keep the location hidden, and did all of it out of love. However, Lili distracts the stallion by stroking it, another forbidden act, allowing Blix to shoot it with a poison dart from his blowpipe, and the unicorns flee. With the couple unaware of the goblins, Lili makes light of Jack's fears concerning her sin and sets him a challenge by throwing her ring into a pond, declaring she will marry whoever finds it. While Jack dives in after the ring, the goblins find the dying stallion and sever its alicorn. An apocalyptic winter descends; Lili runs off in terror and Jack is barely able to break through the surface of the now frozen pond.
Lili takes refuge in the frozen cottage of a kind and friendly family. There, Lili sees the goblins testing the alicorn's magical powers, and overhears from them about how she had a role in their slaying of the stallion, and by doing so, casting the dark winter onto the world. She follows the goblins to a rendezvous with Darkness, who tells them the world cannot be cast into eternal night as long as the surviving mare still lives. Blunder valiantly but unsuccessfully tries using the alicorn to overthrow Darkness and is taken away to his castle. Meanwhile, Jack, accompanied by the forest elf Honeythorn Gump, the fairy Oona, and the dwarves Brown Tom and Screwball, finds the mare mourning the lifeless stallion. Lamenting over his role in their current predicament, Jack cries and apologizes to the mare, who tells him that the alicorn must be recovered and returned to the stallion. Leaving Brown Tom to guard the unicorns, Jack and the others retrieve a hidden cache of ancient weapons and armor. While they are gone, Lili tries to help make things right by helping to save the mare from the goblins, but they overpower Tom and capture the mare and Lili. Learning what has transpired, Jack and his group make their way to the castle in the middle of a swamp. On the way, they are nearly killed by a swamp hag named Meg Mucklebones, but defeat her by flattering her appearance and then decapitating her.
After reaching the castle, Jack's group falls into an underground prison cell in a hellish kitchen. They encounter Blunder in the same cell, revealed to be an elf gone astray, before he is dragged off by an ogre cook to be baked into a pie. Oona offers to use her magic to escape their cell and retrieve keys to free the others if she receives a kiss from Jack. He is tempted when Oona turns into an amorous Lili, but refuses to follow through, telling her "human hearts don't work that way". Oona is greatly offended and scolds Jack, reminding him it was his lust that caused the apocalypse. Despite this, she remembers what's at stake and frees everyone so they can all search for Lili and the mare.
Having fallen in love with Lili, Darkness tempts her with jewelry, a beautiful dress and promises of power and glory. Seemingly seduced, she agrees to wed him under the condition that she will be the one to kill the mare in the upcoming ritual. Overhearing their conversation, Jack and Gump learn that Darkness can be destroyed by daylight. After saving Blunder, the group takes the ogres' giant metal platters to reflect the sunlight to the chamber where the mare is to be sacrificed.
As the ritual begins, Lili frees the mare, but is knocked out by Darkness. While the others relay the light of the setting sun using the platters, Jack fights Darkness, finally wounding him with the severed alicorn. As the redirected sunlight blasts him to the edge of a void, Darkness warns them that because evil lurks in everyone, he will never truly be vanquished. Jack hesitates as he realizes this to be true, but overcomes his doubt and severs the evil hand holding the alicorn, thus expelling him into the void. Gump returns the stallion's horn, returning him to life and ending the winter. Jack retrieves the mystic ring from the pond and returns it to Lili, returning her to life.

Alternate endings

There are three different versions of the film’s conclusion:
Cast notes:

Development

While filming The Duellists in France, Ridley Scott conceived Legend after another planned project, Tristan and Isolde, fell through temporarily. However, he believed that it would be an art film with limited audience appeal and went on to make Alien and did pre-production work on Dune, another halted project, which was eventually finished by director David Lynch. Frustrated, he came back to the idea of filming a fairy tale or mythological story.
For inspiration, Scott read all the classic fairy tales, including ones by the Brothers Grimm. From that, he conceived a story about a young hermit who is transformed into a hero when he battles the Darkness in order to rescue a beautiful princess and release the world from a wintery curse.

