Our Lenten Film series continues on Friday, February 23, with Ridley Scott’s gorgeously realized 1985 fantasy epic Legend. We’ll be watching the Director’s Cut which restores the original soundtrack (by Jerry Goldsmith), complicates the characters, and includes a more nuanced ending than the original US release could manage.
In our first film, Being There, we explored the question of whether innocence and goodness are synonymous. With Legend, we’ll explore the same question in far more mythic terms. Darkness (in a brilliantly over-the-top performance from Tim Curry) wishes to cover the world in perpetual night, seeking to destroy the embodiments of goodness that ensure the sun’s rising each day. Can innocence thwart his plan and save the world from a dark and endless winter? Or must innocence be lost for the good to be truly discerned, desired, and done? Given the overtly devilish depiction of Darkness in the film (Horns? Check. Hooves? Check.) we’ll also consider how evil is represented…and whether the most fearful evil in the film is a comic-book devil, or the casual selfishness of a version of human innocence that has no real thought, knowledge, or experience of evil at all. Legend is an amalgam of Arthurian lore, folk tale, fairy story, and dualistic myth-making.
Join us Friday, February 23, for a dinner at 6pm and a film at 6:30pm, all in the Parish House.
Subsequent films in the series are:
- March 1: The Innocents (dir: Jack Clayton, 1961, NR)
- March 8: Throne of Blood (dir: Akira Kurosawa, 1957, NR)
- March 15: No Country for Old Men (dir: Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007, R)
- March 22: The Zone of Interest (dir: Jonathan Glazer, 2023, PG-13)
