tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72835605101661711172024-02-21T20:00:02.708-08:00"Clearly you've never been..."benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-60523039842186294772019-02-23T18:26:00.002-08:002019-02-26T01:19:20.635-08:00In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Introduction)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Image from tribute to Pierre at Telluride, 2018, photo by Eric Khoo</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">When Pierre Rissient died last May, the loss was felt in film communities across the world. Pierre was an inveterate traveler and arch-networker who’d built up friendships with a multitude of ‘film people’ across the globe. He was amused and proud to be known in Asia as “The French Connection”. Even if we just look at Singapore as a case study, one can see how profound his influence was, particularly on the steady stream of Asian filmmakers heading off to European festivals each year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Rissient was the quintessential ‘behind-the-scenes’ figure, so deeply embedded into the less illuminated recesses of the global film-industrial-complex (press wrangling, festival advising, production consulting) that even a budding UK cinephile such as myself had never heard or read his name until I came to Singapore/Asia in the early 2000s. Here, the name “Rissient” had a quasi-mythical resonance. He was known to have the power to make and possibly break a career, and was the subject of innumerable anecdotes on the film festival circuit, many based around his notoriously short fuse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Researching <i>Kinda Hot</i>, my book on the making of Peter Bogdanovich’s <i>Saint Jack</i>, I began a dialogue with the French producer Pierre Cottrell, a close friend of Rissient. When it was published Cottrell sent him a copy and the next time he was in Singapore, mid-2007, he requested (demanded) to see me. Cottrell gave me firm instructions to meet Rissient at his usual resting place in Singapore, the Goodwood Park Hotel (owned by the Khoo family who had hosted the <i>Saint Jack </i>crew in ‘78), where he was in and out of meetings with filmmaker Eric Khoo and sundry Singaporean film folk. We had a very memorable lunch (a story for another time), and thus began my membership among the coterie of film lovers and film makers (“Friends of Pierre”) that Rissient would enjoy spending time with whenever we were in the same country.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Over the summer and latter part of 2018 I decided to revisit my memories of Pierre with some conversations (and some accompanying videos and images) with a few other Friends of Pierre from Singapore. For those interested, these dialogues also form a ‘shadow history’ of serious Singaporean cinephilia (certain key names will recur), and I hope, that for those who didn’t know Pierre, or are unclear about his influence and distinctive personality, they offer a flavour of an unforgettable, important presence. He was, as he said to me of Lino Brocka the first time we met, “a formidable man”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">(Click below for the conversations)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations.html" target="_blank">Part One: Chew Tze Chuan</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_23.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Part Two: Boo Junfeng and Panuksmi </span>Hardjowirogo & Michel Cayla</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_78.html" target="_blank">Part Three: Eric Khoo</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_68.html" target="_blank">Part Four: Warren Sin</a></span><br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b><i>Merci beaucoup to all the interviewees, plus Philip Cheah and Nick Palevsky for additional conversations.</i></b></span></div>
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-50389013350289288932019-02-23T05:13:00.000-08:002019-02-25T17:50:42.870-08:00In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part Four)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;">(</b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">For Part One</span><b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations.html" target="_blank">go here</a>, </b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Part Two</span><b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_23.html" target="_blank">go here</a>, </b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">and Part Three</span><b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_78.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Part Four: Warren Sin<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“Pedro Costa doesn’t love cinema!”</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Last but not least, one of Singapore’s most dedicated and knowledgeable cinephiles, Warren Sin was a natural ally for Rissient in Singapore. During a much-missed period where Warren and Zhang Wenjie were <i>the</i> powerhouse programming team for the National Museum of Singapore’s now-defunct Cinémathèque (created by then-Museum Director Lee Chor Lin), they invited Pierre to Singapore in 2011 for an incredibly rare screening of one of two films he directed, <i>Cinq et la Peau</i>/<i>Five and the Skin </i>(1982) but not before a fateful meeting with him in Paris, facilitated by Pierre Cottrell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Warren Sin: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">So we got to meet the man. Of course I got the feeling that he’s a guy who either likes you, or not – that’s it. We went to a nice restaurant. For some reason he ordered oysters, so it was an expensive lunch. After that he liked us enough that we continued to hang out. We went to watch a movie, <i>Montparnesse 19 </i>(1958) at one of those small theatres, where he was obviously a regular. And that’s where we experienced the majesty of Rissient. It was a small room, we were seated close to the back. Behind us there was a mother and a teenage daughter. Before the film started Pierre sat down