Work in Progress

OK, here’s a provisional list — tear it apart or question it or whatever. Be great to have your thoughts. Apologies to all those whose ideas I didn’t use, but please believe that you inspired or clarified my own thoughts.

1) Monday 29^th September.

Silent comedies: Buster Keaton’s SHERLOCK JNR plus a few shorts.

2) Monday 6^th October.

Silent drama: Victor Sjostrom’s HE WHO GETS SLAPPED.

3) Monday 13^th October.

Early talking pre-code cinema: Gregory LaCava’s BED OF ROSES and Mervyn LeRoy’s THREE ON A MATCH

4) Monday 20^th October

The Classical era: Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

5) Tuesday 3^rd November

Studio experimentation: Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

6) Tuesday 10^th November

Post-war “realism”: Stanley Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY

7) Tuesday 17^th November

Sixties experimentation: Luis Bunuel’s SIMON OF THE DESERT and Lindsay Anderson’s THE WHITE BUS

8) Tuesday 24^th November

Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST

9) Tuesday 1^st December

New Hollywood: Peter Bogdanovich’s PAPER MOON

10) Tuesday 8^th December

The world: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE

11) Tuesday 15^th December

Seasonal treat: Billy Wilder’s THE APARTMENT

I’m going to watch a bunch of the films you all suggested which I haven’t seen, probably starting with Johnny To’s THE MISSION and carrying on with Makhmalbaf’s ONCE UPON A TIME…CINEMA.

And, yeah, I’m definitely going to have second thoughts in the morning, so let me know what you think I should change.

Jesus Cripes!

I was going to run this at Easter but I totally forgot. Maybe it’s less inflammatory to do it now. Christ has been dead and resurrected for about a month — we can laugh about it now.

Film history is littered with dream projects that never saw the light of day. Since the story of Jesus is so well-known, it’s not surprising that a number of the most intriguing unmade movies were attempts at rendering his life in cinematic form.

A few examples of unusual Jesus movies:

1) Before embarking on THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, George Stevens briefly contemplated a project tentatively titled THE GREATEST STORY EVER SMELLED. To be filmed in the wonder of Odorama, giving audiences an authentic aroma of biblical times, the costly production was eventually scrapped when research failed to come up with sufficiently alluring scents. “We had the smell of camels, the smell of blood, the smell of Victor Buono. The whole thing was downhill after the myhrr!” complained Stevens, whose Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Messiah was shelved in favour of an unperfumed version.

2) Jim Henson’s  A VERY MUPPET EASTER sought to capture the passion of the Christ in glove-puppet form, making for a family-friendly version of a story that is often too violent for youngsters. As envisaged by Henson, the film would begin with Kermit the frog narrating the story of the New Testament to his little relative, Robin. The tale would then take shape in Robin’s mind, visualised with his friends from The Muppet Show playing the various biblical personae: Miss Piggy as Salome, the Swedish Chef as John the Baptist, the Great Gonzo as Judas. Fozzie Bear would have been stretched to the limit as Jesus of Nazareth. Henson apparently abandoned his plan when he heard of a rival production starring the Smurfs.

“In any case, the problem of how to show Fozzie on the cross without revealing the puppeteer’s hand going inside him might have defeated us. One technical mistake and the plausibility would have gone out the window.”

3) The Marx Brothers’ A NIGHT AT GOLGOTHA is perhaps the most tantalising of these unseen Passions. While it is easy to picture Groucho as the wily politician Pontius Pilate (he would have looked magnificent in a toga), and Chico’s casting as an Italian-accented Judas seems less implausible if we consider Harvey Keitel’s performance in Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (“Ey, Jesus, whaddayadoin’ makin’ crosses faw da Romans?”), it’s much harder to picture Harpo as the Messiah, and especially to imagine him conveying the significance, as well as the poetry, of the Sermon on the Mount simply by honking a series of car horns concealed within his robe. Alas, we shall never know if this bold experiment would have succeeded, since ultimately MGM exec Irving Thalberg ruled that Jesus could not be played by a Jew. All that survives of this project is a few minute’s footage of Margaret Dumont’s costume test for the role of the Magdalene.

