Film Directors With Their Shirts Off and On
Richard Lester in a game of shirts versus skins. Lester is among the most frequently shirtless of filmmakers, possibly because he made so many films in Spain. Yet when he DOES wear a shirt, it can be quite impressive.
I really love his THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS films. I think the genius idea, which nobody seems to even try and copy, is to do lots of research into the period, and spin the comedy directly out of that. Well, that gives you the comedy environment (both comedy and history = tragedy + time), the action is moved forward by the characters trying to behave like swashbucklers in a cinematic world where the laws of physics are a little more unforgiving than they were in the day of Flynn and Fairbanks. There’s some rather good slapstick in the PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN movies, whose writers admire Lester’s “period romps,” but it’s not the same thing at all, because those films have nothing outside the frame to be serious about.
shadowplay 
March 17, 2009 at 12:36 pm
he couldn’t afford shirts when he was working for the salkinds
March 17, 2009 at 12:54 pm
He’s pretty wealthy — they paid him a record-breaking fee for Superman III. He turned it down, and his wife threw a sponge at him so he got back on the phone and said yes.
Between Bed Sitting Room and Musketeers he made no movies for about 4 years, but did very well financially shooting little films for TV in Italy. short comedies with a product shot tagged on the end, they were shown only once, and then destroyed.
But it’s true that the Salkinds owed him a lot of money from the Musketeers, and his condition for helping out on the first Superman (as a sort of ombudsman, now that Richard Donner wasn’t speaking to the Salkinds) was that they pay him what he was owed.
On Musketeers: “The money came from God knows where — and vanished God knows where. I found out afterwards that I had probably made the best Panamanian film ever.”
March 17, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I love Musketeers and Juggernaut butRobin and Marian remains the absoulte pinnacle for me. The characters don’t just try to behave like heroes-they’re confronted by their own mythology and have to try to deal with it.
Lester so often deals with 2-Dimensional characters (not a criticism-his style)
but in Robin, you’ve got 2D characters struggling with the limitations of being 2D, none of them can simply play their set roles. He also gets Sean’s best performance, often by catching him offguard with his multiple cameras. He was on such a role in the mid 70s-this white hot talent:just one classic after another. Like Powell and Pressburger in the 40s or KenRussell in the 1969-1972
Why aren’t there more books about Lester,? The only contemporary one I can find is Sodenbergh’s alternately Sublime/Wretched “Luckiset guy you ever Saw” and that seems to be it
March 17, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Neil Sinyard’s critical study is very good. The bio The Man Who “Framed the Beatles” isn’t very good, but is informative. Maybe I should propose a new book? It’d be great if it got me the chance to meet my hero!
Petulia keeps growing for me, and you’re exactly right about Robin and Marian. As for cameras catching Connery off-guard, on Time Bandits he refused to be filmed getting off his horse, and that must be to do with him not liking something in R&M. The one he was really unhappy with was Cuba, but that’s pretty interesting.
March 18, 2009 at 1:06 am
And certainly the Roman backdrop depicted in “Funny Thing Happend on the way to the Forum” is the most startlingly convincing in my limited experience.
March 18, 2009 at 2:51 am
It’s always facinated me that there are these two truly great films about the death of Merrie England-Robin and Marian and Chimes at Midnight.
Both were made in Spain, both by American directors and they’re both very different with the director of the former disliking the latter. But they’re both absolutelymagnificent and better than anything made on the same subject in Britain,.
I like Petulia a lot because, for me, like it’s fanous poster
http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s173/Justine_Smitha/petuliaqt1.jpg?t=1237340568
it’s so hard to grasp it. I watched the first 45 mins or so and narratively I had no idea where the film is going, you know that the enviroment satirical, but is it satirising the characters? How am I supposed to react to them?
It’s interesting how Richard Lester never really made another film like it. Critics have tried to link it more to the work of Nic Roeg and original director Robert Altman (both of whose work it does resemble), rather than credit Lester. I’m interested how would you argue for him?
March 18, 2009 at 9:08 am
Apropos Richard Lester and his Three and Four Musketeer films, I too love films that evoke a feeling of historical verisimilitude. A couple examples of films that have this evocative ability would be Eric Rohmer’s Triple Agent and The Lady and the Duke. Sometimes made-for-TV productions can achieve this quality. Last year I saw an excellent television “fictional documentary” about the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, directed and written by Nick Murphy.
March 18, 2009 at 11:36 am
I just got a copy of The Lady and the Duke, which uses an unusal approach to achieve an effect of reality. I’m looking forward to running it. I was very impressed with Rohmer’s Marquise von O.
For Forum, Lester acquired big sets built for a Samuel Bronstein film (Fall of the Roman Emp?) and had a bunch of Spanish peasants move in and live in it for weeks, to create a realistic effect.
Petulia resembles Lester’s other work quite a bit, except that 3D characters have been droppped into it, and the fragmentation we see in How I Won the War has been turned up to 11. Fragmentation of chronology, narrative, and tone.
I guess the tonal shifts are a little Altmanesque, but Lester took over the project in development and is completely responsible for it. The background chatter, being post-dubbed, is pure Lester. Roeg seems to have been influenced by it, but he actually contributed more to Forum, which he rewrote with Lester just before filming (when Melvin Frank wouldn’t pay for another draft). I write a bit about this one in my Believer article.