and got comfortable and loosened his belt, and then he decides to ask them to give up their seat because he wanted to sit where they were. And the woman says ‘No’, and then he went into this tirade in French, and he keeps shouting at them. And because he loosened his trousers and he’s trying to get up (to address the woman),<and at="" look="" them="" to="" turn=""> his pants are dropping off, and Cottrell was nudging us (to look at this spectacle)<to at="" look="" this="">. Rissient wanted the perfect view for this movie, and he didn’t get his way, but once the film started – then he stopped. It was a good intro. <o:p></o:p></to></and></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">… to his character<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">To a facet of it. But then we got to know him more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You invited him to Singapore to present <i>Five and the Skin.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Now it’s restored <by carlotta="" films=""> but at that time there was only one print with English subtitles left at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and they didn’t want to lend it out. Rissient was very helpful, he wrote to them (and they did lend it)<and it="" lent="" they="">. During the time at the Cinémathèque (at the National Museum) I had to handle the ‘difficult people’, and I wrote his synopsis, and it was a very hectic time, doing the ‘<i>Asia Through French Eyes</i>’ programme, and <when he="" read="" synopsis="" the=""> he said it was one of the best and I totally got his film, and that film is very hard to get. (He said) <he said="">“That’s it, that’s what I was trying to do, you’re one of the few people<who understand="">.”<o:p></o:p></who></he></when></and></by></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">What did you write?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It was less about plot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There is no plot! They had the tribute to Pierre in Cannes last year and afterwards showed the restored film, and I couldn’t find a single comment about it on social media. I’m not sure it holds up well in the #metoo era.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But that film encapsulated what we wanted to do<with our="" programme="">. For all its flaws – it’s out of narrative bounds, it’s half an essay-film, half a journal - this dream-life of a guy meeting all these people and then the references, Lino Brocka, clips from old Hollywood films.<o:p></o:p></with></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I did get to see <i>One Night Stand </i><b style="font-style: italic;">(</b>AKA <aka i="" nbsp=""><i>Alibis</i>, </aka></span>Pierre’s earlier feature from 1977); and it’s a more conventional version of <i>Five and the Skin<b> </b></i>- there’s a Western protagonist having a series of relationships with women in Hong Kong, but it’s much less memorable. I wonder if he’d have liked to make more films.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He was so into film and cinema, and he started off writing and being Assistant Director on <i>Breathless<b> </b></i>(1960) and while doing all this if there was a chance to make a film he would take it, but I think he found his true Rissient-ness in doing what he did.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Being the behind-the-scenes guy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But he’s so in front as a behind-the-scenes guy. He’s the only guy who can wear a T-shirt to a Cannes evening screening, and the connections he had to his ‘chosen’ ones, whether it’s Clint Eastwood, Eric, the Filipinos… and the ‘unchosen’ are also interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><when for="" he="" in="" screening="" singapore="" the="" was="">(When he was in Singapore) We went to a restaurant with some Singaporean filmmakers and we started to talk about film. Rissient asked them what they were watching, and someone said Pedro Costa. Wrong choice! <pierre said=""> “Pedro Costa doesn’t love cinema!” Yes he does!<o:p></o:p></pierre></when></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You became good friends.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He was encouraging in a certain way, if you’re within that wavelength and on top of that, my dedication and love of old Hollywood helped, and every meeting with him led to stories about Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, Ford, Hawks, you name it. And these are people who really matter. And there were a few movies that he kept impressing on me. <i>Gentleman Jim </i>(1942) is the one to watch. Whenever I would go (to Paris) <to paris="">he would hold court. His legs didn’t get any better so we had to go to him. In 2014, SGIFF invited him in as a guest.<o:p></o:p></to></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Do you remember that we went to see him off at the airport? H</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">e was so appreciative that we'd taken the time to do that, saying, “You are good boys, no one else would do this.”</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Yes! I did spend a lot of time with him <then> because he was always at the Museum (during the festival)<where warren="" worked="">. He was less lively then, more mellow and quiet. The last time I saw him was 2017 in Busan. I was there for the film market, and it was ‘Singapore Night’, and it was held at a restaurant that was up some stairs, so he couldn’t go up and he was sitting in a car that was parked in front, talking to people. I’m glad I managed to see him. Pierre was still holding court, in a car. </where></then></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtpghOjrR9PmK8HYObxyzbXAaQsnSeD3YVA369gq50K00NVi3qh52ki6IiVc2vga4SVSx7kWtiuS1OxeRFUGtaEb131G8PXsr-1I1QbgG4nmRkvzBbmPwmfcXLYU5M47L5nt_JWHOhRKP/s1600/PHOTO-2019-02-23-18-42-21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAtpghOjrR9PmK8HYObxyzbXAaQsnSeD3YVA369gq50K00NVi3qh52ki6IiVc2vga4SVSx7kWtiuS1OxeRFUGtaEb131G8PXsr-1I1QbgG4nmRkvzBbmPwmfcXLYU5M47L5nt_JWHOhRKP/s640/PHOTO-2019-02-23-18-42-21.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pierre and Warren, Busan 2017, photo courtesy of Warren Sin</td></tr>
