Revisiting Ridley Scott's Dark Fantasy Legend

LEGEND

(Ridley Scott, 1985, US/UK, 113 minutes)

If Universal had released Legend a year after Tony Scott's flyboy adventure Top Gun, 1986's box office champ, they just might have had a hit on their hands. Instead, this dark fairytale from Tony's older brother, Ridley, premiered in the UK the previous year. 

Though 1983's Risky Business had secured Tom Cruise's leading man status, superstardom was yet to arrive. Instead, much like Sir Ridley's third feature, Blade Runner, Legend proved a box office disappointment. While the former would become a certified sci-fi classic, the latter has become an enduring cult favorite, now elaborately deconstructed by Arrow in a special edition set. One disc features the 89-minute US theatrical cut with Tangerine Dream score and the other features the superior 113-minute director's cut with Jerry Goldsmith score (this set omits Disney's 94-minute European cut). 

In both, 17-year-old Mia Sara, who appeared in Ferris Bueller's Day Off around the same time, plays entitled royal Lili who jeopardizes the entire mortal world when she carelessly puts a beautiful white unicorn in harm's way, thereby creating an opportunity for the forces of evil, represented by a gaggle of goblins, to disempower the creature. She and Cruise's Jack, her forest friend and potential love interest, combine their talents to rescue the sole mare, lest the world be plunged into a permanent nighttime state (it's worth noting that my friend Bill used to refer to this as Cruise's "snaggletooth" era; he hadn't yet gotten his teeth fixed).

Their friends include Oona, a Tinkerbell-like sprite (Annabelle Lanyon), and Gump, a mischievous elf (David Bennent, the wide-eyed former child star of Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum). Their foes include the man-eating seahag Meg Mucklebones (Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo) and above all, the demonic Darkness (Rocky Horror Picture Show's Tim Curry outfitted with lizard eyes, cloven hoofs, and ceiling-scraping horns). 

Once Darkness spies the lovely Lili, he decides to make her his bride, no matter that she once told Jack she would marry the first man to retrieve a ring she tossed in the lake. If the two primary versions of the film end happily, one is more conventionally happy than the other. Though Sara, in her feature-film debut, and 22-year-old Cruise make for appealing leads, Curry's Darkness steals the show, thanks largely to painstaking makeup effects by The Thing's Rob Bottin that took up to five hours to apply. 

The entire Arthur Rackham-inspired forest, constructed on Pinewood Studios' 007 Stage, also impresses with oversized trees, an authentic waterfall, and abundant flora and fauna. In his detailed commentary track on the director's cut, Scott notes that computer-generated imagery, which he would come to embrace in the ensuing years, can be more efficient, but isn't really cheaper than practical effects.

Other extras include an informative commentary track on the theatrical cut from Paul M. Sammon (Ridley Scott: The Making of His Movies), new and archival featurettes, storyboards, two drafts of Angel Heart screenwriter William Hjortsberg's script, and a 2003 documentary on the director. 

Though Legend may never achieve full-on classic motion picture status, the more fleshed-out director's cut proves that Ridley Scott's lovingly-crafted fairytale always deserved better than it got from both film critics and paying audiences alike. 

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

The Legend special edition set is available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. Images from SyFy/Universal Pictures (Mia Sara as Black Lili), Yahoo! Life (Sara and unicorn), and the IMDb (Tim Curry as Darkness and the 1986 international one-sheet).