Conan The Barbarian • 1982  

Directed by John Milius

“I’m a Zen Fascist” John Milius once and famously remarked, and while his tongue was, no doubt, firmly planted in cheek, in its own crude way, that description goes a long way in explaining the unique appeal of this very talented and likable rogue artist. While it may take courage to be left of center in the country at large, in Hollywood, the conservative is the true maverick, and while he has enjoyed much success, as a director and screenwriter, Milius, has, in the difficulties he has encountered over the years in getting many dream projects off the ground, paid a price for his cheerful unwillingness to toe a politically correct line for Tinseltown convenience. Still, it is a big mistake to paint Milius with the broad brush of, say, the political simple-mindedness of a John Wayne or a Jack Webb, for, from the start of his career, his projects have evidenced a complexity and thoughtfulness that make such easy classification impossible. Milius’ work embraces the reality that men and women are different, and that courage and

John Milius directs Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of Conan

violence are sometimes unavoidable and necessary, in a way that does, and should, make knee-jerk liberals uncomfortable, but his work also betrays a tenderness and respect for women, and a keen sense of the limits of the macho ideal that give lie to the stereotype that generally accompanies any discussion of his oeuvre.



Milius’ first successes as a screenwriter were the harrowing western drama Jeremiah Johnson starring lefty icon Robert Redford, and his epic screenplay for Apocalypse Now, and, though Apocalypse celebrates, in a very dark and unglamourous way, the macho themes of wartime bonding and the tribal nature of the male spirit, he is unabashedly critical of the absurd, wasteful chaos and futility of the Vietnamese war, and paints a vivid and unsparing picture of the horror and madness that result from macho ad absurdium in the character of the brilliant but demented Colonel Kurtz. In Magnum Force (script by Milius) a right wing Police death squad is stunned to discover that rule-bending “Dirty Harry” Callahan, whom they expect to enthusiastically join them, is repulsed by their vigilante vendetta against the “scum” who have escaped “liberal” justice. Even at his most chauvinistic, in 1984’s Red Dawn, in which a brave group of American teenagers spearhead a guerilla revolt against a Commie invasion of the American Homeland, Milus leavens the flag-waving with a bitter and unsettling portrait of the devastating and corrosive effects of war and violence on his band of young patriots.

   Arnold Schwarzenegger as the definitive Sword-and-Sandal Barbarian...

It is, however, in his two best, and most successful films, The Wind and the Lion and Conan the Barbarian, that the depth, flexibility and unexpected warmth of Milius’ approach is most fully realized. In The Wind and the Lion, Milius’ second film as a director (after the violent and colourful Dillinger), though Candace Bergen’s abducted gentlewoman hostage may ultimately succumb to the manly and forceful charms of Sean Connery (surprise!) she is an independent, plainspoken and feisty character, who gives her Arab chieftain hubby a run for his money, and Lion becomes as much an affectionate sendup of the macho ideal as a defense of it; and, in Conan the Barbarian, one of the best adventure movies of all time, Milius’ penchant for delivering the unexpected is in full force.

   Conan's gorgeous production design, courtesy of the fertile imagination of the late, great Ron Cobb

In a stroke of perfect symmetry, producer Rafaella Di Laurentiis, who has a habit of filling her high quality fantasy films (Dune, Dragonheart, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), with superior casts, lavish production values and crackling, witty dialogue, chose Milius’ left wing counterpart Oliver Stone to co-write Conan with Milius, a choice which perfectly mirrors and expresses the tension between pragmatism and idealism in Milius’ complex world view. Based on pulp fantasist Robert E. Howard’s epic 30’s adventure series Conan the Cimmerian, Conan is richly imagined and beautifully realized; directed by Milius with a sensual physicality and a deft and energetic touch perfectly suited for telling the story of Conan, the noble warrior savage (played by a pre-Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger with a surprising combination of brooding virility and a lovable, almost goofy vulnerability). 

   Clinging to his still-standing but very dead Mother;s hand, young Conan develops a life long obsession for...

,,, the demise of one of the great screen villains, Thulsa Doom, beautifully underplayed by James Earl Jones.