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<b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;">(</b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">To return to the Introduction</span><b style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_76.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b><br />
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-5588437441088416352019-02-23T02:19:00.000-08:002019-02-25T17:48:01.091-08:00In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part Three)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>(</b>For Part One<b> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations.html" target="_blank">go here</a> </b>and for Part Two <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_23.html" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">go here</a><b>)</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Four: Eric Khoo</span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barbet, Eric & Pierre, Cannes, 2017, photo courtesy of Eric Khoo</td></tr>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“The dead shot.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Pierre’s closest friend in Singapore was Eric Khoo. Eric’s second feature <i>12 Storeys </i>was selected for Un Certain Regard in 1997, in large part because of Pierre’s enthusiasm, making him the first Singaporean filmmaker to be selected for Cannes, paving the way for many more. Thus began a long and enduring friendship between the two. Eric became a conduit for Rissient to meet filmmakers in Singapore, and Rissient remained passionately supportive of Eric’s films. When I first decided to have these conversations I emailed Eric, and received the following:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><i>“</i>Pierre Rissient adored cinema and he was all about PASSION PASSION PASSION. I loved watching him eat and hearing his delicious voice - I LOVE the guy! Without him I may not be directing anymore - he taught me about the dead shot and he’ll always be my Yoda.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It took several more emails and a month or two before we were able to sit down, face to face, over happy hour drinks in Holland Village, Singapore, to have a conversation about Rissient.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Eric Khoo: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The last time I saw him was when I was on a jury in Cannes last year and we had a meal together and he introduced me to Barbet Schroeder, and I thought I was going to see him again. Because, this guy was always unwell, but he always came back, I don’t know how he did it…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Ben Slater: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Do you remember how you first met?<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">EK: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Through Philip Cheah. <i>Mee Pok Man </i>(1996) was launched here (in Singapore), and then festivals started writing to us, and it went to Berlin and Venice, and over 30 festivals, and I was really happy because it put Singapore in the spotlight. I think Pierre had heard about it and was interested to see my sophomore film. A lot of these (film festival) scouts go to Australia, he discovered Jane Campion there, and it was on one of those trips to Australia that he stopped off here to see what was happening. I was at post-production stage on <i>12 Storeys</i>, mixing the sound. He said, “I really like what I’m seeing, when it’s finished can you send me a copy?” Which I did, on VHS. And he tells me he’s going to leave it at the front door of Gilles Jacob, who was artistic director of Cannes at that time, and (he says) “I’ll let you know when you call me tomorrow.” So the next day I called him and he said, “Your film is in Cannes.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">And this became a friendship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">EK: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I would see him everywhere. At festivals, in Paris, whenever he’s in town. He was really part of my life. He’s always there, chasing me. Asking me about my films. Pierre opened so many doors for me, and it was just through his love for cinema. If he liked the product he would champion it. I remember in Telluride when I was there with him, every day he would wear the <i>Be With Me </i>T-shirt. He was always looking out for smaller films. And he wanted to meet filmmakers. I introduced him to everyone (in Singapore). I even introduced him to Jack Neo (Singapore’ most successful director of local comedies). He was always happy and eager to meet filmmakers. He would ask me to send him VCDs, DVDs, of their work so I used to send to him. He lived for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> He would help guide filmmakers into Cannes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK:</b> He had his way of doing things. He would say to the directors of Cannes, “Hey Thierry (</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frémaux</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">), you have to watch this.” He would call me up and say "We have to fight for the best slot (in the festival).” Thierry had a lot of respect for him. Before Pierre passed away, it was the day before Cannes and he was still running around trying to find a distributor for <i>Burning</i>. And then he went. That’s the best way to go. He didn’t suffer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> But he’d suffered before that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK:</b> You know, whenever you’d see him, whether he’s on crutches or wheelchair, he loved travelling, he loved cinema. He loved to eat. If you don’t want (the food), he’ll take it from you, and if you don’t finish the drink, he’ll drink from you. What a guy! And he would always ask me, “How is Philip Cheah? And how is Wenjie?” He was very sweet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Did he ever read scripts for your films?