Tonight with friends: released 48 years ago, this masterpiece signed by the director of Gladiator is one of the greatest historical films of all time

Ridley Scott began to work in the 70s with producer David Puttnam, developing ideas for their future films. It was ultimately late, when he is already forty years old, that Scott was shooting his first film: the Dullists.

It is in a new written written by Joseph Conrad, author of the heart of darkness, the novel having inspired Apocalypse Now, that Scott falls on this incredible story and taken from real facts: two hussars of the Napoleonic army will compete in duel about thirty times, between 1800 and 1816, to wash a blood and honor debt.

He thus draws a pure masterpiece, released in 1977, unanimously considered one of the best films, if not the best, never made on the period. With a budget of barely 900,000 dollars, Scott does wonders by turning many scenes in decor and natural light in Dordogne, in visual compositions very much inspired by the Barry Lyndon of Stanley Kubrick, but also by the Rembrandt and Caravaggio painters.

If originally the filmmaker had two compatriots in mind for the main roles, Michael York and Oliver Reed, will ultimately be two American actors who will oppose the screen and whose alchemy is perfect: Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel, qualified by Scott as “Deaf rage block”.

The duelists will unfortunately not be exactly a summit at the box office … in the United States, it did not even report $ 260,000. In France, where we could have expected a very honorable success given its subject relating to the history of France, and in particular the always lively interest on the subjects around Napoleon, he however only attracted 173,917 spectators. Two years later, Scott washes the affront by signing Alien, the eighth passenger, with the success that we know, and a career now put in orbit.

If you have never seen this pure wonder, the duelists are available on Paramount+