The Conan Completist

SOURCES: ???
AUDIO COMMENTARY: Yes.
NOVELIZATION: Yes.
COMIC BOOK: Not.
FILMED?: Probably.
EXTRAS LAST UPDATE: ---

In their audio commentary, Milius and Schwarzenegger vaguely mention a short passage removed from the final cut. Conan and Valeria are about to share the same bed for the very first time:

Schwarzenegger: Where did you find this set? I do not remember it anymore...
Milius: This one?
Schwarzenegger: Yes, where they make love.
Milius: It is... a kind of Mongolian yurt.
Schwarzenegger: Ah, it is not their home, then.
Milius: No, no. Remember, they rented it from somebody, or something like that. I removed the passage which preceded...

.
The passage in question does not appear in the comic book, but one can find it in the novelization.

[Valéria] followed Conan outside the inn. A lame old woman led Conan and Valeria inside a hut enlightened with candles and made a smile of complicity to them, at the corner of her toothless mouth. Conan gave her a small coin and she left the room while being low inclined. The barbarian removed his tunic while the robber unbuckled her belt and left her armour.

The love scene was also to be the occasion for Valeria to reveal her past as a pitfighting girl to Conan (picture 1). Her combat in the arena having been removed from the final cut, the dialogue in question did not make sense anymore: it thus disappeared too (undoubtedly in the dissolve which follows the entry of the two actors in the yurt).

The novelization proposes a "mute" version of this:

One moment, the impassive face, Conan studied the impatient woman; then, raising the hands to his gashed neck, he revealed the marks of the cruel collar that one had made him wear. Valeria embraced the scars with frenzy and was thrown on him in an irresistible dash. Then, undulating under his pressure, she rejected her long blond hair behind and showed to the eyes of her companion identical scars. She also had endured long nights in the arena.

It will be noted however that, in the final cut, at the very end of the battle of the mounds, Conan turns to the altar on which he burned the body of Valeria the day before and addresses to it/her the pitfighters salute (picture 2), a sword in each hand, which well proves that he knows that she, too, fought in the arena!

ConanCompletist 2004