After the massacre of his village and the murder of his parents by the charismatic and vicious cult leader Thulsa Doom, Conan is sold into slavery. As a gladiator, he finds meaning and worth in his prized ability to slaughter all comers, wins his freedom, and embarks on an epic quest to avenge his mother’s murder, and destroy his surpassingly evil nemesis, finding friendship, even love, along the way. Freed, as was Howard, by the imaginary time period and setting, Milius and production designer Ron Cobb (Alien) create a Hyborian age that is detailed, stunning and completely believable, and with cinematographer Duke Callaghan they deliver a number of lasting and haunting images: the work wheel in the middle of the desert to which Conan the child is chained for the first 10 years of his life; the “Tree of Woe” on which Conan is crucified by Thulsa Doom, and Valeria’s funeral pyre flickering in the darkness.

   As a young Conan hears the ominous sound of thundering horses coming over the rise, Thulsa Doom's horde makes one of the great screen entrances ever...

From its stunning opening sequence, as Doom’s entwined snake standard appears over the rise of a hill, followed by his merciless advancing horde (accompanied by Basil Poulidouris’ rich, throbbing tapestry of a score), Milius’ Conan strikes just the right balance; with enough violence, gore, and sex to be true to Howard’s “Weird Tales” original while maintaining a good-natured fairy-tale quality that elevates Conan to a level of storytelling that achieves a genuinely mythical quality, and adds a welcome emotional warmth to Conan’s brutal coming-of-age saga. The murder of Conan’s mother, for example, which could have been played for gross-out shock, is, instead, a subtle and emotionally affecting moment, as the camera lingers on the young boy’s stunned face, giving Conan’s revenge quest plot a real resonance and power not found in the average sword and sorcery potboiler. But nowhere is Milius’ exceptional A-movie approach to B-movie material more evident than in the central love story between Conan and his beloved, the master thief Valeria, which occupies the central third of the film. From their first meeting in Dooms ‘Tower of Evil’ (another Ron Cobb set which is both physically beautiful and reeking with palpable evil and corruption) Milius’ attentive direction of his actors and the simple but eloquent dialogue convey an affecting and believable love story quite removed from the plot-servicing, heaving-bosom-propelled ‘love story’ common to most sword-and-sandal epics.  

One of the many things that distinguishes Conan from run-of-the-mill adventure epics is a believable and touching love story, played with real chemistry by Schwarzenegger and the sadly unappreciated Sandahl Bergman.

As played by first-time actress Sandahl Bergman (the Broadway dancer had made an impressive debut two years before in the sizzling Airotica  number in All That Jazz), Valeria is another one of Milius’ very feminine, but equally strong, female heroines, and Bergman’s unaffected, heartfelt performance (do you want to live forever?) gives weight and substance to the tragic outcome that awaits them in the film’s operatic climax. While Bergman continued to work steadily as a dancer, and as a character actress in B movies and television (and is a charming presence in the making-of documentary Conan Unchained) we are left to wonder why this very engaging and attractive performer was not able to parlay this early starring role into a larger presence in Hollywood.

It is hard not to wonder if Milius was inspired by George Lucas’ use of  the great James Earl Jones as the Freudian/Oedipal villain of Star Wars, as Jones’ beautifully underplayed, hissing Thulsa Doom, trying to escape death, tells Conan in an oily whisper: “I am the wellspring from which you flow… What will you be when I am gone… my son?” His performance is, in any case, perfection. With the tiniest of expressions and the subtlest of body movements, Jones creates one of the most truly evil villains in screen history; his casual dispensing of death (check out his expression as he decides whether of not to kill Conan’s mother) and the almost fatherly way he sends his followers to their doom, make his villainy all the more sinister for its subtlety. 

   I am your Father, Luke... Errr, I mean Conan...

The other great performance in Conan is that of Max Von Sydow, another of those Euro actors who will appear in almost anything when the condo payment is due, but who never gives less than a great performance in the process. As King Osric, the aging and weary monarch (who sends Conan and Valeria on their fateful mission to rescue his brainwashed daughter (who has joined Doom’s cult, and is “about to be his…”), von Sydow conveys, in a single memorable scene, an important shared thread in the work of both Milius and Robert Howard: 

   Max Von Sydow brings the world-weary gravitas to Conan, as KIng Osric, father to a wayward princess in peril...