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK: </b>(</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Shakes head emphatically) He’d wait and he’d watch it, and then at the rough cut stage he’d say “Try this, try that.” For him it’s the baby and we have to nurture it. And we have to give it life. Good life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">How involved did he get?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">EK: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The only film he helped me to edit was <i>Be With Me</i>. We had made it with the digital camera, and the tapes were so cheap - I shot a lot of footage. And at the editing stage there were so many different permutations of how I could edit the film. But I still felt something was amiss. There were three stories, and one was her (Theresa Chan’s) life and they were going simultaneously, and it didn’t quite work, and some of the stories went backwards. The editor didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to do, my writer didn’t know. So, I called Pierre, and I said, “I’ve just done this film and it’s a unique film.” So, he says “Send it to me.” He was staying with Clint (Eastwood) at the time in LA, so he called me up at midnight, and said “I just watched it. You have something so special with this film, but I cannot talk to you (on the phone), you have to come to Paris and I will sit down with you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">So we went to Paris with all the rushes. We had a cut on VHS and we watched it, and we’d look at the sections and he’d say, “Why don’t we try something, let’s look at the rushes.” This was in my nephew’s apartment, with just a VHS machine, it was low-fi. We’d write down the time-codes. Pierre would come in the morning, at 8:30, I would go and buy some food and cook it – I cooked <i>Bak Kut Teh</i> (Pork Rib Soup) - and then Benjamin Illos was there as well. And we just tried this and that for three mornings, and then when I came back to Singapore, I strung it all together and it worked a lot better. But there were things he wanted to remove and I said, “No way.” One was the ghost mother (a bereaved character sees his deceased wife), he thought the Western audience would have a problem. But he taught me a lot just sitting there. He’d say, “That’s a dead shot.” And it made a lot of sense. He was able to give me the right amount of suggestions that made it a much better edit. It was all about the pacing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Where did he learn this?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK:</b> Watching cinema.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> He had a reputation for being difficult.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK: </b><i>Be With Me </i>was the opening night film in the Directors Fortnight, so before we premiered he calls me up and says, “Eric, do you realise that before <i>Be With Me </i>plays, they are going to programme a 20 minute African film (<i>A Bras Le Corps</i>, made in Abidjan), and tonight at a certain time they are going to show a (restored) Ozu film, so that means you’re going to have people walking out of your cinema to watch the Ozu film.” And I said, “What can I do?” And he said, “You tell them they can’t do that.” And I’m like, “How can I do that?”, so he tells Olivier Père (the Artistic Director of Directors Fortnight at the time) to tell his boss not to play that (short) film. So, we are at the venue, and the film was going to play in the next ten minutes. And Pierre was screaming. And it was scary. When he gets mad, he explodes. But it was all about the work, he was so passionate. In the end the (short) film played, and I can’t remember anyone walking out. Actually, when I think back, I can’t fault him, he just wanted the best for the film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> He must have been furious at the screening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK:</b> He didn’t go to the screening! He didn’t even go to the party. The following day he had calmed down and then he congratulated me. He was so happy with the reviews.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Did he ask for any credit for advising on the editing?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>EK:</b> Never. I always had him under ‘special thanks’. When he liked something he just wanted to push it, he didn’t care if he’s part of it or not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eric's last meal with Pierre, 2017, photo by Eric Khoo</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>(</b>For Part Four<b> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_68.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b></span></div>
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-60486245173756774452019-02-23T01:56:00.003-08:002019-02-27T00:32:00.236-08:00In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part Two)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>(</b>For Part One<b> <a href="http://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Two: Boo Junfeng <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“Image makers not filmmakers.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I met Boo Junfeng and Pierre on the same day in 2007 at the Goodwood Park Hotel, Singapore, where Eric Khoo was introducing Rissient to various film people. Junfeng was already known for his short films. Today he’s the writer-director of two renowned feature films, <i>Sandcastle </i>and <i>Apprentice</i>, both selected for Cannes (Critics Week 2010 and Un Certain Regard 2016, respectively). I wanted to talk to Junfeng about Pierre partly because he’d participated in a TV interview (<i>Signature Conversations</i>) with him in 2012 which closely approximates the experience of spending an afternoon with Rissient talking about films, and also his own relationship to Pierre, which was exemplary of how Pierre mentored/supported young filmmakers who crossed his path. