Cinema: Pop and Circumstance

As the historian Prescott tells it, Pizarro drew his sword and “traced a line with it on the sand from East to West. Then, turning towards the South, ‘Friends and comrades!’ he said, ‘on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the South.'” It was an epic moment, one of the many, in fact, that The Royal Hunt of the Sun shamelessly overlooks in favor of pop-psych melodramatics. A pity, too, because when this Freudian version of the conquest of Peru concentrates on the pomp and circumstance traditional to movie spectaculars, it is a lot of cornball fun.

General Francisco Pizarro (Robert Shaw) was, the way Screenwriter Philip Yordan tells it, obsessed by his own bastardy. As in the case of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, the burden of his illegitimacy weighed so heavily that it drove him to deeds of improbable and even reckless heroism. In the bizarre personage of King Atahuallpa (Christopher Plummer) Pizarro encounters a man of his own kind, an implacable and almost superhuman force. Atahuallpa gives short shrift to the rabid Catholic missionaries in Pizarro’s party and, looking into the explorer’s eyes, says tellingly: “Their God is not in your face.” Replies Pizarro: “I see my father in your face.” The eventual and inevitable execution of Atahuallpa becomes a pat symbol of Pizarro’s psychosis, at once too easy and too unwieldy to be taken seriously.

Still, the proceedings—adapted from Peter Shaffer’s opulent play—are well managed by Director Irving Lerner in a style that might be called Eisenstein modern, and devotees of the Hollywood spectacular will cherish the bravado of the two leading actors. Robert Shaw bellows and glowers in his ornate armor like a psyched-up Errol Flynn. Christopher Plummer, in cloak, loincloth, gold necklaces and flowing hair, looks like the lead singer of a particularly exotic rock group, and his attempts at a Peruvian dialect occasionally make him sound like one. His performance is unabashed camp, consisting about equally of ego, bluff and plain old Spam. It is obvious that he has not had so much fun since he spent all that time over in the corner of the screen sneering at the kids in The Sound of Music.