That while honor, valor and great deeds are all worthwhile, they all ultimately fade away.  “There comes a time” sighs Osric, “when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father’s love for his child…” Both Howard and Milius share an open admiration for the courage and professionalism of military men, while remaining deeply skeptical of the lasting results of conflict and war; and this doubt brings a melancholy undercurrent to what might have otherwise remained an essentially lighthearted fantasy.

John Milius has never made a project that did not incorporate some of his contrarian world view, and Conan is no exception. In Thulsa Doom’s ‘Snake Cult of Set,’ Milius is clearly sending up all cults and ‘movements with easy answers’ in general, and the hippie culture of the sixties in particular. As Conan playfully comes on to an effeminate high priest of the cult (played with relish in a delicious cameo by EuroTrash/Jess Franco icon Jack Taylor) in order to steal his robes as a disguise, he drapes flowers around his neck and pretends to be seeking to “reach emptiness.” 

Jess Franco Company Player Jack Taylor (inadvisedly) tries to put the moves on temporary Flower Child Conan...

Mocking as this sequence is, when Conan triumphantly hurls Thulsa Doom’s head down the stairs of his temple, Milius has his followers, one by one, sadly throw their candles into the water and file away to Poulidouris’ mournful choral chant, in what might as well be an elegy for the dead counterculture, and it is clear that Milius has a soft spot for those who seek, however foolishly, a higher meaning.

Two examples of the extraordinary visual beauty of Conan... The Tree of Woe, (Mel Gibson was green with envy) and, below..

It is hard to overstate how much better Conan the Barbarian is than any of its immediate competitors in the genre; one only has to watch Richard Fleischer’s pallid and silly follow-up Conan The Destroyer, to see the difference between the labour of love of a visionary director and the hack work of a slumming bigshot looking down his nose at his material. Conan is a robust and exhilarating epic that manages to imbue its melodrama and high adventure with some real ideas and philosophy, while never for a moment slowing down or distracting from the storytelling. Milius created in Conan the Barbarian, a colourful, riveting and often surprisingly thoughtful fantasy for wide-eyed young men (and women) of all ages, and a lasting contribution to fantasy cinema whose sense of awe and wonder continue, 30-odd years later, to enthrall us.

...and this... Courtesy of Cinematographer extraordinaire Duke Callaghan ~

Azumi • 2003 • Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura 

Azumi opens in a moment of tragedy, as the young girl who will grow to be Azumi, silently mourning her dead mother, is taken in by a traveling Master and his group of adopted orphans. The mood quickly shifts to idyllic however, with this group of young students engaged in a mock-fight in a sun dappled forest, which ends with one of them toppled into the water by his laughing cohorts. It seems that Master Gessai (played to a world-weary "T" by the late great Yoshio Harada) has gathered together this ragtag group of youngsters, sheltered them from the world, and trained them in martial arts and sword fighting for something they know only as “Their Mission.” We are prepared for a wholesome Star Wars-ian saga ancient Japan-style, with a series of scenes of youthful dreaminess: playful roughhousing, an implied budding romance between Azumi (the only girl in the group) and the tallest, handsomest of the boys, and naïve, idealistic campfire musings on their future heroic roles to come.  

  Azumi is 'rescued' by Master Gessai after the death of her Mother...

As their training draws to a close however, Gessai announces to his overjoyed charges that they are ready to make their way in the world, and must now each pair up with their best friends, not as they expect, to form a team, but to weed out the weaklings. It seems that three warlords are threatening an uneasy peace, won in a recent, horribly destructive war. Our young heroes’ mission is to assassinate these warlords, who haven’t yet done anything wrong, on the orders of a religiously inclined military figure. (Sound familiar?) In order to carry out a task of such moral dubiousness, there is no room for weakness: anyone who can’t kill their best friend, can’t be an effective assassin. After some understandable hand wringing, the young band of brothers hack each other to bits, and Azumi, forced to fight for her life, kills her childhood  friend/boyfriend (who was quite prepared to kill her). So much for childhood innocence.

  The future assassins mourn the classmates and friends they have been obliged to kill...

