The Conan Completist

SOURCES: thearnoldfans, Métal Hurlant, William Smith
AUDIO COMMENTARY: No.
NOVELIZATION: Yes.
COMIC BOOK: No.
FILMED?: Not sure of the whole!
EXTRAS LAST UPDATE: ---

The first cut scene listed by CromIsGod on www.thearnoldfans.com intervenes just after the opening scene [1]:

Young Conan & The Master scale a large mountain or cliff face to reach their summit where The Master tells Conan of "The Riddle of Steel".

Was such a scene really shot? A reasonable doubt remains. The scene in question appears in the novelization:

In after years, Conan remembered how rolling thunder-heads blotted out the stars, as his father led him from the village of log dwellings into the upper reaches of the snow-clad mountain.
As they clambered upward, the wind rose, biting the furs that sheltered them. They traversed white-lipped crevices, rough, flinty slopes, and bald out-crops where scarcely a toehold could be found.
Thunder rumbled as they reached the summit. Then the storm broke... Thus, in the fury of the elements, was the mystic rite performed to render the sword invincible.

But it does not appear in the official movie adaptation comic book signed by John Buscema and published by Marvel, in which, as in the final cut, Conan and his father are already at the top of the mountain when the scene begins.

There is however a second "comic book adaptation" of the movie, which includes the climbing scene (picture 1). Remained unfinished (although published in the Metal Hurlant special issue devoted to the film), it is the work of William Stout, comic book artist hired at the sides of Ron Cobb as a conceptual designer.

Conan's father monologue also seems to have been appreciably shortened, as David C. Smith announces it (while basing himself on the Milius script):

Cut from the opening father-and-son sequence is the Master’s presenting the young Conan with the sword forged during the opening credits. "Learn the riddle of steel," he tells the boy, "and you won’t need Crom!" He puts Conan’s hand on his and together they hold the weapon. "Here. Your sword." The sword that Thulsa Doom takes, then, is as much Conan’s as it was his father’s. Thulsa Doom steals Conan’s own property, a development that emphasizes the hypocrisy of the cult leader and adds an even more personal dimension to the subtext linking warrior and sorcerer.

William Smith (who plays Conan's father in the film) gives himslef the merits of the monologue in question in this interview carried out by Louis Paul (during which he also reveals to have beaten Schwarzenegger when arm-wrestling!):

"In CONAN, I just had one speech, to the baby Conan, and John Milius kept saying to me "I want something about steel and fire and strength." Now, I was on the set for thirteen weeks and I was on the screen for only seven minutes, and he came to me one day, and he said "We're gonna' shoot that monologue of yours now" and I said "What monologue?" and he said "What I've been telling you about..." So, the monologue that I did in CONAN was off the top of my head "Not man, not woman, not beast can you trust. This can you trust..." the sword. I did the same thing in RED DAWN. I wrote the whole Russian speech in that."

Knowing the dialogist talents of Milius, the arm-wrestling anecdote is certainly more authentic than the monologue one! (It reminds a little bit that of the famous monologue of Robert Shaw in JAWS, of which more or less everyone allotted paternity, whereas it is clear that it belongs to Milius...)

The scene of the monologue, such as one finds it in the final cut, obviously was entirely filmed indoor, with a blue screen (except, of course, the two establishing shots of snow-covered mountain [pciture 2] which precede it): the clouds which pass behind young Conan and his father (picture 3) were added in post-production. However, a mysterious photograph (picture 4) is on the DVD (used as a background on the filmography page of William Smith), which shows us the same two actors on location, with, behind them, a landscape which strongly evokes a snow-covered mountain... Does this photograph come from some hypothetical outdoor shooting of the monologue scene? It is extremely possible. And if certain shots were filmed in natural locations for the needs of this sequence, then one can very well suppose shots of the climbing could have been filmed.

ConanCompletist 2004