The Mark of Kane.

The whole thing started with one of those odd leaps for which the internet has become famous. You know, those The Carpenter and the Walrus moments when you're looking at shoes and ships and sealing wax and end up doing a search for cabbages and kings?

In this case, it started on one of those list sites, the ones that show you galleries of "Disney for Adults" or tell you "The Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sperm".*  I honestly don't remember what the list that caught my eye was dealing with, but the keynote image was from the movie adaptation of Solomon Kane, and it occurred to me that although I knew that a film version had been in production, I'd never seen the results anywhere. Surely it must have been released by now, I thought.

So off I went in search of Solomon Kane.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Solomon Kane is perhaps the second best known creation of pulp author Robert E. Howard - his best known, of course, being Conan the Barbarian.  Unlike Conan, Kane's adventures are set in the more familiar historical venue of Elizabethan England, although many of Kane's adventures take place in Northern Africa, where he fights vampires, zombies, and (of course) nameless things from before the dawn of Time.  

Solomon Kane, as described by Howard in Red Shadows**, the character's August 1928 Weird Tales debut, was:

A tall man, as tall as Le Loup he was, clad in black from head to foot, in plain, close-fitting garments that somehow suited the somber face. Long arms and broad shoulders betokened the swordsman, as plainly as the long rapier in his hand. The features of the man were saturnine and gloomy. A kind of dark pallor lent him a ghostly appearance in the uncertain light, an effect heightened by the satanic darkness of his lowering brows. Eyes, large, deep-set and unblinking, fixed their gaze upon the bandit, and looking into them, Le Loup was unable to decide what color they were. Strangely, the mephistophelean trend of the lower features was offset by a high, broad forehead, though this was partly hidden by a featherless hat.

That forehead marked the dreamer, the idealist, the introvert, just as the eyes and the thin, straight nose betrayed the fanatic.

This fanatical idealist, armed with rapier and flintlock, appeared in twelve short stories and three poems, and like Conan made the leap to comic adaptations many years ago.  On that basis, it would seem only a matter of time before the movie world turned its gaze upon this grim Puritan righter of wrongs, who at least offers script writers a bit more depth and complexity than his barbarian colleague.

However, as with Conan, there's always that possibility that the character might have suffered in translation, so I decided to look for an evaluation copy online before investing in a DVD or Blu-ray version. A little casual investigation revealed that the film had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, which seemed like more than enough time for a few bootleg versions to have made their way to the Internet. Now, normally in these situations one is spoiled for choice, and in a way, I was, but not in the usual way.

First I downloaded what turned out to be a very nicely dubbed Russian version, passed on innumerable French and Spanish copies, then found an English version which, although it weighed in at an acceptable 1.2 GB, was a terrible copy made by shooting the screen of a TV set, and finally found a reasonably good English version - which lost sync on the sound about an hour in. Then there was the French version subtitled in Korean...

Okay, obviously something is up here.

Having booked the day off in an attempt to use up vacation time from 2010, I decided to bite the bullet, trot over to FutureShop on Broadway and satisfy my curiosity by purchasing a copy. Or so I thought. Nothing on the shelf in either the DVD or Blu-ray sections, not even a Solomon Kane divider.  Okay, so off downtown to HMV. Nope, not there, either. Just on spec, I checked the downtown FutureShop - nothing again.

With a bit of a frustrated frown, I returned home to purchase a copy online, only to discover that there was nothing on either amazon.ca or chapters.indigo.ca.  Ironically, you can buy fifteen different versions of the movie poster on amazon.ca, but not the actual movie.  Amazon.com had a DVD version, but only in a European region code, nothing that would play on a North American player.

Subsequent investigation revealed that not only had there not been a North American theatrical release, the scheduled Region 1 DVD release date of June 2010 seemed to have come and gone without result as well. I also discovered that the movie was produced in a co-operative British-French-Czech effort, which might explain why North American distributors had turned their back on it as a "foreign" film, in spite of good reviews, acceptable box office, and noteworthy DVD sales overseas - in fact, Solomon Kane was the top selling DVD and Blu-ray disk for its first week of release in the UK.

My impression from the various downloaded versions was that although unfortunately the plot of the movie version isn't derived directly from any of the original Howard stories, the film admirably captures the spirit of the character. Unlike most heroic fantasy movies, it takes itself completely seriously - there are no bumbling sidekicks, no slapstick humour, and lead actor James Purefoy offers a convincing and believable portrayal of a man who has attempted to redeem himself by turning his back on violence and returning to his faith, but who abandons that attempt in order to save an innocent.  If I had to sum it up, the creators of the movie handled their material with respect, which is not a statement I'd feel comfortable making in regards to 90% of the fantasy movies that I've seen (Peter Jackson's treatment of The Lord of the Rings being an obvious exception.)

And maybe that's the reason for its lack of acceptance in the North American market. Fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote an article entitled Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? in which she talks about what she sees as a basic American distrust of fantasy, or at least of fantasy as an aspect of adult life, which would go a long way to explain Van Helsing, The Scorpion King, or the Conan movies, with their self-conscious nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach to the genre.

Is Solomon Kane a brilliant fantasy movie? No, not really, as far as I can tell it doesn't rise very far above its roots in 1920s pulp fiction. But it's a serious fantasy movie, and that if nothing else should deserve a little recognition.

- Sid

* Just for the record, I was there for "Starcraft II Wallpapers".  Frankly, I feel that I know all that I really need to know about sperm, thank you.

** Available as a free download at:  http://manybooks.net/titles/howardrother07Red_Shadows.html