Richard Lester, a BFI Tribute

Richard Lester is awarded a BFI (British Film Institute) Fellowship at a ceremony next month with an interview and special screening of maybe his best film ROBIN AND MARIAN - (see still at Nicol Williamson post below), not only has it Connery and Audrey Hepburn but also the likes of Robert Shaw, Nicol Williamson, Richard Harris etc. One of my essential 1976 films (along with TAXI DRIVER, OBSESSION, NETWORK, L'INNOCENTE etc).

Lester is that Canadian who moved to England, became an essential director of English movies, up there with Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Joe Losey, Ken Russell, Clive Donner and Michael Winner then. His HARD DAY'S NIGHT with the Beatles was very influential, as was HELP! - it was marvellous walking into the cinema half-way through (continuous performances in those days, you could stay as long as you liked, I saw it twice through) the sequence on Salisbury Plain as George Harrison did his solo number "I Need You" - it was a big thing then, at 19, to see The Beatles on screen in colour, rather than on a tiny black and white television. His Beatles films were hugely influential as the first pop promo videos really with those musical numbers cut and edited to the music.


Lester also hit it with THE KNACK [which won the Cannes Grand Prix] and offbeat films like THE BED-SITTING ROOM, HOW I WON THE WAR, he certainly worked with the best and his movies were full of delicious quirky funny moments. PETULIA with Julie Christie in San Francisco is one I really must re-view and his 70s all star spectaculars were, well, spectacular and funny: THE THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS, ROYAL FLASH (review at Malcolm McDowell label), and I am shortly going to catch up with JUGGERNAUT a better than average bomb-on-ship thriller, with Hemmings & co.. ROBIN AND MARIAN was perfect too.

He also presented a marvellous 6-part BBC television series back in the '90s HOLLYWOOD UK, (thankfully I kept some episodes on vhs cassettes) revisiting the locations and interviewing surviving members of iconic British 60s films like BILLY LIAR, BLOW-UP, THE L-SHAPED ROOM, SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING, THE SERVANT etc with waspish comments from Bogarde, Terence Stamp (insisting that BLOWUP was all about him and Antonioni had been following him around and offerred him the role first), with Monica Vitti speaking in Italian and it was fascinating going back to BILLY LIAR's house as it is now, and the BLOW-UP park and studio.

Good to see more praise for this boldly original director with a great sense of humour!

The most bonkers over the top performance ever?

I nominate THE PASSAGE from 1979 as the most loony daft so-called thriller ever. I thought SHINING THROUGH was bad enough – that’s the one where Melanie Griffith is sent undercover into Nazi germany as a spy and has to be rescued by her boss Michael Douglas who poses as a Nazi but he does not speak German!. Here, in THE PASSAGE, we have the older Anthony Quinn and James Mason with the distressingly frail Patricia Neal who are being chased over the mountains by psychotic WW2 Nazi Captain Malcolm McDowell as the most demented camp Nazi you will ever see.

McDowell said in an interview: "I played this real nasty Nazi who was chasing these people across the Pyrenees. We all knew real early on that the movie was not going to be any great work of art and so I was determined to have some fun with it. My attitude was that if I was going to play a Nazi, I was going to take it totally over the top and do it right. I ended up playing the character like a pantomime queen. What I was doing was so far out that James Mason turned to me one day and said, 'That's wonderful dear boy, but are you in our film? You seem to be doing something different from the rest of us'..."



This farrago was put together by veteran J Lee Thompson in 1979 – 20 years earlier he was helming cracking films like TIGER BAY and NORTHWEST FRONTIER before going on to THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and CAPE FEAR (1962) – here is directing by numbers and allowing McDowell to go way over the top, Quinn is the mainly silent Basque (titled The Basque) and Mason has nothing much to play with either. It is obvious that Patricia Neal as Mason’s wife is so frail she will not last long … the less said about Kay Lenz’s very wooden performance as the daughter the better. One ludicrous scene has her as the prisoner of McDowell who prepares to anally rape her (or so it is suggested) and he strips off to reveal he is wearing a jockstrap (were they in use then?) with a swastika on it! He also camps around with his cigarette holder and has great fun chopping off the fingers of Michel Lonsdale while "preparing dinner", and watch out once he traps that band of gypsies headed by a dignified Christopher Lee …. The party struggle over the Pyrenees aided by Zorba The Basque with some ambushes on the way until the demented climax with some unforgivable fantasy moments as McDowell comes back from the dead …. It all got dreadful reviews at the time and vanished from cinemas in a week or so, one can now see why! McDowell was brilliant in lots of things (I love TIME AFTER TIME) but allowed his head here, the same year as CALIGULA, he certainly seems to enjoy seeing how far he can go. So bad then it’s one to relish.

Fantasy double bill: Royal Flash & Gerard

Richard Lester's films always please. Nice to see his 1975 ROYAL FLASH is available again. This is a pleasing spoof on THE PRISONER OF ZENDA with a who's who of British talent: an early part for Bob Hoskins, the final appearance of an aged Alistair Sim and that trio of Malcolm McDowell, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in their prime, plus Christopher Casenove, Britt Ekland and the spectacular Brazilian Florinda Bolkan as that very spirited adventuress Lola Montez (her motto being "Courage and shuffle the cards") as they love and fight across 19th century Europe.

Flashman of course is the creation of George MacDonald Fraser with that sequence of novels and who scripted this and Lester of course adds those touches which make his films from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT and HELP! on so enjoyable. This, like his ROBIN AND MARIAN and the two MUSKETEERS films are perfectly in period while also being exciting and damned funny, and also puts a great cast through their paces. (one Lester I missed was his '76 thriller JUGGERNAUT, and of course his 1967 San Francisco based PETULIA with Julie Christie is a deservedly cult movie, and those little seen items like THE BED SITTING ROOM and HOW I WON THE WAR). It is one of McDowell's better roles (like his H G Wells in TIME AFTER TIME) [there's a cult movie to discuss!] and he seems to be having great fun here as do all the cast, including Roy Kinnear, and boxer Henry Cooper. (McDowell strips again, Bates stays dressed this time).



Here, we first meet the coward and braggart Flash cavorting with famous courtesan Lola Montez and getting his bottom spanked with her bristly hairbrush, thus interrupting the aria of singer Margaret Courtenay (splendid as ever) leading to the two ladies having a duel at dawn! Reed is the glowering Otto Von Bismarck who also is enraged by Flash at the gaming tables of Victorian London, and then Bates turns up as the dastardly Rupert of Hentzau-like villain with the plan for Flash to impersonate a European prince! There are some splendid set-pieces among the alpine castles involving Tom Bell and others, as our "hero" ends up fighting in Kabul, Afghanistan - also a dangerous war zone back then!



This would make a terrific double bill with Jerzy Skolimowski's 1970 caper THE ADVENTURES OF GERARD, from Conan Doyle about the hussar Gerard and his adventues during the Napoleonic wars, with Peter McEnery in his element as Gerard, with Claudia Cardinale and stalwards Eli Wallach and Jack Hawkins (complete with voice box). This is just a memory though as the film has not been available for ages, one of those lost European films like Schlondorff's MICHAEL KOHLHAAS from '68 with David Warner and Anna Karina, about the horse trader (Warner) seeking justice no matter what cost to himself, or Cacoyannis' bizarre THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT from 1967, already discussed here (1960s label), or Tony Richardson's THE SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR or ....