Azumi was a huge hit in Asia, largely on the strength of its dizzying camera work, the most spectacular swordplay since the heyday of Kurosawa and Inagaki, and the undeniable barely-legal appeal of Pop Diva Aya Ueto, (who turns in a surprisingly subtle and affecting performance) but it bears little resemblance

  Aya Ueto IS Azumi...

either to the exuberant but often shallow Wuxia epics of the eighties Hong Kong Revival, or, for that matter, to the recent, hugely popular sweeping historical epics from Mainland China. Shot through as it is with a dark and melancholy view of life, it is as far removed from the former (The East is Red, Dragon Inn) as, with its central lack of an epic romance (Azumi having knocked off her putative love interest in the first reel), it is from the latter (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). Ryuhei Kitamura came to international attention with Versus, a funky, technically stunning hybrid of the Yakuza and Zombie genres (!), and while its cinematic razzle-dazzle caught everyone’s attention, viewers who seemed to sense that Kitramura was aiming for, but not quite hitting, a higher target, were frustrated by its lack of characterization and its largely incomprehensible plot. With Azumi, Kitamura has greatly strengthened his storytelling skills, his ability to deliver believable, affecting characters, and most importantly, his apparent desire to colour his genre piece with a surprising depth and ambiguity that instantly raises Azumi above the usual level of simple swordplay costume drama.
Make no mistake however, Azumi is, first and foremost, a cracking good adventure movie, which delivers an astonishing series of action sequences which have no equal in recent Hong-Kong or Mainland productions. Virtually devoid of fanciful wire-aided wall climbing and tree-leaping, Azumi’s battle sequences retain, even in their most astounding moments, a grim, gritty real-world quality that make believable even its most fantastic conceits, most notably our young heroine’s exceptionally ferocious ability to dispatch vast numbers of savage foes with a preternatural calm and determination. Balancing the requisite action (in a way that never interrupts the action/adventure aspect) are moments of tenderness, tragedy, connection and loss that ring true in a way that enhances both the story and the deeper emotional grounding with which Kitamura imbues his seemingly simple Martial Arts Hero Flick.

Early on in their journey, Gessai forces his young charges to stand by helplessly and watch the ravaging of a buculic village by a band of savage bandits, in order that their mission not be compromised. “Why”, they all keep asking, as the carnage unfolds before them.

  The young assassins ask "Why"....

  ...as history repeats itself...

They encounter their first target, the warlord Nagamasa, peacefully fishing with his men by the bank of a river. Azumi takes an instant liking to this uncommonly jocular and likable warlord and, when he confirms his identity, she throws a cloth over his face so that she will not see his face as she kills him. 

  Assassin Rule Number One: Don't take a liking to your targets...

Again, she asks “Why?” These WHYs form a thread of skepticism about the black and white notions of unquestioning duty and loyalty that permeate even many of the best of the aforementioned Martial Arts films. Although, in the end, Azumi assumes just that attitude, and accepts her destiny as an assassin (as much for the sake of those two lucrative sequels as for the demands of the story) this sense of questioning, and an ability to convey the painful results of conflict in a simple and eloquent way, again subtly separate Azumi from its many peers.

  Jô Odagiri as Azumi's nemesis, the vicious, philosophy-spouting assassin Bijomaru...

In even the best of the recent spate of Ancient Chinese sagas, the characters tend to be as much symbols of eternal truths as living, breathing fully-fleshed out characters. Here again, Azumi distinguishes itself from the pack. With the exception of the effeminate rose-loving aesthete/assassin Bijomaru  (played with icy, creepy perfection by Jô Odagiri), none of the characters are the all-good or all-evil cliches one might expect. Master Gessai, who seems at first to be a heartless and stubborn stoic, reveals unexpected moments of tenderness for his young charges, just as his students are capable of shocking and unexpected brutality and callousness. The warlord Nagamasa who would rather fish than fight, the henchman Suro, who takes his life in his hands by mercifully finishing off a victim whose inevitable demise is being sadistically protracted by Bijomaru, and even Bijomaru’s ecstatic, almost comical glee at finally finding an opponent worthy of him, reveal shadings and complexities of personality that make us almost as interested in the villains of Azumi as the heroes.

  The fatalistic majesty of Azumi's visuals recalls such disparate Japanese classics as Kwaidan and Kurosawa's Ran...

