Life Imitating Blake's 7

Anybody remember the sequence in "Warlord," the penultimate episode of Blake's 7 Series 4, in which two bored security guards on a catwalk decide to amuse themselves by picking off civilians with their automatic rifles?

OK, now anybody notice the similarity to recent events in Iraq, regarding the behaviour of certain so-called "civilian security contractors"?

Considering that we've already got 24-7 government surveillance, random acts of terrorism, the cultural oppression of native peoples, genetic modification, cloning, educational stratification and an unpopular leader who smiles a lot and who recently had to get rid of his favourite working-class enforcer following a scandal, I'm expecting the Liberator to turn up any minute now.

At least skin-tight black leather seems to be off the catwalks this season...

Ice Ice Baby

Everybody who's seen Dennis Potter's (pen)ultimate work Karaoke has probably played the fun game of spotting oblique references to Potter's own earlier work (my favourite by far is the sequence which opens in a totally Singing Detective-esque men's ward, which is then interrupted by a doctor turning up and offering to move the protagonist to a private room, which is a lovely bit of dramatic bait-and-switch), but the viewer can also have fun spotting actors before they were famous. The ones I've spotted so far:

• Euan McGregor, just pre-Trainspotting, as a young man arguing with his girlfriend
• The "cheeky chappie" presenter off Banzai! as one of the Japanese karaoke fiends at the nightclub (probably a couple more Banzai! regulars in there as well, but he's the only one I identified)
• Ian McDiarmaid as the protagonist of the TV-show-within-a-TV-show: OK, he had played Emperor Palpatine by that point, but the heavy makeup didn't come off till 1999.
  
• Sanjiv Baskhar as a wine waiter with a French accent

Moving on to its sequel/second half Cold Lazarus (where the game transforms into spot-the-Blake's 7-reference, and/or marvel-at-Frances-de-la-Tour-and-Ciaran-Hinds's-brilliant-performances), it astonishes me that the production team were willing to shell out that much money for an animatronic head. Surely it would have been cheaper to just put Albert Finney in makeup for half a day and have him blink into the camera?

Bagdad Revisited

Got a nice e-mail from a reader regarding last month's comparative review of the 1924 and 1940 versions of The Thief of Bagdad, pointing out that I'd been rather mistaken about the setup of the 1940 version: unlike in the 1924 version, in which Douglas Fairbanks is both the Thief himself and the romantic lead, in the 1940 version Sabu is in fact the titular thief, and John Jason, the romantic lead (who appears to have been cast largely on his resemblance to Fairbanks) is the deposed Caliph of Baghdad, and so the story is, in fact, one in which the Thief, through his skills, helps the deposed Caliph to win the princess and the throne, making the apparent "sidekick" the hero and vice versa (to explain, my viewing was interrupted a few times-- as I've implied below, I was watching it on More4 while working from home).

I'm still not sure that this makes it a better story, in my eyes, and to my mind splitting the Fairbanks character into two confuses the issue: rather than having a single character undergo trials and receive the traditional fairytale reward of the princess' hand in marriage, riches and a kingdom, you have the effective "hero" undergoing most of the trials but at least two-thirds of the reward going to someone else (q.v. Ivanhoe: Rebecca does all the work, nurses the hero back to health, and braves the Normans with him, but bloody Rowena, who does nothing at all in comparison, is the one who winds up marrying him). It also turns the romantic subplot into something shoehorned in to provide a conventional narrative, rather than the point of the film, and means that the narrative kind of flops back and forth between the romance and the real story-- a bit like those Marx Brothers movies in which the studio has insisted on some kind of conventional dramatic narrative, but it's quite plain that what the film really wants to do is chuck the detective/young lovers/whatever and focus entirely on Groucho, Harpo and Chico.

My correspondant made a good point that having Sabu as the titular character does make the film enjoyable for children, in that it's the young protagonist who saves the day and does all the fun stuff like stealing the idol's eye and fighting the giant spider, which is a good point (and I do have to say that I think Sabu is due a bit of a revival really)-- but personally, from the point of view of an admitted film snob and silent buff, I still prefer the original.

Bad Gag

In one of those you-wait-around-for-ages-and-three-come-along-at-once moments, I've had the opportunity recently to see both the 1924 and 1940 versions of The Thief of Bagdad. Leaving aside the present-day irony of hearing someone say "...and now, on to Basra!" without adding "...put on your flak jackets and check your rifles, men," I thought a comparison would be worthwhile.

