Die königliche Jagd auf die Sonne

Producer Phillip Yordan had some pretty tough days in the early 1970s. Yordan was charged with tax evasion, I believe as part of his relationship with Samuel Bronston and Pierre DuPont. Bronston had allegedly comingled Dupont's money on several of his productions (most notably EL CID and FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE). Bronston was finished by the late 1960s and Yordan would fall later, which may explain the erratic production values of BAD MAN'S RIVER and ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN.

SUN remains, a tattered quasi-masterpiece, despite Christopher Plummer's rather eccentric performance. One wonders what might have been. No matter, what is on display is good enough for the cheap price of the the DVD. Nevertheless, the quality of the DVD leaves much to be desired. The DVD uses a distracting "baby or royal blue" rather than black for its letterboxing. The interlacing is so bad in some sequences, the film is hardly viewable. The sound is uniformly underrecorded. Surely the masters weren't in THIS bad a shape.

Worth a look for students of history AND of good drama.

This film about the downfall of the Inca empire in sixteenth century Peru manages to be deadly dull for the first 35 minutes; even star Robert Shaw (as Pizarro) manages to be boring and glum.

Then Atahualpa, King of the Incas (Christopher Plummer) appears and Plummer shocks the movie back to life. In the process, he gives a lesson on movie-stealing; hissing, prancing, yowling, sniffing, swooping, shrieking, he effectively makes the film His and everyone else is just annoying background noise. Plummer is in his own Universe and I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

Even the anti- Vietnam War scene doesn't stop the laughter. It's so badly executed that characters fall before being hit, in two cases without being hit.

As long as Plummer's on screen, this is amusing or, at the very least interesting: without him, it is pretty dull.

I saw "Royal Hunt of the Sun" soon after it came out, probably early 1970, in a theater in Cuzco, Peru. The audience was full of speakers of Quechua, and when Christopher Plummer said his first lines in, supposedly, Quechua -- twisting his face, going up and down rapidly from normal voice to falsetto, making little hawking and guttural noises in his throat in a weird impression of the glottal stops of the language -- people started chuckling, and then started actually falling out of their seats in rolling waves of laughter. Atahualpa, king of the American equivalent of the Roman Empire, inheritor of 2000 years of sophisticated cultural history, looked and sounded like a chimpanzee trying to speak German. Lack of respect? Failure to take the trouble to find a proper tutor for the few lines Plummer had to speak of Quechua? Who knows. But it was hard for the audience -- or me -- to take the movie seriously after that scene. I saw the movie again 10 or 15 years later, and couldn't help laughing all over again... and explaining to my family why it was so hilarious.

Royal Hunt of the Sun has been called a cult classic. Maybe so, but for me it was an incredible movie with top notch actors. The film takes a different approach to Pizarro in Peru than one would expect. The mental conflict makes for a fascinating story line as well as a riveting performance by Robert Shaw and a jaw-dropping characterization of a Sun god by Christopher Plummer. It is truly a unique movie.

If, like me, you fell in love with Christopher Plummer while watching The Sound of Music, Royal Hunt of the Sun is a definite must-see! As the Incan ruler Atahualpa, he's wearing very little throughout the movie and his body is absolutely breathtaking! He hasn't played that many "beefcake" roles or done many scenes that show his physical attributes, but this one definitely does! Where was People magazine and their "Sexiest Man Alive" contest when this movie was out??? Christopher Plummer would have won hands-down, no doubt!

All that aside, his acting is excellent, too. This movie re-tells this sad chapter of history very well and very accurately.