One way in which Azumi does resemble its contemporaries, however, is in its physical beauty; painting a series of indelible setpieces, which have a haunting grace that lingers long after the last clanging sword. The desert landscape that opens Azumi is so quietly beautiful that at first we do not register the sad scene that is unfolding: a small child quietly sitting at the side of her dead mother. In the film’s most powerful moment, a vast sea of swirling grass and forbidding winds surround Azumi’s luckless cohort Hyuga, as he valiantly stands his ground on a single dusty path that bisects the field, to defend his newfound girlfriend Hiei against the pitiless Bijomaru. It recalls the ‘grasses with a life of their own’ in the classic Onibaba, and is a moment worthy, in its atmospheric and emotional power, of the great man Kurosawa himself.

  The Man With No Name... except Asian and gorgeous...

In a delightful moment of circular cinematic cross-influence, the delirious final act of Azumi takes its loving and unabashed inspiration from a genre itself influenced by the classic samurai films of the sixties, the Italian Western. In order to rescue her mentor Gessai, whose bravery and nobility have overcome her objections to his seemingly callous adherence to duty, (and who is strung up in the town square as bait, in a direct steal from the climax of A Fistful of Dollars), Azumi is faced with a horde of sweaty, grinning, disgusting bad guys so large that even she, ‘ultimate warror’ that she is, would not be able to defeat them all without testing our suspension of disbelief. Instead, she is aided in their complete annihilation by a Sergio Leone-esque combination of some fortuitous explosives, the re-appearance of a companion thought dead, and a murderous row that erupts among various factions of the villainous horde, leaving Azumi and Bijomaru to face off in the Japanese equivalent of a Main Street showdown.

  One of Azumi's rare moments of peace, as Azumi comforts, and is comforted by, the girlfriend of the recently departed Hyuga...

In Azumi, Ryuhei Kitamura fashioned, (with only his second film) a classic quest/adventure tale which, with its ‘very youthful hero who must grow up fast’, and its moments of unsettling darkness, echoes another recent way-better-than-might-have-been-expected minor genre classic, Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War. But while Miike’s emotional depth was leavened with an impish, playful and satirical wit, Azumi derives its resonance from the pattern of loss that is interspersed, mantra-like, throughout the riveting action sequences: The never-explained loss of Azumi’s mother, the youngsters’ loss of innocence as they are consumed with their duty and their task, Hyuga’s loss of life itself as he violates the warrior code by becoming attached to Hiei, and, perhaps most tellingly, Azumi’s loss of her own ideals as she sacrifices her vision of a life of peace and her own gentle inner nature to her warrior destiny. The fact that Kitamura is able to give his film these unexpected shadings without ever sacrificing the kinetic flow of one of the best samurai swordplay flicks ever, is testament to a new talent well worth watching, and Azumi has found an audience among both Otaku fanboys as well as admirers of just plain, good old-fashioned moviemaking.

Duck Soup • 1933 • Directed by Leo McCarey

 

Ambassador Trentino: I am willing to do anything to prevent this war! 
Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho): It's too late. I've already paid a month's rent on the battlefield...  

In Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters, Mickey (Allen), contemplating suicide, wanders into a repertory theater showing Duck Soup, and concludes that if life is good enough to produce the Marx Brothers, then it must be worth living. An entire generation of baby boomer moviegoers would not consider that an exaggeration, but the film now regarded as one of the best film comedies of all time had to wait 35 years to be considered as such.

In 1933, however, America, still reeling from the effects of WWI and sensing that the world was once more headed for crisis, were less receptive, finding Duck Soup‘s cynicism, utter disrespect for authority and contempt for war in all its aspects somehow threatening. While not the failure Hollywood legend would have one believe (it was the sixth biggest grosser for Paramount that year), Duck Soup was nowhere near the smash success that the previous Horsefeathers had been. For years after, the film was considered a minor Marx Brothers, critically and financially overshadowed by the MGM Marx comeback blockbuster A Night at the Opera.

   The Inaugural Reception for Rufus T. Firefly: "Are we expecting somebody?

