The Sword and the Claw (1975)

 

a.k.a. Lionman

Director: Natuk Baytan

Screenplay: Natuk Baytan and Duygu Sagiroglu             

Cast: Cüneyt Arkin as Süleyman Sah / Kiliçaslan; Bahar Erdeniz as Ayla; Yildirim Gencer as Kumandan Antuan; Cemil Sahbaz as Altar; Reha Yurdakul as Rüstem Bey; Anuska as Sabbah; Tarik Simsek as Komutan; Ekrem Gökkaya as Papaz Basaryos; Necdet Kökes as Zipzip; Aynur Aydan as Prenses Maria; Yusuf Sezer as Demirpençe  

Ephemeral Waves

 

You can't even open a door for me - idiots!

Those moustaches - a trite thing to start a review on, but for this return for me into Turkish genre cinema, among the many trademarks of them, it has also included a strong facial hair game on the male cast. When their rip-off of Spiderman, in 3 Dev Adam (1973), had eyebrows so strong his mask couldn't contain them, then the moustaches in this film, smash cutting to a battle between rival armies, will be just as magnificent.

To be more serious, The Sword and the Claw is one of the best made of these Turkish genre films I have seen, but that unfortunately means that, even if they were more technically shambolic, this film does lack the unpredictability of a film like 3 Dev Adam, a double edged sword for a film which imagines a Jungle Book scenario (a young boy raised by lions after his king father and mother are slain by a warring leader) with a Medieval sword epic and pulp action, but could have done with a lot more weirdness than we got.

It does evoke old Asian kung fu films from the seventies onwards, not just the Hong Kong films but Korean and Taiwanese films, I have seen on old second hand DVDs with less than stellar prints, and English dubs with a tendency to add egregious cussing and a lot of odd flections in the voicing. This is notably a more preserved and shining work, as this is a preserved released from the American Genre Film Archive, the first Turkish genre film I have seen as intended with its bright look and a very colourful production. Even the costumes and production design with comic book like bright colours (especially purple), adds a bit of distinction of note when I have usually seen films like this in muddy forms online. The voice acting is still peculiar; not to blame AGFA or the original Turkish film production, but one factor to overcome for this version of the film is that the English dub is "subdued" to say the least. As in monotone and bad, that was a clear influnecing factor on the film for me in its sluggish moments.

Personally, as a fan of AGFA even if I have to import their releases, I can still appreciate this film even as an okay piece of pulp than one of their more idiosyncratic titles. You can still see a style of filmmaking different from today emphasised by the fact it is more technically solid in its production - from the excessive use of trampolines in having the characters bound around, to the fact that to show the lead being raised by lions, in-between the archive footage, you do have a young boy onscreen with a real lion cub, which is insane to image being done on a set decades later. Certainly, I can get behind this type of obvious pulpy genre cinema, and it does have a sequel called Lionman II: The Witchqueen (1979), which could have elaborated on this world is films were churned out. Certainly, Cüneyt Arkin is a striking lead who does not even have to talk for the most part, whose main trademark is mostly jumping on his opponents and pawing at them, leading to a lot of red paint gore being smeared on extras' faces. It is surprising to think that Turkey, both as a country known in terms of cinema in the modern day for the likes of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and being mainly a Muslin country, had genre films like this which skirted with gore and even a little bit of eroticism. Certainly the amount of the hand trauma here in the film, including being lopped off, is excessive if part of the tone.

The problem is ironically why a film like Turkish Star Wars (a.k.a. Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam) (1982) is difficult for many to enjoy, and also why it would be impossible to release legally without the copyright being a nightmare. Turksploitation is a world of the unpredictable, a drastic left turn from acclaimed art house films like Ceylan's. Even if I adore the arthouse films, and many of genre films from any country disappoint, there is something tantalising about the few Turkish films I have seen being as wild as they can be, wilder than The Sword and the Claw despite AGFA'S promotion of it. In fact, beyond the gore, this is a far more subdued production in the world of whiplash editing and abrupt use of Star Wars music. In the perfect world, with men with steel lion claws scaling whole castle walls in real time and throwing soldiers around like ragdolls, this movie would have had a greater manic energy and absurdity to match its admirable attempt at being more cohesive.