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Ben Slater: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I’d gone out for this crazy lunch with Pierre, and we came back to the Goodwood, and Eric wanted to introduce him to filmmakers and Pierre asked me to hang around. And you and Sun Koh (Singaporean filmmaker) <singaporean filmmaker="">came in, and I’d not met you before.<o:p></o:p></singaporean></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Boo Junfeng: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Sun asked me to go, and back then I didn’t even know Eric very well. At that time I’d made my first film, <i>A Family Portrait</i>, I was probably just out of the army.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You were very quiet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BJF: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I was very nervous, and I was so fresh. The idea of Cannes was so out of reach, the idea of even making my next short film was so out of reach. I didn’t see it at as “I need to know this guy.” I only got to know Pierre better after <i>Sandcastle</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I saw him just before he watched it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BJF: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The second run was at The Arts House (an arts centre in Singapore with a screening room), Pierre was there, with a public audience and afterwards we had a very long dinner. Just me and him and one of my Assistant Directors at the time, because I felt better with some company. I think Pierre saw something in the film, because when the DVD was coming out I asked him for a quote and he gave me a very nice quote, not about the film, but about mine being an interesting voice and wanting to hear more from me. He saw the future of a younger filmmaker and wanted to give that support. He knew what to focus on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS:</span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"> And so the next time you met him was when you did the conversation with him for TV? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BJF: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">They planned it so it was all quite real. He was sitting there and I was entering as I was arriving (to meet him)… I knew that a lot of the focus would be on Asian Cinema and the kinds of films and filmmakers I was drawn to, and I knew he would be an expert on most of them. He was just responding to the people I was inspired by, and he knew many of them personally. I remember talking about Lee Chang-dong because I had a deep appreciation for his works and Pierre knew him very well. I remember him saying that there are film-makers who are very quiet and when you talk to them you can sense a vulnerability and that’s reflected in the films they make. That stayed with me, because you do have to be a real person, at least for the kinds of films that I want to make. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">After that I only saw him again once or twice, and I remember sending him an early cut of <i>Apprentice</i>, and I don’t think he was too fond of it. He didn’t say much. He said how he felt it could be better and what was missing and what were the weaker parts of the film, and that gave me a lot to think about. And then I was in Paris and I met him for coffee and we talked, and then we went back to edit the film further.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Can you remember anything he said that struck home?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BJF:</b> Some things about certain performances. Which made me feel like I shouldn’t be too precious about certain moments, and I should just cut them out because they weren’t working. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Did you see him in Cannes that year?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BJF:</b> I heard from other people he wasn’t there. So as I was leaving at Nice Airport I texted him and immediately he called me and said he’d heard good things about the new cut, and he looked forward to seeing it and apologized for not being there. He was a gentleman, the way he spoke. The last time I saw him was last year at Fribourg, which turns out to be one of his favourite festivals, and I remember having breakfast with him, and <i>Apprentice </i>won the Grand Prix. I don’t know if he saw it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> He was generous with his time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BJF:</b> It was one of those things that I deeply appreciated. He really didn’t have to. Of course he probably enjoyed company, and to have people to listen to him, talking about films. But as a film-maker I felt always quite honoured in his presence that he’d give me that time to discuss films and my films. Sometimes when you meet people at festivals they will look over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone else, but with him he was always so dedicated and so one-on-one and so genuine. He’s known to be honest, brutally so sometimes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> In the interview he says he didn’t think much of your short films! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BJF:</b> He talked about other filmmakers, and he said some are “image makers” not filmmakers, and there’s not a real understanding of cinema. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> I once asked him what he really liked and he said he wanted things to be stripped-back and simple and he didn’t enjoy excess, at the heart of what he liked was a very stark, spare cinema.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BJF:</b> He liked films whereby the truth of that reality or story and the human condition is right there. You could see the author and the sincerity and the truth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/316381848" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/316381848">Signature_Rissient_Boo</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user4298986">M'GO Films</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>Three: Panuksmi Hardjowirogo</b> <b>& Michel Cayla<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“You discover it in reverse.