Max von Sydow could transform the trashiest pulp fantasy flick into a cultural touchstone
When remembering the great Max von Sydow, it’s hard not to recall those iconic images of the medieval knight peering over the chess board into the sinister countenance of the grim reaper in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or receiving a tender shave from Mathieu Amalric in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But there was another side to the twice Oscarnominated Swede.
These days, it’s far from unusual to see an Oscar-winning doyen of the art house turning up as a villain in a superhero movie, or donning the mo-cap suit to play a four-limbed alien in some outrageous space fantasy. But back in the 80s, Von Sydow’s turns in the likes of Flash Gordon, Dune and Conan the Barbarian would have been a little more unexpected to the cinema-going public.
Perhaps he just had the knack of choosing the right movies to ham it up in. John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, from 1982, was a film essentially led by a bodybuilder with a limited grasp of English pronunciation (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a statuesque 6fttall American dancer named Sandahl Bergman who had featured briefly in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz but also had limited acting experience. But the presence of Von Sydow – along with Milius’s innate understanding of the brutality and glory of the swords and sorcery genre and a remarkable supporting cast – led to a fantasy film that stands alongside Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy at the very pinnacle of the genre.
Von Sydow only appears briefly as King Osric the Usurper, who sets Conan and his friends on a quest to rescue the monarch’s daughter from the cult leader Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones on sparkling form), and yet he probably has more lines than Schwarzenegger. His majestically outraged diatribe on the horrors of Doom’s snake cult adds a genuine veneer of classical elegance to Robert E Howard’s pulp fantasy trappings, and reminds us we are not just watching some knuckle-headed action piece.
Von Sydow had a rather larger part in the 1980 space romance Flash Gordon, another movie that blended serious thesps such as Brian Blessed and Timothy Dalton with untried actors (in this case, rookie modelturned-actor Sam J Jones in the title role). Whatever you think of the dubious wisdom of casting a Nordic actor as an alien with cod-oriental features in 2020, Von Sydow’s turn as Ming the Merciless is a thing of operatic grandeur.
As with every Von Sydow performance, no matter how silly the project and how lowbrow the genre, there is never a sniff of suggestion that he is phoning it in: the actor, who had been a fan of the comics as a child, gives it everything as the cruel and maniacal cosmic nutter and is at the very heart of the movie. Yes, it’s pure space pantomime, but this is pantomime of the highest order, as full of delightfully hammy power chords as the Queen songs that soundtrack it.
Von Sydow never did anything quite so brazenly burlesque as Flash Gordon in his later career. But it was surely turns such as these – as well as his appearance in the misfiring David Lynch space fantasy Dune – that led to him being cast as Lor San Tekka in JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens. We never did find out (at least on screen) too much about the significance of the enigmatic Force acolyte in the first of Disney’s Star Wars films, but Von Sydow had enough presence in his short death scene with Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren to help jaded fans of the space opera believe in it again after the horrors of the
prequel trilogy.
A less typical Von Sydow genre performance was his fabulously evil turn as the frozen-hearted “pre-crime” police chief Lamar Burgess in Steven
Spielberg’s beautifully crafted, futuristic thriller Minority Report, based on Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story about a world in which people are jailed for murders they have not yet committed. This was a rather more hardboiled turn, as the clear-eyed, sober villain who knows he has set the controls for the heart of evil, but simply cannot bring himself to break up the dystopian clarity of a deeply dysfunctional system.
I suspect it will be for his earlier, pulpier 80s films that fans of science fiction and fantasy will best remember him. For a generation or two of genre geeks, Von Sydow was that rare example of the serious thespian whose very presence could elevate ostensibly lightweight fantasy cinema into the most superlative of cultural touchstones, like Alec Guinness or James Earl Jones before him. He will be dearly missed.