#495: The Duellists
Honor before reason in Ridley Scott’s feature film debut
Initial release: August 31st, 1977
Director: Ridley Scott
Is there anything more fragile than some men’s egos? Is there anything more pointless — dangerous, even — than a fixation on honor? In Ridley Scott’s 1977 feature-length debut, The Duellists, Scott asks these questions in the context of the turn of the 19th century, when egos and honor ran unchecked on the battlefields and streets of Europe.
Gabriel Feraud is a soldier in Napoleon’s 7th Hussars, a fervent supporter of Bonaparte, and also an asshole who likes to duel people to settle slights to his ego. When he nearly kills the nephew of the mayor of Strasbourg, the local general sends another officer, Armand d’Hubert of the 3rd Hussars (played by a fetal Keith Ian Carradine) to collect him and place him under house arrest. Feraud, played by a seemingly ageless Harvey Keitel, is never one to spare messengers, and views the whole thing as a personal insult to him directly from d’Hubert, and challenges d’Hubert to a duel. The duel ends inconclusively, but gets d’Hubert fired from his staff position in the general’s service. Over the next course of the film, we’re treated to a vertical slice of sorts of the Napoleonic Wars as they’re waged over the next 16 years, as Feraud just won’t leave d’Hubert alone. Every time d’Hubert thinks he’s gotten away from Feraud, Feraud shows up again. At one point, d’Hubert gets promoted and thinks that now Feraud won’t be able to duel him as it’s against the rules to have duels between unequal ranks — only to find out that Feraud got promoted too. When Napoleon’s army freezes to death in the Russian winter, who does d’Hubert see shivering up on the other side of a campfire but none other than Feraud?
While the film begins with Feraud, it’s mostly about d’Hubert, who is trying to build a military career while this asshole keeps popping up at inopportune moments. While d’Hubert certainly would not mind if Feraud were to fuck off, he feels himself honor-bound to respond every time, no matter how much physical damage he endures to his body, or emotional damage when opportunities are closed to him such as getting fired from his staff position, or a lover leaving him in frustration. In the end, it must seem to him that Feraud is his only friend, the two of them at one point forced to work together to fight off the Russian Cossacks during the retreat from Moscow. But Feraud certainly doesn’t see things that way, even after all the years since that first duel in Strasbourg. His ego is in equal measure to d’Hubert’s sense of honor, and we watch the film wondering which of these men is going to get themselves killed by their respective vice.
As Ridley Scott’s first feature film, adapted from a Joseph Conrad novel, Scott’s filmmaking talent is on full display here from the word go — he would be directing my top two favorite films, Alien and Blade Runner in just a few short years — but there’s a bit of a hackneyed quality to it. He had already developed an impressive talent for the technical side of filmmaking, but he had picked up that talent after spending his formative years in the advertising business, with a famous 1973 commercial making him a household name, in part because it uses soft lighting to create an aesthetic of picturesque poverty for the sole purpose of selling bread. Now, granted, it’s really impressive soft lighting, which leads me to the elephant in the room that must be addressed, and that’s the obvious comparisons of this film to Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 period epic Barry Lyndon.
I don’t think it’s unfair to compare these two films, though it is interesting to note how they compare and contrast. The Duellists was Ridley Scott’s feature debut; Kubrick made Barry Lyndon towards the tail end of a successful career that had him on the verge of a sort of filmmaker’s apotheosis, which he arguably would reach within the next decade. Kubrick had to fight to get the kind of lighting he wanted, going so far as to “borrow” lenses from NASA; Scott makes it look easy by shooting most of the film outside, relying more on getting the time of day right (there’s a scene set at sunrise that is stupendously gorgeous — and if shooting had started five minutes earlier or later it simply wouldn’t have worked as well.) Both are set in (roughly) the same historical period (if you consider the mid-to-late 1700s and the early 1800s to be the same historical period.) Both have their strengths in costume design, lighting, and script. And both couldn’t be more obvious examples of their respective creators’ signature styles. (And both are kind of about the same thing: namely, the egos of men who don’t have much else going for them.)
You know, as long as we’re comparing movies, let’s compare The Duellists to a much more recent film of Scott’s, The Last Duel from 2021. I see the newer film as a dark mirror of the older one; both use dueling as a fixed point to explore themes of class and masculine ego, but in very different ways, with the 1977 film trailing a simple rivalry in the context of the Napoleonic Wars while the 2021 film further examines gender and the end of the medieval period (and, more broadly, how little has changed since then.) Both are different films saying different things; in the context of Scott’s overall career, which he’s packed with everything from science fiction and fantasy to crime dramas and sprawling historical epics, it’s interesting to see how after all these years he still circles back to masculine ego. (And it’s not like we haven’t seen what happens when nobody listens to Lieutenant Ripley…)
The Duellists isn’t a perfect film — none of Scott’s movies really are, even Blade Runner, the flaws of which are admittedly less Scott’s fault and more the studio’s — but it’s still an incredible period piece that treats the petty rivalry between these two men as the farce that it is, showing how one man’s demand to be respected and the other man’s insistence on proving himself to this upper-class twit just looks stupid to everyone else.
