The Royal Hunt of the Sun

Irving Lerner was mostly a TV-director -- he did 13 episodes of Ben Casey -- and so he is out of his milieu in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, an adaptation to screen of Peter Schaffer's play about the confrontation between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca ruler Atahualpa. Lerner's second-unit shoots some effective landscape shots in Peru and the principal set, a fortress-like bunker simulating one of the Inca's lesser palaces, is grimly plausible and built to spectacular scale. But the budget was less than the film's ambitions and the big palace is weirdly empty -- by way of explanation, the Inca says that his people have fled the city. The battle scenes are shot on a shoestring and unimpressivley edited -- the cutting is disguised to disguise the fact that the battle is staged with about fifteen soldiers on both sides. There are impressive shots of Pizarro and his men crossing deserts and the cinemascope images are designed to remind viewers of David Lean, particularly Lawrence of Arabia, although the comparison is much to the detriment of Lerner's 1969 picture. Lerner's visual imagination seems Tv-stunted and, although everything looks real, the reality is Hollywood-reality -- pictorially accurate, but not quite convincing. The strength in the film lies in the dialogue lifted from Schaffer's play and the quality of the acting. Robert Shaw plays Pizarro as a fierce, wounded little man with a grievance. He sees Atahualpa as some kind of brother at first -- after all, both he and the Inca are ambitious bastard-sons -- and, later, toys with the notion that the Indian emperor is, in fact, some kind of God. Atahualpa, played by Christopher Plummer, is genuinely alien -- an image of New World splendor and despotism totally unlike the tyrants of Europe or classical Greece or Rome. Eyes perpetually squinting, as if always blinded by his father, the Sun, Plummer makes strange mewling sounds, moves like a ballet-dancer, and, from time to time, seems to imitate his totemic animal, the puma. (The script doesn't emphasize that the Inca empire was obsessed with jungle cats and that the royal city of Cuzco was built in the shape of a puma, with the palace, the famous Corianca or golden court, located at the site of the cat's genitals -- Plummer seems to know these things, however, and plays Atahualpa perpetually poised between seizure and trance, ever ready, it seems, to shift shape into the form of his totem, the great predatory cat). Much of dialogue is gripping and the clash between the two leaders is intricately wrought and staged. The difficulty is that the subject matter is too grand for the film's rather pedestrian and stiff style. Lerner is caught in an awkward middle ground -- the movie is too big for TV, but the theatrical confrontation between Pizarro and Atahualpa is too rhetorical, too verbal and stage-bound for the wide screen-- in fact, that part of the film would work better on TV. Nonetheless, this is an impressive picture and might be improved if you watch the picture dubbed into Spanish, for instance, with English subtitles or, maybe, with the sound turned off entirely. A lot of the music is hilariously sixties vintage -- Lawrence of Arabia's soundtrack by Maurice Jarre works because it is big and grandiose and quasi-symphonic is the style of Richard Strauss; the score seems timeless. By contrast, the jazzed-up score of Royal Hunt often sounds like an airport Holiday Inn quartet playing tunes for folks queued up for a Sunday buffet.