Screenplay

Scott wanted Legend to have an original screenplay because he believed that "it was far easier to design a story to fit the medium of cinema than bend the medium for an established story". By chance, he discovered several books written by American novelist William Hjortsberg, and found that the writer had already written several scripts for some unmade lower-budgeted films. Scott asked him if he was interested in writing a fairy tale. He was already writing some and agreed. Scott remembers, "The first notion was to actually make a classical fairy story, but if you actually analyze a classical fairy story, most are either very short, or very complex". The two men bonded over Jean Cocteau's 1946 film of Beauty and the Beast. In January 1981, just before beginning principal photography on Blade Runner, Scott spent five weeks with Hjortsberg working out a rough storyline for what was then called Legend of Darkness.
Originally, Scott "only had the vague notion of something in pursuit of the swiftest steed alive which, of course, was the unicorn". Scott felt that they should have a quest and wanted unicorns as well as magic armor and a sword. Hjortsberg suggested plunging the world into wintery darkness. Hjortsberg's first draft of Legend of Darkness also had Princess Lili slowly transform into a clawed and fur-covered beast who is whipped and sexually seduced by the antagonist. Scott wanted to show the outside world as little as possible and they settled on the clockmaker's cottage.
Initially, the quest was longer, but it was eventually substantially reduced. Scott wanted to avoid too many subplots that departed from the main story and go for a "more contemporary movement rather than get bogged down in too classical a format". By the time Scott had finished Blade Runner, he and Hjortsberg had a script that was "lengthy, hugely expensive, and impractical in its size and scope". They went through it and took out large sections that were secondary to the story. The two men went through 15 script revisions.

Pre-production

The look Scott envisioned for Legend was influenced somewhat by the style of Disney animation. He had even offered the project to Disney, but they were intimidated by the film's dark tone at a time when Disney still focused on family-friendly material. Visually, he referenced films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Pinocchio. Early on, Scott worked with Alan Lee as a visual consultant who drew some characters and sketched environments. However, Scott eventually replaced Lee with Assheton Gorton, a production designer whom he had wanted for both Alien and Blade Runner. Scott hired Gorton because he knew "all the pitfalls of shooting exteriors on a soundstage. We both knew that whatever we did would never look absolutely real, but would very quickly gain its own reality and dispense with any feeling of theatricality".
Scott also consulted with effects expert Richard Edlund because the director did not want to limit major character roles to the number of smaller people who could act. At one point, the director considered Mickey Rooney to play one of the major characters but he did not look small enough next to Tom Cruise. Edlund considered shooting on 70 mm film stock, taking the negative, and reducing the actors to any size they wanted—but this was deemed too expensive. Thus, Scott was tasked with finding an ensemble of small actors. Legend would be financed with a budget of $24.5 million, and would be distributed by Universal Pictures in North America and by 20th Century Fox in all other territories.
In order to achieve the look of Legend that he wanted, Scott scouted locations in the Sequoias of Yosemite National Park to see the grand scale of trees there. "The whole environment is so stunning... It was so impressive, but I didn't know how you would control it". However, it would cost too much to shoot on location and he decided to build a forest set on the 007 Stage, named after and used for many James Bond films, at Pinewood Studios. The crew spent 14 weeks constructing the forest set, and Scott was worried that it would not look real enough. It was only days before the start of principal photography that it looked good enough to film. The trees were 60 feet high with trunks 30 feet in diameter and were sculpted out of polystyrene built onto tubular scaffolding frames. In addition, other sets were constructed on five huge soundstages.

Casting

, Jim Carrey and Robert Downey Jr. were considered for the role of Jack. While Scott was considering Richard O'Brien to play Meg Mucklebones, he watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and saw Tim Curry. He thought the actor would be ideal to play Darkness because the actor had film and theatrical experience. Tim Curry's makeup as Darkness in Legend is considered to be one of the most iconic images in all of fantasy cinema. Scott discovered Mia Sara in a casting session and was impressed by her "good theatrical instincts".

