David Lynch – Blood and Porridge

March 27, 2024March 29, 2024

It’s Timmy time

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now. Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us. Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen. The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock… The soundtrack was unnervingly silent… And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping. We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film. I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie. So, what did I think of it? Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning. In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor. Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1. As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager. But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

© New English Library

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis. There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events. Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing. Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives. Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again. While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long. He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform. Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

© HandMade Films / Python (Monty) Pictures

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed. As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention. They head for Arrakis… And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced. Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control. How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery. It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether. The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly. He just pops up all-of-a-sudden. I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle. Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis. These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one. I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens. But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2. Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen. Gurney would be right to distrust her.

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1). Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers. Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2. In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters. In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems. Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave. In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2. The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!” Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness. And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens. The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise. Even their fireworks look dark and perverted. And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film. (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast. That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck. But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre). For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die. Yes, I know. It’s sad that I notice these things.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

January 31, 2023February 1, 2023

Norm!

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives. Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins. Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former. As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love. Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go. To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement. From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21^st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky. Morales survived and divorced him two years later. For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott. Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs. Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

And yet… I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees. This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

© Rhinehart & Company

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II. Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112^th Cavalry. It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war. The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot. They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other. In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union. The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island. If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word. Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly, Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’ It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process. Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together. However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park. This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs. Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot. Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water. At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam. To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here. About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

© Penguin Books

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself. Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too. At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person. Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight. This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine). With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event. It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20^th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country. Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it. And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good. Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all. And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest… The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

Random House USA Inc

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously. It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish. Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night. Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book. Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street. He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

© Penguin Random House

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies. Sounds good, yes? Well, no. The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987). And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality. It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’. (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.) Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this. Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day. This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die. Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness. At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr Five.” Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument. “I made you come 16 times – in a night.” “And none of them was any good!”

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad. I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993). Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange… There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash. Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel. Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them. Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff. My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!”

November 18, 2021March 27, 2024

Spice-world: the movie

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Like everywhere else, one sector in Sri Lanka heavily hit by Covid-19 was the country’s cinemas. In Colombo, establishments like the Liberty, Savoy and Regal had stood closed-up, empty and silent for so long that I’d begun to doubt if they’d ever open their doors again. However, with the Sri Lankan Covid-19 death toll down (for now), the authorities have permitted cinemas to reopen, albeit working at a reduced capacity. During the first half of November, their auditoriums could only be 25% full. For the month’s second half, the maximum capacity has been increased to 50%. To do our bit to help Sri Lanka’s beleaguered cinema industry, myself and a mate went a few days ago to the Scope multiplex at Colombo City Centre shopping mall. There, we watched Dune, this year’s big-budget, Denis Villeneuve-directed adaptation of the famous 1965 science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Or at least, Villeneuve’s adaptation of the first half of it, as Dune is one fat book.

And we had no regrets about seeing Dune in a cinema. It’s a visually majestic creation that needs to be seen on a big screen to be properly appreciated. In fact, you’ll be committing a minor crime against celluloid if you watch it in reduced form on a TV or laptop screen. And if you dare to watch it on a phone-screen… Well, you don’t deserve to live.

I have to say, though, that I read Herbert’s novel as a teenager and it was no favourite of mine. In part, my being unimpressed by it was probably down to bloody-mindedness. A lot of earnest, nerdy people gushed about how great it was, which probably predisposed me to not liking it. This was similar to my less-than-enthusiastic reaction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-worshipped Lord of the Rings – although unlike Rings, I did read Dune to the end. (With Rings, I gave up four-fifths of the way through.) Also, it didn’t help that I read Dune a couple of years after Star Wars (1977) came out. Many of the book’s plot elements – a scheming galactic empire, a desert planet, an elite sect with psychic powers – had recently featured in George Lucas’s sci-fi / fantasy blockbuster, so they seemed less fresh than they had in 1965.

© New English Library

Though I found Lord of the Rings overrated on the page, I did enjoy the movies that Peter Jackson made of it in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Well, apart from the last half-hour of the final one, The Return of the King, which consisted of nothing but various characters getting married. A second-rate reading experience can, with an excellent cast, a great director and all the epic locations and special effects that Hollywood money can buy, be turned into a first-rate viewing experience.

And so it is with Dune.

