Giving Heads

Khartoum is another decapitation film worthy of a heads-up, not only because Charlton Heston's skull gets popped off, but because it includes the classic "message in a basket" (Laurence Olivier shows Heston two severed heads in hopes of scaring him out of town), a gambit that would be borrowed by Mel Gibson nearly 30 years later in Braveheart when a basket carrying a severed head gets sent to the king's castle as an announcement of their royal defeat.

Equally worthy of mention is Sam Peckinpah's brutal, nihilistic 1974 release Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Here, Warren Oates plays a likable bistro owner who, through a series of unexpected mishaps, ends up driving around rural Mexico with the head of a dead womanizer riding shotgun in the passenger seat. It is worth recalling that Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was a bomb when it was released a quarter-century ago, as was the film that shamelessly borrowed the theme of the neurotic motorist accompanied by a severed head, last year's Crazy in Alabama. The twin failures suggest that severed heads as traveling companions don't cut it.

When pressured to pick the greatest decapitation movie of all time, purists give the nod either to The Omen, in which David Warner's head is separated from his body by a sheet of plate glass in an "accident" that has Satan's fingerprints all over it, or to Conan the Barbarian, the 1982 cult classic that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's otherwise unnecessary career. Much as I enjoy The Omen, it only has one beheading, whereas Conan has two; and since I almost always prefer quantity to quality, I have reserved my highest praise for Arnie's bafflingly impressive screen performance.

Conan is the only film I know that both begins and ends with a decapitation, thus achieving a seamless post-cranial unity. At the beginning of the film, a surprisingly multi-cultural horde of marauding barbarians descend upon young Conan's village and butcher everyone except the boy and his mother. Expecting to be slaughtered like the rest of her tribe, Mrs. Conan raises her sword in a vaguely menacing gesture. But arch-villain James Earl Jones is far too clever to risk a mano-a-mano confrontation with a lioness defending her cub. Mesmerizing her with an expression of unexpected warmth, Jones turns to go, acting as if he has shed enough blood. This feint is just convincing enough to put Arnie's mother off her guard, and the next thing you know the kid is clasping the hand of an entirely headless mother, while her Neanderthalic noggin drops slowly to the ground.

Talk about formative childhood experiences.

For a film starring Schwarzenegger, this decapitation sequence is unusually artistic, much more visually opulent than the crude hugger-mugger one normally sees in his films. But artistry need not concern us here. What interests us is that in the climactic confrontation, Jones uses a similar trick to try to sucker-behead Arnie, but this time it doesn't work. Instead, Arnie lops off his nemesis's skull, holds it up for all his followers to see, and then chucks it down a flight of stairs in an unforgettable sequence that would be recycled a generation later in Gladiator. By chopping off the head of the man who decapitated his mother, Conan achieves the kind of "closure" that any of us who grew up with decapitated mothers would naturally seek.

Decapitations figure prominently in all of the films in the Highlander series, for the simple reason that the villains in the films can only be killed by having their heads chopped off. Though a beheading buff of the first water, I have never found these movies especially interesting. Decapitation works best when you don't entirely expect it, when it comes as a bit of a jolt, as it does in Black Rain, The Patriot and Se7en. The only film in the Highlander series that is at all interesting is Highlander--The Final Dimension, in which a decapitated Oriental warrior who is sort of a poor man's Yoda continues to speak derisively to his murderer (Mario Van Peebles) long after he is deceased. But this sort of posthumous dissing probably happens all the time in Mario Van Peebles movies.

It cannot be denied that some decapitation scenes resonate with audiences more than others. Much of this has to do with who is getting his head cut off and how much of the severed head you actually get to see. For example, Andy Garcia is probably the best-looking actor to ever get his head hewed off in a movie. But it's important to remember that in the memorable sequence from Black Rain (which should have been called Bring Me the Head of Andy Garcia or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, But if You Can't Find It, Andy's Head Will Do) we never actually see his head pop free. Very annoying, indeed. The same criticism can be made of John Huston's otherwise excellent 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, where we do not in fact witness Sean Connery's decapitation, but merely see a rotting skull--which could belong to anybody--at the very end of the film. (Decapitation buffs, take note: Connery is, to my knowledge, the only actor of any consequence to be decapitated in two films, as he also parts company with the old coconut in the original Highlander)

This brings us to the contemporary era of decapitation films, which is a decidedly mixed bag. Although beheadings have become much more common in recent films, largely because computer imaging makes this sort of thing far easier, the true head-detaching potential of the idiom has not yet been realized. Up to this point, directors seem content to lift their decapitation shots from earlier films, confident that their youthful audiences have not seen them. For example, while I thoroughly enjoyed the head-being-tossed-down-to-the-ground scene at the beginning of Gladiator, it's hard to see how it's much of an improvement over James Earl Jones's bouncing skull in Conan the Barbarian. The head-in-the-basket gambit in Braveheart is an effective dramatic touch, but it is nonetheless a direct lift from Khartoum. And the severed head that keeps blabbing away after being separated from its body in Scary Movie is merely a variation on similar scenes from Highlander--The Final Dimension, Salome's Last Dance and The Head.

Other decapitation movies are even less impressive. Both Austin Powers and Lake Placid include sequences where a human head is bitten off by a monster from the deep. This is good. Unfortunately, the directors merely show the audience the headless body, neglecting to display the head itself. This is a serious, serious error. Cinematic decapitations are most effective when you actually get to see the expression on the victim's head. Was he surprised? Horrified? Embarrassed? Or just kind of pissed off?

The sad truth is, recent movies are littered with wasted opportunities for the director to do something truly memorable in the decapitatorial genre. Antonio Banderas, in his maiden voyage as a director in Crazy in Alabama, totally drops the ball by letting Melanie Griffith drive all across America with a severed head in a hatbox, but never once lets the audience see it. Nor does the audience ever get to see the scene where Griffith decapitates her husband with an electric carving knife she got as a Christmas gift. Roland Emmerich makes a similar error in The Patriot where a soldier's head is torn off by a cannonball early in the picture, but we never again get to see either the head or the cannonball. In this case, I think Emmerich made the classic mistake of raising the bar too high. Once that first head comes off, the audience is naturally going to want to see more of this kind of thing. After all, it's not like the English were short on cannonballs. Emmerich should have paid closer attention to Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, where the head-severing philosophy was quite clear: the more, the merrier. In Burtons movie, heads bounce, heads fly, heads get impaled, and most important of all, heads roll.

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