Makeup effects

Scott contacted Rob Bottin, who designed the special makeup effects for The Howling, about working on Blade Runner, but Bottin was already committed to John Carpenter's The Thing. Scott told him about Legend, and toward the end of production on The Thing, Bottin read a script for the film and saw an excellent opportunity to create characters in starring roles.
After wrapping his work with Carpenter, Bottin met with Scott to reduce the thousands of creatures suggested by the script, to a manageable quantity. The process would involve complicated prosthetic makeup that would be worn for up to 60 days with some full body prosthetics. According to Bottin, at the time, Legend had the largest makeup crew ever dedicated to one project. Bottin divided his facility into different shops in order to cover the immense workload. As actors were cast, Bottin and his crew began making life casts and designed characters on drafting paper laid over sketches of the actors' faces. He designed the prosthetics in his Los Angeles studio and spent some time in England occasionally helping with the application of makeup.
With the exception of Cruise and Sara, all the principal actors spent hours every morning having extensive makeup applied. Between 8 and 12 prosthetic pieces were applied individually to each face, then made up, molded and grafted into the actor's face so that the prosthetics moved with their muscles. Each person needed three makeup artists working on them for an average time of three and a half hours spent applying prosthetics. Actor Tim Curry took five and a half hours because his entire body was encased in makeup, the film's most challenging character design.
Curry had to wear a large, bull-like structure atop his head with three-foot fiberglass horns supported by a harness underneath the makeup. The initial design of the horns placed a strain on the back of the actor's neck because they extended forward and not straight up but Bottin and his crew eventually reduced the weight of the horns. At the end of the day, he spent an hour in a bath in order to liquefy the soluble spirit gum. At one point, Curry became claustrophobic, got too impatient, and pulled the makeup off too quickly, tearing off his own skin in the process. Scott had to shoot around the actor for a week as a result.

Principal photography

began on March 26, 1984 on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios. On June 27, 1984, with ten days filming left on this stage, the entire set burned down during a lunch break. Reportedly, flames from the set fire leapt more than 100 feet into the air and the clouds of smoke could be seen five miles away. It occurred during lunchtime, and no one was hurt. Scott quickly made changes to the shooting schedule and only lost three days moving to another soundstage. Meanwhile, the art department rebuilt the section of the forest set that was needed to complete filming. Due to the fire, the scenes of Lili meeting the unicorns for the first time and finding the cottages in the snow were filmed in the garden of the main house behind Shepperton Studios. The underwater scenes were filmed in Silver Springs, Florida for the "purity" of the water. Cruise did all his own diving and swimming in waters that, according to Scott, had real alligators 25 feet from where they were filming.

Post-production

Scott's first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes long. He then believed there were minor plot points that could be trimmed and cut the film down to 113 minutes, so he tested this version for an audience in Orange County. However, it was decided that the audience had to work too much to be entertained, and another 20 minutes was cut. The 95-minute version was shown in Great Britain and then the film was cut down even further to 89 minutes for North America.
At the time, Scott said, "European audiences are more sophisticated. They accepted preambles and subtleties whereas the U.S. goes for a much broader stroke." He and Universal delayed the North American theatrical release until 1986 so that they could replace Jerry Goldsmith's score with music by Tangerine Dream, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and Bryan Ferry.
Scott allowed Goldsmith's score to remain on European prints and the composer said, "that this dreamy, bucolic setting is suddenly to be scored by a techno-pop group seems sort of strange to me". Normally, Goldsmith would spend 6–10 weeks on a film score, but for Legend, he spent six months writing songs and dance sequences ahead of time.
In 2000, Universal unearthed an answer print of the 113-minute preview cut with Jerry Goldsmith's score. This print had minor visual anomalies that were eventually digitally replaced, occasionally with finished shots from the 89-minute U.S. version. This edition is Scott's preferred 2002 "Director's Cut", with the restored Jerry Goldsmith soundtracks. The Director's Cut's source is one of only two prints of this extended version known to exist, used for Universal's 2002 DVD "Ultimate Edition."