Its cast is wonderful – Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Timothée Chalamet, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Jason Mamoa, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Javier Bardem – and director Villeneuve has already helmed two of the past decade’s greatest sci-fi movies, Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). And its 165-million-dollar budget has been put to good use. The filming locations in the UAE and Jordan really do transport you to the film’s main setting, the endlessly sandy and murderously hot desert-planet Arrakis; while the special effects, conjuring up fleets of spacecraft that stand like gigantic, angular cathedrals when they’re parked on planets’ surfaces, but look as tiny and inconsequential as pollen-grains when they’re bobbing in the black void of space, are stunning. Hence, the absolute necessity to see Dune on a large screen.

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Denis Villeneuve, of course, isn’t the first filmmaker to bring Dune to the screen, for an earlier cinematic version of it had appeared in 1984, directed by that genius of visionary weirdness, David Lynch. The 1984 Dune was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics – I remember the New Musical Express retitling it Dung – but I didn’t think it was that bad. Lynch added some delightfully bizarre touches to the story and he arguably had an even better cast of actors than Villeneuve: Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and the great (and now, sadly, late) Dean Stockwell. Sting was in it too.

Alas, Lynch’s producer was old-school movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted Dune to be a regulation two-hour movie. Cramming all the events of Herbert’s doorstop-sized book into that caused massive problems for the script. Early on, Lynch had wisely envisioned Dune as two movies, and then proposed it as a three-hour film, but this cut no ice with old Dino.

I remember going to see Lynch’s Dune at a cinema in Aberdeen with my girlfriend of the time. Having read the book I was familiar with the plot, which goes like this… (Beware – spoilers are coming.) In the distant 102^nd century, the galaxy is ruled by an empire that incorporates a number of powerful families, or Houses. One of these, the House Atreides, headed by the well-meaning Duke Leto (Isaacs in the new Dune, Prochnow in the old one), his ‘concubine’ Lady Jessica (Ferguson now, Annis then) and their son, the young Paul (Chalamet now, MacLachlan then), is entrusted with running the desert-planet Arrakis. Arrakis is vital for the Empire because a mysterious ‘spice’- in reality a consciousness-expanding drug – is mined there and its properties enable spaceship-navigators to find their way through interstellar space. The planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the reclusive and Bedouin-like Fremen, are suspicious of the Atreides because previously the Empire had put them under control of another House, the Harkonnen, who treated them genocidally.

Before Leto can win hearts and minds on Arrakis, the Harkonnen launch an attack to retake the planet, with the Emperor’s blessing – the whole manoeuvre has been a plot to get rid of the potentially troublesome Atreides. The Atreides are wiped out, save for Paul and his mother Jessica, who flee into the planet’s deserts. They now have the formidable task of rallying the distrustful Fremen and persuading them to retake Arrakis from the homicidal Harkonnen – which, in the book’s later stages, they do.

Villenueve’s film ends with Paul and Jessica fleeing the Harkonnen – a second Dune movie, which will tell the remaining story, has now been greenlighted. Poor old Lynch, though, had to squash everything into just over two hours. I remembering being in an Aberdonian pub after seeing his Dune with my ex-girlfriend, who hadn’t read the book. I spent about an hour trying to explain the film’s plot to her, which she’d been flummoxed by.

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Villeneuve’s Dune only covers half of the book and is still 19 minutes longer than Lynch’s version, so obviously the story gets more space to breath. This also enables Villeneuve to do a lot of the important sci-fi business of ‘world-building’. It’s gratifying too that Dune’s secondary characters, the various soldiers, courtiers and allies of the House Atreides, like Gurney Halleck (Brolin now, Stewart then), Duncan Idaho (Mamoa now, Jordan then), Thufir Hawat (McKinley Henderson now, Jones then) and Dr Liet-Kynes (Duncan-Brewster now, von Sydow then) get much more time to establish themselves and win the audience’s sympathy. In the compressed 1984 Dune, their roles were brief and their deaths, if they occurred, were blink-and-you’ll-miss-them events.

Certain critics have sniped at this new version of Dune for being humourless. Now while I admit to counting a total of three jokes during the film’s entire 157-minute running time – it’s telling that two of those jokes turn up in the trailer – I have to say I found it refreshing to experience a science fiction film willing to treat its subject matter seriously and not populate it with, say, bumbling comedy droids or wisecracking bipedal rodents. In effect, those critics are showing their snobbery. They’re protesting: “But this is just science fiction! It’s not, it can’t be serious! You’ve got to have bumbling comedy droids in it! And wisecracking aliens!” So, stuff ’em.