4) Steven Spielberg’s J.C.: THE SON OF GOD AND HIS ADVENTURE ON EARTH was a sincere, if misguided, attempt to solve the problem faced by so many cinematic Christ films: no actor could adequately portray the splendor of a God in human form. Spielberg’s answer — special effects — was one that has served him well throughout his career. In 1981, fresh from the success of the bible-themed RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Spielberg hired animatronics genius Carlo Rambaldi to construct a metal messiah. Rambaldi had built a fifty-foot high robot gorilla for Dino deLaurentiis’s KING KONG, and deLaurentiis had once produced a film called THE BIBLE (“The film of the book”), so it all seemed to make sense.

“But no matter what instructions I gave Carlo,” recalls Spielberg today, “no matter what photographic references I gave him — Max Von Sydow, Jeffrey Hunter — he kept coming up with this shriveled little grey guy. I loved the design, but I just couldn’t take seriously the idea of this little homunculus curing people’s leprosy. He looked like he had leprosy.” In the end, Spielberg abandoned his plan for a religious film, but he was able to use the grey shrunken, wrinkled figurine as the lead character in another movie — 2008’s INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

The name’s Bunuel. Luis Bunuel.

A VIEW TO A KILL.

If you’re like me, you often wish Luis Bunuel had directed a Bond film. One, probably anything’s better than Marc Forster directing a Bond film, and two, Bunuel was riding high during the heyday of 007, so why couldn’t it have happened?

Looking deeper, we see that Bunuel directed Bond girl Carole Bouquet in THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, in which she played one half of the object, shortly before her appearance in MOONRAKER, and furthermore MOONRAKER bad guy Hugo Drax was played by Michel Lonsdale, seen getting his bottom thrashed in Bunuel’s PHANTOM OF LIBERTY back when Roger Moore was battling Scaramanga.

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

Like Bond, Bunuel’s characters, at least in his later films, are always impeccably turned out, and demonstrate perfect sang-froid even in the most stressful situations, whether it be alligator attack or the army arriving for dinner unexpectedly. Like Bond, they are famous for their discrete charm.

Bunuel’s enthusiasm for fire-arms is well documented. You can even see him shooting a mountain goat in LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD (well, you can see the puff of smoke from the right of frame just before the goat falls off the mountain). Don Luis’s enthusiasm for experimental weaponry had him making his own bullets, playing around with different charges, trying to develop a bullet with just enough momentum to leave the gun barrel before bouncing lightly off its target. This interest in fancy weaponry surely marks him out as the ideal man to bring Bond to life.

“Do pay attention, 007!”

While Bond favours the vodka martini, Bunuel leans more towards the dry martini made with gin and angustura bitters, but that’s a minor point. The martini is a creative drink, also favoured by Busby Berkeley (a Busby Bond? Why not? But later.)

So it’s not an implausible idea, OK?

Scaramanga’s dwarf sidekick, Hervé Villechaise, would have been right at home in any of Don Luis’s films (dwarfs trot through SIMON OF THE DESERT, THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY and several others), and Bond’s tendency to run up against scorpions, tarantulas and other obscure fauna would be quite in keeping with the action of a Bunuel. My Bunuel 100 Anos book (or, as I call it, The Boys’ Big Book of Bunuel) even includes a Bunuel Bestiary in the back.

So, Dan O’Herlihy as Bond. Celtic Bonds have been successful before, of course, and as Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe, O’Herlihy got in plenty of experience in exotic locations. I’d love to see what he made of the part.

Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Fernando Rey, suavely villainous in Hollywood movies like THE FRENCH CONNECTION, would make a great master-criminal. Could we resist Catherine Deneuve as Bond girl Anne Dalou, and could she resist playing it if the high priest of cinematic surrealism were in charge? Zachary Scott, fresh from THE YOUNG ONE, could play Bond’s CIA counterpart Felix Leiter. Oh wait, he died in 1965. Damn. OK, Bernie Hamilton then. Sean Connery always thought Felix should be black — I presume on the basis that it was the kind of thankless part where nobody would object, and therefore you should make the effort.

Ken Adam, I submit, would have had a great time building sets for Bunuel, who loved “secret passages leading on to darkness”.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL would make a great title for a Bond. Imagine what Shirley Bassey could do with a lyric like that. Much better than QUANTUM OF SLOSH, anyway.

But let’s call our imaginary Bunuel Bond GRAN CASINO ROYALE. The globe-trotting narrative will take us through Spain, the U.S.A., Mexico and France. Bond will battle tarantulas, snakes and flesh-eating ants, and face enemies armed with razors, rifles, burlap sacks and buggy-whips. All in search of a mysterious box with undisclosed, buzzing contents…

That Obscure Odd-Job of Desire.