In the Flesh: Legend (1985)

There’s something so beautiful about playing the classics straight with real craft and skill to back it up. Fair maidens and unicorns, demonic lords of darkness brooding on their thrones. This stuff is as shopworn as it gets, so fundamental to fantasy as a genre that it can feel like the idea of a story more than the thing itself, but when you dig into it, when you texture those hoary old pieces of iconography with care and attention to detail, they can come alive like you’re seeing them for the very first time. Ridley Scott’s Legend, although occasionally lumpily paced, has that feeling in spades. Its enchanted forest glades make you want to lie down in the moss and let the sun that falls through the branches dapple your skin. Its dark lord, aptly titled Darkness (Tim Curry) has recognizable moods and nuanced relationships. When we first meet the demonic figure, there’s an unmistakable look of sadness on his face. Little things like that make the story feel like more than just recycled imagery and archetypes.

The world production designer Assheton Gorton conjures is among the best the 80s fantasy boom has to offer. Storms of crabapple blossoms, decaying proto-industrial palaces, dusty shafts leading up through hundreds of feet of stone to windswept chimney vents on barren ledges. Even when it’s so clearly a miniature or a matte painting we’re looking at, the sets have a wonderfully crunchy, grimy look to them. There’s a fun vein of Shakespearean fairy story running through the film as well, and the fairies run the gamut from silly and charming to genuinely inhuman. Oona’s (Annabelle Lanyon) fierce desire for Jack (Tom Cruise) feels like something truly wild and threatening, even if it is born of whim, and her transformation into Jack’s lady love, Lili (Mia Sara), to entice him into a kiss is enough to raise goosebumps. 

Then there’s that Tangerine Dream soundtrack, heartbreaker after heartbreaker, synth that sparkles like light on the surface of a babbling brook, waves of dark, airy sound as a masked dancer twirls through shadow and firelight in a swirl of black tulle and satin. Even the ending ballad, ‘Loved by the Sun’, a collaboration between Tangerine Dream and singer Joan Anderson, has a breathlessly earnest quality that sails straight over any inherent cheesiness. That it plays over one of the film’s most affecting moments, the resurrection of the unicorn slain in the first act, certainly helps the sense of full-throated wonder and relief it’s going for. Sometimes you don’t need a big, complex, fully fleshed out world, or an intricate plot, or rounded characters. Sometimes a lady and a unicorn are enough, if you respect the power those symbols hold and put the work in to frame and present them in an appeal to the viewer’s emotions. Legend nails that calculus dead-on.