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

One thing David Lynch’s Dune was memorable for was its depiction of the Harkonnen. Played by Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Brad Dourif and Sting, they were a grotesque, evilly-perverted bunch – no more so than McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, who was a levitating, leering sack of pus. Probably wisely, Villeneuve doesn’t try to out-Lynch Lynch here and makes his Harkonnen a more sombre lot, communicating their malevolence through stillness rather than histrionics. Stellan Skarsgard is especially effective as a brooding, Brando-esque Baron.

I read somewhere that Frank Herbert intended the good guys, the Atreides, to be descended from the Greeks on faraway, long-ago earth, although some visual and verbal references to bullfighting in both his book and Villeneuve’s film suggest they’re Spaniards. However, when the Duke, his family and courtiers arrive on Arrakis, the film shows them being led out of their spaceship by a bagpiper… which implies they’re actually Scottish. Well, their home planet’s name is Caladan, which sounds like ‘Caledonia’. One of them is called Duncan and another is called Gurney – Scots gurn a lot. And by half-time they’ve already been slaughtered. So yup, I think they’re Scottish.

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

One thing I believe makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.

Anyway, for now, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Dune completes a science-fictional hat-trick for Villeneuve. Perhaps it’s not quite as impressive a run as Stanley Kubrick achieved with the sci-fi or sci-fi-related Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972), but it’s still pretty amazing. Let’s hope he can knock Dune 2 out of the park and make this triumphant threesome a foursome.

© Legendary Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

August 9, 2021

Cinematic heroes 3: David Warner

© Warner Bros.

I’ve just discovered that a few days ago was the 80^th birthday of the film and TV character actor David Warner. In honour of the great man becoming an octogenarian, here’s an updated version of a post I wrote about him eight years ago.

For most actors, becoming typecast is a pain in the neck. The day that the lugubrious-faced, distinctive-voiced David Warner became typecast, as an actor specialising in offbeat roles in offbeat films, often horror, science fiction and fantasy ones, it was actually a pane in the neck.

As Keith Jennings, the photographer who befriends Gregory Peck’s ambassador Richard Thorne in 1976’s The Omen, he is memorably decapitated when a sheet of glass comes crashing off the back of a truck and shears his head from his shoulders. Indeed, though The Omen was choc-a-block with people dying in gruesome freak accidents, and later there were Omen sequels with more freak accidents, and later still there were a half-dozen Final Destination movies following a similar template and serving up many more freak accidents, the cinema has seen very few freak accidents as spectacularly shocking as Warner’s in that 45-year-old movie.

© 20^th Century Fox

The main actors in the big-budget Omen – Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw – were names not normally associated with horror movies. Until then, Warner’s name hadn’t been associated with them either. Mancunian by birth, he started acting professionally in 1962 and the following year joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, which led to stage roles in Henry IV Part 1, Henry VI Parts I-III, Julius Caesar, Richard II, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and, in 1965, playing the title role, Hamlet. The earliest films he appeared in were sometimes theatrical in origin too, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Sea Gull, which both appeared in 1968. However, it was in 1966’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment that he made his biggest impression on 1960s movie audiences. In it he plays a working-class artist who’s abandoned by his posh wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, and goes to unhinged extremes to win her back.

When Warner’s career is discussed, it’s often overlooked that he was once a regular performer with the legendary action-movie director Sam Peckinpah. His association with the hard-drinking, coke-snorting, near-deranged filmmaker started with 1970’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in which he played an eccentric preacher who befriends Jason Robards’ titular hero. Peckinpah often boasted, “I can’t direct when I’m sober,” and for the young Warner Hogue must have been quite an initiation into the director’s weird and wonderful ways. When bad weather held up filming, Peckinpah and his crew went on a massive drinking binge and ran up a bar-bill worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

In the next year’s Straw Dogs, Peckinpah’s taboo-busting film set in the English West Country, Warner plays a simpleton who unwittingly kills a girl and then takes refuge in Dustin Hoffman and Susan George’s house with a squad of vigilantes on his trail. In Cross of Iron, Peckinpah’s 1977 war movie about a doomed German platoon on the Russian front, he plays a humane German officer who just wants to get through the war in one piece. In fact, in Cross of Iron, nearly all the Germans, including James Coburn’s gallant corporal and James Mason’s world-weary colonel, are humane types who view war with extreme distaste. What upsets the apple-cart, and eventually gets most of them killed, is the arrival of Maximillian Schell’s glory-hunting Prussian officer. Schell is obsessed with winning an iron cross for himself and isn’t worried about other soldiers dying in the process.

