Arnold Schwarzenegger And His Conan Co-Stars Suffered Some Scary Injuries While Filming

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John Milius is a man of limited talents, but one thing he understands is the savage glory of combat – and, well, surfing, as demonstrated by his terrific third feature "Big Wednesday."

But let's get back to war, because that's where John Milius has always been most comfortable. It's a troubling predilection for an asthmatic who, so he claims, dearly wanted to serve his country in the Vietnam War, only to become a top-tier action screenwriter and an unabashed gun nut (his rewrite of "Dirty Harry," wherein he insisted on Eastwood's character brandishing a Smith & Wesson Model 29 chambered for the .44 Magnum cartridge, earned him a rare firearm as a bonus payment). Milius loves firearms and violence, and he regrets that his faulty lungs would not allow him to be Sgt. Rock; ergo, his movies are feverish, gore-soaked fantasies through which he lives out a chest-beating brutality he will never know firsthand.

The pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard was tailor-made for Milius. The Texas writer pounded out brawny, bloody adventures about broadsword-wielding brutes like Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane. They're invigorating reads. Howard's intensity leaps off the page. Like Milius, Howard never saw combat, but he did come to know the lethality of a firearm when he fatally shot himself in the head at the age of 30.

Milius was a member of the 1970s Film Brat collective that included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, and, having made three noteworthy features in "Dillinger," "The Wind and the Lion," and "Big Wednesday," seemed on the cusp of a breakout. In 1982, his brilliant adaptation of "Conan the Barbarian" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a commercial/artistic coming out party, but bringing it together required actual bloodshed from his stars – the kind Milius rarely sacrificed himself.

According to the 2001 book "Flights of Fancy: The Great Fantasy Films," by Kenneth Von Gunden, the production of "Conan the Barbarian" was far from accident-free. Milius's asthma was aggravated by the five-month shoot in Spain, which saw the cast and crew dealing with cold, wet weather and constant assault by mosquitoes. When they weren't getting sucked dry by the vampiric bugs, they were inadvertently shedding each other's blood.

The formidable Sandahl Bergman had her right index finger slashed to the bone by an extra during one swordfight. She also had her breasts and legs burned during pyrotechnic sequences, which left her in considerable pain throughout the shoot. Star Arnold Schwarzenegger took his share of punishment as well, getting grazed in the neck by a steel axehandle. But, really, Bergman took the brunt of the blows, and she held up admirably.

Schwarzenegger (who dearly wants to play Conan again) held the team together by assuring them that the pain would result in a classic Hollywood adventure. He was right. I've watched "Conan the Barbarian" several times in rep house screenings, and that movie plays as if heaven-sent by Crom. It's a film made possible by two men who sat in front of typewriters and got off on a wanton kind of violence they could not themselves commit.