The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969)

Director: Irving Lerner

Starring: Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Nigel Davenport, Andrew Kier

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: The birth of a hero. The death of an empire. The adventure of a lifetime.

Plot Outline: The Spanish explorer Pizarro (Shaw) captures the Inca god-chief Atahualpa (Plummer) and promises to free him upon the deliverance of a horde of gold. But Pizarro finds himself torn between his desire for conquest and his sense of honor after friendship and respect develops between captive and captor.

My Rating: 6/10

Would I watch it again? Does the Pope shit in the woods? There's no direct evidence but I'd say probably not.

Here's a WACKY scene with Christopher Plummer doing some "acting"?!

NOTE: Youtube has disabled embedding for this clip but you can still watch it by clicking here.

OK, so I watch PLAY DIRTY and Nigel Davenport kicks all kinds of ass and that put me in the mood to watch something else that he did so when I saw that he did this one a year later and it's with Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer and Andrew Kier AND it's about Spanish conquistadors kicking some Incan ass I thought I couldn't go wrong. I went wrong. I didn't realize I had gotten a one-way ticket to snoozeville.

Before I touch on the acting I'll touch on a few things. This is adapted from a stage play written by Peter Shaffer (who also wrote the plays, EQUUS & AMADEUS). It's obvious. It also looks like they didn't have much more budget than for a play. The movie starts off with Shaw in the court of the King. Through voice over we discover that it takes Shaw a year to assemble his small army and ship. They're seen walking through the Spanish desert. The very next scene is them walking through the Peruvian desert without any notice that they've traveled at all!?! I sat there for a minute wondering what the hell happened. Once I figured it out I was cool with it but shit. The Incan city of gold consisted of one concrete palace and that's it. We're never allowed to see beyond that. The music by Marc Wilkinson was very odd. During the initial slaughter of unarmed Incans we're treated to a surreal use of slow motion with an acoustic guitar/vocal flamenco song. Strange. In a strange way it worked but only a little and the scene needed much more violence to be truly effective.



I love the films of the 60s. They're so cynical. This one's a damning of religion, specifically Catholicism. It's throughout the picture but the best moment is the entrance of Plummer who believes he is the son of the Sun God which makes him a God as well. The Catholic priest stand before him explaining (in a fair amount of detail) the story of Jesus and why he's the only God in town and so on and so on. In aggravation, he starts to whine and moan at the banality of it all. I felt his pain. The priest rattles on with his nonsense and eventually hands Plummer a bible. Plummer listens to it, touches it, looks at it, sniffs it, and finally plows his tongue from the bottom of the book to the top. He then spits and throws it to the ground in disgust. COOL!!!



Now the acting. Robert Shaw is a MO-FO of an actor. And so is Davenport and Kier. I've always liked Plummer in everything I've seen him in until now. His performance is so eccentric and bizarre. He's off the charts in this. He's either so brilliant that I'm blind or he's a mentally retarded Monty Python fan stuck in overdrive. At one point I'd swear I saw some LSD tabs on the set. I give this one a 6; 5 for Shaw's brilliant performance and 1 for Plummer's balls to pull off one of the most laughable bits of acting I've ever seen.



Besides Plummer, who does make it interesting even if he's nuts, what brings the film down is the pacing. As I said, it's based on a play and so there's very little action to punch up the slow spots which I would be OK with if it just didn't move so damn slow. If Shaw weren't so engaging to watch this would be a total waste of time. The print I saw (released by Simitar) is widescreen (non-anamorphic) but it's atrocious. Print damage throughout with lots of pops and noise, the occasional missing few frames that rob us of some key dialogue, ghosting effects and so on. It's better than a fullscreen print I suppose but they could have done something to clean this up. Even if Criterion comes out with a special edition of it I'll only watch it again if it's a longer cut. Once was enough with the print I watched. If you LOVE Shaw like I do it's worth seeing. If you want to see Plummer looking amazing for a 42 year-old buffoon then watch the clip above. That should give you enough of an idea about what he does in this.

When I was about an hour and fifteen minutes into it I was pleasantly surprised to see that I only had about thirteen minutes to go. Nice. Oh, and the ending is pretty fucking cool. Since you're unlikely to see it I'll spoil it for you. HERE BE ROYAL SPOILERS...Shaw, after spending more than two months with Plummer, is convinced that Plummer is a God after all and believes as he is told that after he dies his body will be touched by the Sun God (his father) at the next day's light and brought back to life. So the next morning after Plummer's execution Shaw has his dead body in his royal regalia on his throne. After the morning sun bathes him and the room in light Shaw approaches Plummer and grabs his hand at which point the helmet falls forward followed by his corpse landing on the floor beneath him. The look of disappointment on Shaw's face says it all. END OF SPOILERS...YARRRRRR. I really wanted to like this film but there's far too much keeping it down.