In 1973 Warner made his first appearance in a horror film, the British anthology movie From Beyond the Grave, whose stories were based on the writings of Ronald Chetwyn-Hayes. In the film’s first story, The Gate Crasher, he plays an arrogant prick called Edward Charlton who acquires an old mirror from an antique shop and gets it on the cheap by lying to the shop-owner about the mirror’s likely age. Charlton obviously hasn’t seen many horror films before. Otherwise, he might have thought twice about cheating a proprietor played by Peter Cushing in a shop called Temptations Inc. He gets his just deserts. The mirror turns out to be inhabited by a malevolent spirit, which possesses him and drives him to commit murder.

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Warner got his fondest-remembered roles, starting with the kindly but ill-fated Jennings in The Omen. Then, in 1979’s Time After Time, he switches from being a nice guy to being a bad one, playing John Leslie Stevenson, a Victorian gentleman and friend of the pioneering science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, who’s played by Malcolm McDowell. Unbeknownst to Wells, Stevenson has been making a name for himself by butchering prostitutes in Whitechapel – for he is none other than Jack the Ripper. When Wells unveils his latest invention, a working time machine like the one he would later write about in his famous 1895 novella, Stevenson uses it to escape the closing police net and scoots one century forward into the future. But the machine has a recall function, so a horrified Wells summons it back to the 19^th century and uses it to follow Leslie to 1979. Wells assumes that he’s let Jack the Ripper loose on Utopia and, predictably, is more than a little disappointed to find that the 20^th century is less utopian than he’d anticipated. Meanwhile, the Ripper has taken to the era’s violence, sleaze and heavy-decibel rock music like a duck to water.

A quirky and very entertaining movie, Time After Time was written and directed by Nicholas Meyer who, regrettably, devoted most of his energies to the less adventurous and eccentric, and more mainstream and family-friendly Star Trek franchise during the 1980s. Actually, it’s probably because of Meyer’s involvement that both Warner and Malcolm McDowell have made appearances in Star Trek films – Warner was in both Star Trek V and VI (1989 and 1991). I’m not much of a fan of Star Trek or its movie spin-offs, but I like the sixth one, largely because Warner is in it. He plays Chancellor Gorkon, charismatic leader of the Klingons and obviously modelled on the then Soviet leader Mikael Gorbachev, who’s decided it’s time for the Klingon Empire to pursue peace-talks with the Federation.

In 1981 Warner delivered another memorable performance in Terry Gilliam’s cinematic fairy tale The Time Bandits. He plays Evil, who’s been created by Ralph Richardson’s Supreme Being and then imprisoned in a hellish place called the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Obviously, Warner and Richardson’s characters are the Devil and God under different monikers. Some fine actors have played Old Nick in movies over the years, including Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, but for my money Warner’s portrayal is the most entertaining. His Devil is a petulant and embittered type who spends his time ranting at his idiotic minions (“Shut up! I’m speaking rhetorically!”) about how rubbish God is. The Almighty, he argues, has wasted His time creating useless things such as slugs, and nipples for men, and 43 species of parrots, when He could have concentrated on making laser beams, car phones and VCRs. Warner steals the show in The Time Bandits, which is no minor achievement considering that in addition to Richardson the film stars Ian Holm, John Cleese, Sean Connery, Michael Palin, Shelley Duvall and a delightful gang of time-traveling dwarves led by David Rappaport.

Thereafter, Warner’s CV filled with all manner of odd movies, hardly Shakespearean in the acting opportunities they offered, but relished by obsessives like myself. These include 1979’s Nightwing, 1980’s The Island, 1987’s Waxwork, 1991’s Cast a Deadly Spell, 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, 1997’s Scream 2 and 2010’s Black Death.

As an actor he’s adept at playing out-and-out villains, for example, his Dillinger / Sark character in the 1981 Disney computer-game fantasy Tron, a movie that was unappreciated at the time but that, in the decades since, has been accorded considerable retro-cool. He’s also good at doing mad scientists, like the splendidly named Doctor Alfred Necessiter in the whacky 1982 comedy The Man with Two Brains, which is poignant today as a reminder of the time when Steve Martin used to be funny.