Rediscovered in the '60s at college screenings and art-house revivals, including many an exam time showing at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, by a young, fiercely antiwar audience that embraced its hilarious assault on authority and all things establishment, Duck Soup is now considered by many to be the Brothers’ finest hour, and its loopy, anarchic, scattershot approach has influenced an entire generation of comic film makers in the years since, from the The Three Stooges’ sassy WWII shorts and Monty Python’s Flying Circus to Richard Lester’s Beatle films and Allen’s own Take the Money and Run and Bananas. Duck Soup’s legendary Mirror Scene was even lovingly recreated by the Brothers’ Room Service costar Lucille Ball on her own TV show (with Harpo).

   Identity Crisis...

Duck Soup may be the most influential screen comedy of all time, but the greatest pleasure of its periodic rediscovery is that it’s that rare classic that lives up to its reputation: anarchic, irreverent and just plain hilarious. Though wonderful in their way, many Marx Brothers films are no more than statically filmed stage revues, brilliant vaudeville bits and Broadway musical numbers lamely strung together. Duck Soup, on the other hand, satisfies as a comedy and as a film. Director Leo McCarey began his career directing two-reel comedies for Hal Roach and went on to direct such diverse classics as The Awful Truth and the lovely melodrama An Affair to Remember. With Duck Soup, his first great film, he delivers a real movie: a rowdy mix of biting satire, outrageous physical comedy and of course, timeless Marxian shtick.

   "His Excellency's Car!"

While there are a few priceless Marxian musical moments (Harpo’s breathtaking harp solo for a group of mesmerized children in A Night at The Opera and the classics I Must Be Going and Hooray for Captain Spaulding from Animal Crackers), the musical numbers in their films, more often than not, served as periodic and frustrating momentum stoppers every time the brothers built up a head of comic steam. In Horsefeathers, Groucho famously remarks that, while he is required to stay for the musical interlude, the audience is free to “go to the lobby ‘til this thing blows over.” One of Duck Soup’s great merits is that Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar’s compact, snappy songs are biting send-ups of standard musical comedy filler and are seamlessly woven into the action, propelling the film’s progress rather than bogging it down.

   Minister of Finance: Here is the Treasury Department’s report, sir. I hope you’ll find it clear.
   Firefly: Clear? Huh. Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a
   four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it.

Beyond successfully packaging the Marx Brothers’ antics, Duck Soup also finds the Brothers themselves in top form. Groucho flawlessly delivers a dizzying combination of dazzlingly clever wordplay and pun-filled jokes, so shamelessly corny as to have fallen flat if anyone other than this hyper-confident huckster/charmer had delivered them. His delivery is more stylized, a little less loose and amiable than in the preceding films, but the overall effect of these staccato assaults and the preposterous expressions that punctuate them is of an inspired comic alien on loan from another planet, having the bemused, detached look of someone who intends to hop off the train just before the wreck he has just instigated occurs. Harpo, the divine lunatic with the most expressive face in American film, serves up just enough angelic innocence with his deviltry to keep us from being as appalled as we should be by his cheerfully cruel dismantling of lemonade vendor Edgar Kennedy’s mental health. And the greatly underrated Chico, who often doubled for his brother on stage and is here, in Soup’s mirror sequence, indistinguishable from him, is the glue that holds together the polar opposites of Groucho and Harpo; he, sardonic, delicate, and oddly wise, providing the quiet structural heart of many of their classic setpieces.

All Master Spies must be subtle and convincing
in their various uncanny disguises

If the audiences of 1933 found Duck Soup unsettling, even long-time fans will be shocked today by its uncanny relevance. As much as war itself, Soup lampoons the flimsy pretexts, the pompous sword rattling, and the noxious nationalism that are the furnishings of the lead-up to wars of choice. When a roomful of be-medaled generals cheerfully send young men off to die in the The Country’s Goin’ to War number, it is well-nigh impossible not to be reminded of the world’s present circumstances. 
Years after making the film, Groucho was asked about the pungent political message that underpins Duck Soup. He replied, “we were just four Jews trying to get a laugh.” Maybe so, but he also once remarked that “military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” It is hard not to believe that life-long liberal humanist Groucho didn’t mean for us to take away an important lesson from Duck Soup. After we recovered from the uncontrollable fits of laughter, of course.

Finally, a tip of the Magic Window hat to the remarkable ladies of Duck Soup: The completely irreplaceable Margaret Dumont, and the impossibly sultry Raquel Torres who plays the film's smouldering villainess Vera...