First off, the 1924 version wins hands down in pretty much every category-- and yes, that does include sound and colour. The colours in the 1940 version mean you lose the lovely dreamy black-and-white atmospherics, and the 1940 version also has some really rubbish songs that make you wonder why anyone bothered (admittedly, I heard the 1924 version in a German open-air cinema with a really funky local jazz band providing the accompaniment, but even leaving that aside, it has to be said that you can get away a lot better with cheesy dialogue when it's just written on a title card). The special effects in both films (and it's quite clear that both were intended to be serious showcases for the state of the visual art at the time-- the UK release of the 1940 version was even subtitled "An Arabian Fantasy in Technicolor") were more or less on par when you take technological innovation into account: OK, the 1924 version has a "flying horse" with a ludicrous pair of wings strapped to it, but it's no worse than the model biplanes flying over Metropolis really, and the primitive Colour Separation Overlay on the 1940 version is equally giggleworthy.

One thing that I found particularly noteworthy was the issue of Islamophobia. I was mildly surprised, considering how prevalent it is in American culture today, that Islam and Arabic civilisation were presented in a very positive light in the 1924 film. I didn't notice any particular instance of a venal, grasping, sadistic (barring a torture-and-execution sequence, but it's no worse than you'd get in Henry VIII), greedy or lustful Arab; the citizens of Baghdad are all more or less normal people, and one of the key points in the story comes when a saintly mullah impresses upon the titular Thief that he can't just go on selfishly taking things all his life, and that if he really wants the girl, he'll have to earn her hand in marriage fair and square. I can't imagine anyone doing a mainstream film with a saintly and sensible mullah in it today. Mind you, the 1924 film is just full of Yellow Peril panic, in that the bad guy is a decidedly evil and sadistic "Mongol", he is aided by a treacherous and cruel Chinese slave-girl (played by the stunningly beautiful and criminally underrated Anna May Wong) in the Caliph's palace, and the "Chinese" names are mostly childish jokes along the lines of Woo Hoo and Ni Hi.

While the 1940 version is surprisingly free of that sort of thing (surprising in that there were less than 18 months to go till Pearl Harbour, and the Americans were pretty well aware that they'd have to go up against the Japanese sometime soon, witness Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe), the Islamophobia is there in spades. The bad guy is now a sinister lustful Arab named Jaffar (plagiarism suit against the Walt Disney Company pending), the Caliph goes from being a sensible if unimaginative man who wants what's best for his subjects and his daughter, to a bewhiskered old fool who is willing to give his daughter to the baddie in exchange for a clever mechanical toy, given to blind lusts, and openly expresses the wish that his subjects were obedient toy puppets rather than real people. Sabu turns up in the sidekick role, mostly because it's 1940 and Sabu is flavour of the month, upstages John Justin and promptly gets transformed into a dog, which I find full of disturbing undertones.

Which brings us to the issue of the message of the films, which was really the most unfortunate change. The 1924 version had a kind of earnest fairy-tale morality; the story revolves around how the Thief, who is living it large on the proceeds of robbery in Baghdad, encounters the Caliph's daughter while robbing the palace, falls in love and first attempts to take her the way he takes everything else: he masquerades as a royal suitor with a view to seducing her, but realises that he can't just love her and leave her, and actually goes out to earn her love, on the way gaining magical objects and so forth, with the ultimate result that her father cannot forbid their love, he has proved himself the best man, etc. The 1940 version, though, dumbs it down completely-- girl and thief fall in love during break-in, girl is kidnapped by bad guy when bad guy's attempt to marry her legally falls through, thief goes on quest to rescue girl while finding magical objects along the way, thief marries girl. No real message there, other than that clever and opportunistic people always succeed and Love Conquers All.

So: see the 1924 version if you like, ideally in an open-air screening. The 1940 version is pretty much reserved for fans of Sabu and/or Colour Separation Overlay.

Bunny Girls

Back to Raffles again... I'm now watching the series through from the beginning (although, for some bizarre reason, ITV3 refused to show "The Last Laugh," and I'm rather curious as to why-- the story it's based on has a gay bondage incident, but I very much doubt that they actually went anywhere near that far on television), and I'm starting to notice some patterns in the adaptation.

The pilot and first couple of episodes are essentially straight adaptations of extant Raffles stories, which are unfortunately rather dull, mostly because the dramatic tensions in the stories themselves are largely built up through the fact that we're seeing everything through Bunny's eyes (meaning that the reader is frequently in the dark as to Raffles' actual plans, and having the events coloured by Bunny's overactive imagination), which is pretty much lost when you switch to the third-person style of television. Round about episode 3, though, the adaptor (Philip Mackie) gets into his stride and decides that the best formula is a combination of a) adaptations of extant Raffles stories with elements from other Raffles stories thrown in to pad them out; b) adaptations of extant Raffles stories with the dramatic tension racked up in other ways (e.g. by having Bunny's perpetual fantasies of being found out by the police come true); c) stories which take an element or two from an actual Raffles story and then just spin it out from there based on the characters involved.