But he also has harassed and melancholic qualities, which come nicely to the fore when he’s playing fathers. He was, for instance, the heroine’s father in 1984’s The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s atmospheric and sensual adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short stories. Meanwhile, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, he plays Senator Sandar, father of dishy chimpanzee Helena Bonham-Carter. In heavy simian make-up and in Warner’s unmistakable tones, Sandar sighs at one point: “Youth is wasted on the young…”

In 1997 Warner found time to appear in James Cameron’s Titanic, then the biggest-grossest movie of all time. Say what you like about Titanic, about the mawkish love story between Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio, about Billy Zane’s cartoonish performance as the villain, about the unspeakable theme song sung by Celine Dion, but you can’t deny that it has a great supporting cast: Warner, Kathy Bates, Bernard Hill, Victor Garber, Bill Paxton. Warner, playing Spicer Lovejoy, Zane’s valet, doesn’t have much to do apart from connive with his master, stalk around, spy on Kate Winslet and generally behave sinisterly. He does, though, get to punch Di Caprio in the guts after he’s been handcuffed to a railing on board the sinking liner, which is actually my favourite bit in the film. (Warner also turned up in a 1979 movie called SOS Titanic and the Titanic features in The Time Bandits too. Thus, he’s a titanic actor in all senses of the term.)

Warner has long been a fixture on television as well. He’s appeared in one-off TV movies and dramas like 1984’s Frankenstein, where he plays the creature to Robert Powell’s Victor Frankenstein and Carrie Fisher’s Elizabeth, 1993’s Body Bags and 2003’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; appeared in series and mini-series like 1981’s Masada, 1982’s Marco Polo, 1984’s Charlie, 2011’s Secret of Crickley Hall and, from 2008 to 2016, Wallander, in which he plays another father, this time to Kenneth Branagh; and lent his voice to animated shows, including the Superman, Batman and Spiderman ones during the 1990s.

Some of his TV work is as cult-y as his film work. In 1991, he guest-starred in three episodes of David Lynch’s glorious, off-the-wall crime / horror / sci-fi / soap opera Twin Peaks, playing Thomas Eckhardt, a Hong Kong-based crime-lord who has a long and dark history with Joan Chen’s Jocelyn Packard. Two years after that, he appeared in the underrated, Oliver Stone-produced mini-series Wild Palms, a hybrid of conspiracy thriller, Alice in Wonderland and the then-recent literary genre of cyberpunk. Set in a near-future USA, under the heel of an organisation that’s part multinational corporation and part Scientology-style religious sect, the show features Warner as Eli, the leader of an underground resistance movement. (This clip neatly encapsulates Wild Palms’ weird energy.) And in 2014 he popped up in John Logan and Sam Mendes’ gothic horror mash-up Penny Dreadful, in the role of Bram Stoker’s vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Because Warner played Frankenstein’s creature in 1984, it’s ironic that in Penny Dreadful – in a cheeky tangling of Stoker and Mary Shelley’s original narratives – Van Helsing gets killed by the same creature, played this time by Rory Kinnear.

In 2005 Warner was involved with the macabre TV comedy show The League of Gentlemen, written by and starring Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. In fact, he didn’t appear in the show itself, but in its cinematic spinoff The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. Like many a film-based-on-a-TV-show, it doesn’t really work on the big screen, though its most effective scenes are definitely those featuring Warner as a 17^th century magician called Dr Erasmus Pea. His character is rottenly evil but he’s very amusing too. For example, while Dr Pea uses a pan to fry a hellish concoction including two recently gouged-out eyeballs, from which he plans to grow a monstrous homunculus, the camera cuts to a close-up and he pulls a pretentiously absorbed, TV-chef expression worthy of Jamie Oliver.

Warner clearly gets along with The League of Gentlemen’s creators, because since then he has appeared alongside Mark Gatiss in the radio comedy show Nebulous (2005-8); in The Cold War, a 2013 Gatiss-scripted episode of Doctor Who; and in The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge, a 2015 episode of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s acclaimed anthology show Inside No. 9.