Reception

Legend received mixed reviews. The film currently holds a 38% "Rotten" approval rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes based on 40 reviews, with an average rating of 4.87/10. The consensus reads: "Not even Ridley Scott's gorgeously realized set pieces can save Legend from its own tawdry tale -- though it may be serviceable for those simply looking for fantasy eye candy." Steve Biodrowski of Cinefantastique praised the film, highlighting the makeup design by Rob Bottin and Tim Curry's performance as Darkness, saying that "ecause of the visuals, the film is worth seeing". Widgett Walls of needcoffee.com also praised the film, once again highlighting Bottin's makeup, focusing on the character of Darkness, saying simply that "Tim Curry's Darkness is absolutely incredible."
Vincent Canby of The New York Times said that "t's a slap-dash amalgam of Old Testament, King Arthur, "The Lord of the Rings" and any number of comic books." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times praised the visuals as "a sumptuous, richly colored feast for cinematographer Alex Gordon's camera", but thought the film "surely could have used more humor and invention". Kim Newman of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that "like Blade Runner before it, the film suffers so much from an over-emphasis on details at the expense of the actual story that it becomes a plodding bore." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film half of one star out of four and stated that writing the review was "akin to recalling a bad dream", concluding that "I don't want to remember any more about Legend than to make sure I include it in my 'worst films of 1986' list and never rent it when it comes out as a video cassette." The film has been described as the "extinction event" that discouraged Hollywood from making fantasy films.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised Bottin's makeup and Assheton Gorton's set design and the performances of Tim Curry and Tom Cruise, but noted that the effects were so good that the roles could have been played by almost anyone. Ebert also said that the movie was composed of all of the right ingredients to be successful, but that the film simply "doesn't work". He went on to say that "ll of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishment". However, with the release of the 2002 Director's Cut, he agreed with many fans on how it was intended to question the balance between good and evil, and gives the main characters moral flaws to display the imperfections of humans. The release of the Director's Cut in 2002 also had the original score from Jerry Goldsmith restored, and brought renewed attention to the film. Both Ridley Scott and Tom Cruise have requested their fans to view this version, even to the extent of Cruise disowning the US version entirely as a "stereotypical 80's fantasy".

Music

Soundtrack

Due to the changes in the film from its European and American releases, Legend has two different soundtracks. The first, produced, composed and conducted by Jerry Goldsmith, was used for its initial European release and restored in the director's cut edition of the Region 1 DVD release. The second soundtrack features music by German electronic artists Tangerine Dream and was used for the initial theatrical and home video releases in the United States. This soundtrack also includes songs by Jon Anderson of Yes and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music.
The following songs are featured in the European and Director's Cuts, with lyrics composed by John Bettis and music by Jerry Goldsmith:
The following songs appeared in the 89-minute U.S. re-cut when it was re-scored by Tangerine Dream:
A promotional music video was created for the Bryan Ferry song "Is Your Love Strong Enough". The video, which incorporates Ferry and guitarist David Gilmour into footage from the film, is included as a bonus on disc 2 of the 2002 "Ultimate Edition" DVD release.

Home media

In 2002, Universal released the 113-minute Director's Cut on Region 1 DVD, restoring previously cut scenes and the original Goldsmith score.
Universal released a Blu-ray version of the "Ultimate Edition" on May 31, 2011. With the exception of the 2002 DVD-ROM features, this disc carries over all the content from the DVD, including the Jerry Goldsmith-scored "Director's Cut" and the Tangerine Dream-scored theatrical version.
20th Century Fox - the international rights holder - has released a Blu-ray issue for Region 2 of both the 94-minute European version and the 113-minute Director's Cut, both with Jerry Goldsmith's music.