On average, stories fitting into category a) seem to be the weakest, mostly, I suspect, because you can frequently see the join between the actual story and the introduced element, but also partly because the most commonly introduced element seems to be the Plucky Girl Who Finds Out Raffles is a Burglar But Covers For Him Anyway, which Hornung himself only ever used once, in Mr Justice Raffles, generally regarded as one of his less sterling efforts (and the TV series almost universally manages to lose the subtext of the novel, namely, that Raffles wasn't attracted to her and fobbed her off on a cricketing friend with whom he is suspiciously close). The strongest ones seem to come from category c)-- principally "Home Affairs" and "To Catch a Thief," which have extracanonical scenes between Raffles and Inspector Mackenzie that would have anyone in stitches.

The other element which periodically lets the stories down is the fact that the Raffles stories were a "continuity series," while the TV series is episodic-- meaning that periodically, they're having to adapt some of the later Raffles stories (in which he is presumed dead by the police, and posing as an invalid named Mr Maturin) to the situation of the earlier stories (Raffles living it large at the Albany). So, for instance, an element of dramatic tension in "To Catch a Thief" goes out the window when it is no longer the case that Raffles is afraid people will realise he isn't actually dead; also, "The Pearl of the Emperor" loses the twist ending where Raffles dives into the Mediterranean to fake his own death and Bunny winds up arrested and charged with grand larceny.

Mackie seems to be trying to make up for it, though, by throwing in periodic elements which absolutely have to be Raffles-fan inside jokes. For instance, having him turn up at the British Museum got up as an invalid in "The Gold Cup" (which was based on a story from the "Mr Maturin" period) or making the burglary victims in "A Bad Night" a Dutch family so that Raffles can get in a jolly good rant about the Boer War (an allusion to the Raffles equivalent of the Reichenbach Falls), or working in Turkish Bath sequences every couple of episodes (referring to Bunny's paen to the pleasures of hanging around in a room full of hot, sweaty naked men [OK, I'm exaggerating, but not by much] in "The Chest of Silver"). I have to admit, they're fun to watch for, but it does have me wondering whether it would be possible to do a faithful adaptation of Hornung and have it actually work as television.

Life imitating Hasbro

A crack team of Americans and token cute foreigners are currently (well, according to the Republicans, anyway) fighting a ruthless terrorist organisation determined to rule the world.

There's a singer out there called Jem.

And yet, despite this, the local cars steadfastly refuse to transform into heroic robots with quirky personalities. Aside from the one in the Citroen advert, but honestly, would the Autobots ever really be that uncool?

Bona Timeshares

Am I the only one who can't pass an advert for Polaris vacation homes without expecting to learn that it's run by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick?

Yes, we're still OK...

One more time now: Alan and I are fine, but I for one am really glad that we're going to be driving to the convention on Saturday, rather than taking the tube. The chances of somebody blowing up the M25 are pretty slim.

I think, Bunny, that the subtext is rapidly becoming, um, text.

I've been on a bit of a Raffles kick lately, reading the Penguin edition of E.W. Hornung's original (and keeping an eye out in secondhand shops for the subsequent volumes) and watching the repeats of the 1976 TV adaption on ITV3 (yay for digital). The latter, for the most part, manages to successfully maintain the subtle homoeroticism in Bunny and Raffles' relationship which is present in the original stories (according to the preface of the Penguin book, the man who was the original inspiration for Raffles was seriously out and proud)... apart from, every couple of episodes or so, shoehorning in some female love-interest for Raffles (poor old Bunny never seems to get a look in), who is generally completely out of place in the narrative since women were largely peripheral characters in the original stories, who disrupts the proceedings as Anthony Valentine desperately tries to keep up with the sudden switch from eyeing up Christopher Strauli to eyeing up the femme du jour, and who generally leaves one with the feeling that the production team of the day would really, really have liked to run one of those BBC News style rolling text bars reading "LOOK! RAFFLES ISN'T GAY! HONEST!" over the action.

Mind you, a recently-shown story featured a sequence in which Raffles cheerfully reads a copy of "Fact" magazine which is emblazoned with a large, gaudy and clearly legible Victorian advert for, wait for it, Vaseline. So perhaps the balance is being redressed on another level.