The 21^st century has seen Warner return to the stage, giving well-received turns as the venerable and vulnerable monarch in King Lear in 2005 and as Falstaff in Henry IV Parts I and II in 2007. His IMDb entry lists his most recent movie appearance as 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns and says he was still doing voice-work last year. Warner is now at an age where you wouldn’t begrudge for him retiring and choosing an easier life of armchairs, cardigan, slippers and pipe, but I for one hope that some young filmmakers – perhaps ones who grew up enjoying his performances in The Omen, Time After Time, The Time Bandits and Tron when they were shown on TV – coax him into making a few more movies. He’s the sort of actor whose mere presence in a film, no matter how good or bad, gives you a glow.

August 14, 2020August 17, 2020

Flash… Ah, feck off

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if I’m the only person who’s still sane in a world that’s gone mad. And this time what makes me feel that everyone else has lost their marbles is the amount of praise and adulation being heaped on Mike Hodges’ sci-fi / comic-book movie Flash Gordon at the moment – this being both the 40^th anniversary of its original release in 1980 and the occasion of its re-release on modern-day streaming platforms.

In the Guardian recently Peter Bradshaw awarded it four out five stars, hailed it for its supposed expressionism (its ‘operatic theme’, its ‘bizarre 2D studio sets’ and its ‘eyeball-frazzling colour scheme’) and made a somewhat dubious claim that it’d inspired ‘every 21^st-century Marvel movie’. Meanwhile, the Standard’s Charlotte O’Sullivan also gave it four out of five stars and described it as a ‘marvellously terrible romp’ – well, in my opinion, you could argue that she was half right there. And the venerable sci-fi / fantasy media magazine Starburst recently published a list of the best 80 sci-fi / fantasy movies of the 1980s, in which Flash Gordon was placed ahead of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1986), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1980) and Brazil (1985).

The sound you hear is the sound of my teeth grinding.

I’ll be blunt. I thought Flash Gordon was rubbish when it came out in 1980 and 40 years later, despite what often happens when you have both the benefit of hindsight and the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, I still think it’s rubbish. The beef I have with the film is that it makes a joke of its two sources of inspiration, the Flash Gordon comic strip created by Alex Raymond in 1934 and the three movie serials based on the strip and starring Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe that were made in 1936, 1938 and 1940. Tasked with putting Flash Gordon onto the big screen in 1980, the filmmakers took the easy route of playing the character for laughs.

This is regrettable because during the same period other filmmakers took their inspiration from similar old comic strips and movie serials but made an effort to adapt them into films that, while poking some knowing fun at their subject matter, did so in an affectionate and proportionate way and were still mightily entertaining at the end of the day. I’m thinking here of the first two Superman films (1978 and 80) with Christopher Reeve and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980). In fact, those films remind me of something Mark Gatiss once said about Billy Wilder’s mildly tongue-in-cheek 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: that it gently takes ‘the mickey out of Sherlock Holmes in the way you can only do with something that you really adore.’

There wasn’t much evidence that Flash Gordon’s producer, the old-school Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, adored or, indeed, knew anything about the original comic strip and movie serials. However, Flash‘s fate was sealed when old Dino – who, thanks to a CV that included Death Wish (1974), King Kong (1976), Orca: Killer Whale (1977), Amityville II and 3-D (1982 and 83), Dune (1984) and Maximum Overdrive (1985), was known in some quarters as ‘Dino Di Horrendous’ – signed scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr onto the project. Semple Jr was responsible for the 1966-68 TV version of Batman, which had sent up the Caped Crusader in an extremely camp fashion. Incidentally, I’m not using ‘camp’ here in the 1909 Oxford English Dictionary definition of it, as meaning ‘ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, effeminate or homosexual’. No, I’m using ‘camp’ in its simpler meaning of ‘so bad it’s good’.

This camp approach meant that the Batman TV show was ridiculous, but with the intention that kids wouldn’t recognise the ridiculousness and would merely enjoy the derring-do, while adults would recognise it and would have a good time laughing at it. Hence, ‘so bad it’s good’.

(Ironically, most films that are regarded as classic entries in the ‘so bad they’re good’ category, from Ed Wood’s oeuvre in the 1950’s to Tommy Wiseau’s epic 2003 clunker The Room, were actually intended to be proper, serious movies. They were never meant to be bad, but ended up so because of their makers’ entertaining incompetence.)

