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The film is choppily edited in every version that I've seen, with jarring mood changes to spare. But the textures, clearly influenced by Jean Cocteau, are sublime, extraordinary. It's just a pity they didn't have the balls to pursue the original vision, which included Darkness raping Lily. An apocalyptic, adult-oriented fairy tale ... well, to some extent they seem to be trying that now (Red Riding Hood and a slew of revisionist fairy tales still to come), but no one is better suited to such material than Scott and Goldsmith.
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. It's just a pity they didn't have the balls to pursue the original vision, which included Darkness raping Lily.
Even though that was in Hjortsberg's first-draft script, I am fairly certain Scott's own vision from the beginning was always to make a family-accessible fairy tale film.
Yeah, that was in a very early draft of Hjortsberg's script, which also depicts Darkness whipping Lili while she is tied to a post!
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Great post Andy! I only saw the US version years ago and the movie is a car wreck. Still, kudos to Scott for making the original cut available. That's the way it should be. I wish Lucas would follow suit. I'm actually interested now is seeing the Director's cut with the Goldsmith score. I have the soundtrack but would love to see and hear how his score works in the film.
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What a horrible, HORRIBLE movie.
Not a perfect movie, but far from "horrible". Legend is one of the most exquisitely-rendered (and scored) pictures ever made (and like Blade Runner, far-reaching in its influence).
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The visuals seem to have gained some kind of respectability these days, but I remember at the time it was seen as little more than a glossy TV or cinema commercial in appearance. even down to the white fluff floating around and lighting effects. It really was considered typical of what one would expect from flashy shampoo commercials of the time. Still looks that way to me.
I originally saw this at a Sunday morning test screening in London. It had the Goldsmith score. The audience clearly thought the film was rubbish, which it was. No redeeming features apart from Currie's make-up and the music.
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It's tacky and incomprehensible (in either cut) and deeply, deeply embarassing. I've given it a shot twice over the years, and hated it both times.
It's still better than most pictures in the genre.
I'd rather watch Legend's visuals and enjoy its score than sit through The Princess Bride, Willow, Dragonheart, Eregon, Dungeons & Dragons, Warriors of Virtue, Stardust, Inkheart or that crappy Uwe Boll movie with Burt Reynolds.
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Dursin's Tangerine Dream-comments are of course crap. He has clearly no knowledge on how TD's music functions in the soundscape of a film.
God knows it's far better than the Goldsmith score.
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Thank you, Andy, for the post! I've always loved the film -- even the TD version. There are so many "loose ends" in any version of the film -- the original sets burning down and then being reconstructed -- the change of emphasis from the original very dark concept to a more universally appealing all-purpose tale of Good vs. Evil -- and all of the re-editing over the years. Your article is terrific IMHO -- I agree that Goldsmith's score adds a very rich dimension to the extended version in which the TD music simply wouldn't be as appropriate. The ExVer spends more time with the characters, adds the folk songs, and tries to add at least a little bit more depth to the characters. The TD version, not their fault god knows, was shortened to get to the Good vs Evil story almost right away (Curry's Demon Lord appears much earlier in the TD version), creating a romance between Jack and Lily, and emphasizing the heroic nature of the Cruise character by making him seem more of a standard bearer -- less of a woodland creature out of his depth and threatened by the outside world.
Bryan Ferry has always been one of my favorite song performers and writers (Roxy Music is one of my favorite bands) -- and I love TD on the whole. So for me there are almost two distinct films -- both flawed in different ways -- but both immensely enjoyable.
I remember telling a friend back in the day that I would only hop on the laser disc bandwagon if they released the Goldsmith scored version of "Legend". About a week later I was browsing with him in the Upper West Side Tower Records store and out of curiousity I started to flip through the LD import section. And...there it was...a Japanese import LD in a beautiful sleeve of "Legend" with Goldsmith's score! Although it was not the full length version (it's about an hour and 30 minutes on the Japanese LD), it did indeed have Goldsmith score. I purchased my first LD player that week.
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