I assume it’s largely because of Lorenzo Semple Jr that Flash Gordon turned out the way it did. Mind you, Dino already had form in the camp stakes for in 1968 he’d produced sci-fi / fantasy movie Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim and based on the comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest. With its baroque sets, garish costumes and lurid skyscapes, it’s obviously a visual influence on the later Flash Gordon, but it also blazes a trail by being intentionally and supposedly-hilariously silly. I have to say I find Barbarella excruciating. It’s painfully unfunny in nearly all its parts and also grotesquely sexist, with Vadim’s camera leering over the naked and near-naked flesh of its star (and Vadim’s then wife) Jane Fonda. Plus it’s imbued with an irritating swinging-sixties smugness that makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

I don’t think Flash Gordon is as bad as Barbarella, but when I saw it as a teenager, and any time I saw bits of it on TV afterwards, I always found it a grim experience. It’s depressing how scenes that were meant to have the viewer chuckling at the glorious silliness of everything just left me cringing. The worst moment is when Flash (Sam Jones) takes on a squad of red-armoured goons employed by the villainous Emperor Ming (Max Von Sydow) in a brawl in Ming’s throne-room that morphs into an American football match. Flash and Professor Zarkov (Topol) pass a ball-sized metal orb between them, Flash charges into the goons and scatters them like ninepins, and Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) does a cheerleading routine (“Go, Flash, go!”) on the side. Oh, and any time a goon gets too close to the delegation of Hawkmen led by Prince Vultan (Brian Blessed), Vultan goes, “Ho-ho-ho!” and bonks the goon on the head with his metal staff. Funny, eh? Well…

I’m not blaming the director Mike Hodges, who was responsible for the gritty British crime classic Get Carter (1970). I assume that with Flash Gordon, for reasons of his own sanity, Hodges just pointed his cameras in the right direction and didn’t think too much about what was ending up in the can. However, I wonder what might have happened if the visionary director Nicolas Roeg, who’d originally been signed to make Flash Gordon and had spent a year working on its pre-production, had actually been given a chance to direct it. The results might have been astonishing… But on the other hand, considering how another big sci-fi collaboration between Dino De Laurentiis and a visionary director, David Lynch, created the turgid shambles that was Dune (1984), I suppose the Dino-produced, Roeg-directed Flash Gordon could have been shite too.

I’ll stop the Dino-bashing for a moment to point out that he did subsequently produce Lynch’s excellent Blue Velvet. Credit where it’s due and all that.

To be fair, Flash Gordon does have a few good scenes, for example, when Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton) forces Flash to stick his arm into a hollow tree-stump that’s infested with poisonous alien creepy-crawlies, or when Vultan forces Flash and Barin to fight each other on a platform that has lethal spikes popping out of it at random places and at random moments. The latter scene was choreographed by the late, legendary fight arranger William Hobbs. it’s telling, though, that these good bits are ones that are played straight rather than for laughs.

And although I can’t say the central performances of Sam Jones, Melody Anderson and Topol made much impression on me, I’ll happily praise the efforts of the supporting cast – Von Sydow, Dalton, Omella Muti as Princess Aura, the splendidly silky Peter Wyngarde as Ming’s sidekick Klytus. Also, a number of familiar faces make welcome appearances in smaller roles, such as playwright and occasional actor John Osborne (who played the key villain in Get Carter), sinewy character actor John Hallam (who wasn’t in Get Carter but was in a lot of other British crime movies at the time, like 1971’s Villain, 1973’s The Offence and 1975’s Hennessey), and Richard O’Brien, who co-created The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976).

Of course, one performance in Flash Gordon that’s memorable, if not exactly noted for its subtlety, is that of Brian Blessed as the Hawkmen’s leader Prince Vultan. As portrayed by Blessed, Vultan is half-Viking, half-turkey, and 100% pure ham. I wonder if Blessed regrets attacking the role with such exuberance. He must get fed up nowadays, 40 years after the event, when people still approach him and ask him to recite, or more accurately bellow, his most famous line in the film: “GORDON’S ALIVE!” Indeed, if you’re to believe Blessed, no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth II once asked him to shout the line for her royal pleasure.

While I marvel at the unfathomable love people feel for this dire film, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by another thing that Blessed has claimed about the Queen. Apparently, she’s told him that Flash Gordon is her favourite movie and she makes a point of watching it with her grandchildren every Christmas. In other words, in Britain at least, the Flash Gordon rot extends right to the top.