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Full disclosure, I have worked with Panuksmi Hardjowirogo and Michel Cayla of MGO Films quite a bit. Prolific producers of media content based in Singapore/Asia, including a great deal of work for museums and television, they frequently work with filmmakers. Among many projects, they co-produced the feature film <i>HERE</i>, directed by Ho Tzu Nyen which was in the Directors Fortnight in 2009, and produced a TV series <i>Signature Conversations </i>for Singaporean news network ChannelNewsAsia, which included the aforementioned interview/conversation between Pierre Rissient and Boo Junfeng, filmed in 2011, broadcast in 2012, produced by Panuksmi and directed by Michel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Panuksmi </span></b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Hardjowirogo</b></span><b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">:</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I met Pierre in Paris with (Zhang) Wenjie and Warren (Sin), they were working at the Cinémathèque of Singapore (at the National Museum of Singapore) and I went along to be a translator and to meet people at the Cinémathèque in Paris. We met up with (<i>Saint Jack </i>producer) Pierre Cottrell who introduced me to Pierre Rissient at a lunch for the five of us. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Ben Slater: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">So how did the TV show come about?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Michel had this concept for a TV series called <i>Signature Conversations</i> which was about peers interviewing peers. So we had Boo Junfeng as the Singapore filmmaker interviewing a film person from overseas, and we knew from Wenjie and Warren that Pierre was coming into town.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He came to the National Museum to show <i>Five & the Skin </i>(1982)… Had you heard of him before Cannes in 2009?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Michel Cayla: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">No. He was under the radar. But knowing where he came from, researching a bit more, I got a better picture of the fellow. He starts in Paris at the Cine-Club. His generation loved cinema, wanted to watch movies, so you get friends and you realise you can organize your own Cine-Club, which I did in Montreal, and through that you meet distributors and you find out how film works. But you discover it in reverse: you start projecting films, and then you meet distributors of film, and then understand marketing and finally how they are made. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">How did the idea come about for putting him in the series?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We thought he could open a door into Asian cinema, but we wanted someone who was coherent and not just about Hollywood. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You knew what he was like?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I knew him through drinking and eating, and when I met him he wasn’t in very good shape, he’d just had an operation and was on crutches. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He was off crutches when you filmed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">MC: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The original concept was to have him walk into the studio with Junfeng, and to sit together and to be continuing a conversation, but he didn’t want to be seen walking on camera. So it starts with him sitting in the studio waiting for Junfeng to arrive. We had to improvise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We wanted to show the contrast between this young Asian filmmaker in his early 30s and this older French guy in his 70s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">MC: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">That pairing would never happen in any other context.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He also wanted to find out the ideas of young film-makers and what the film culture here was like here in terms of film history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There were so many films mentioned by Pierre, you had to find clips and stills. There’s a clip of an Edward Yang film…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We got that from the family. Pierre also helped us get the contacts, through Benjamin (Illos), for a lot of those clips. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">One of the things about Pierre that makes him hard to interview is that he drops names all the time. And drops them with the certainty that you know who he’s talking about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">MC: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He mentioned this old French silent movie that he loved, <i>L’Assommoir </i>(1908). Completely out of the box. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">How long did you film him for?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We were two hours in the studio.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">MC: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But he took a break, it wasn’t two hours straight. These guys know what they want to talk about, and what they don’t want to talk about. They are very coherent, quite focused. They don’t need to see the questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">BS: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">After that did you see Pierre again?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">PH: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The last time I saw him was in France at the premiere of <i>Ilo Ilo (</i>in Cannes in 2013). He looked happy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">(</b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">For Part Three</span><b style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_78.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b></div>
benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-38725847154771140012019-02-23T01:46:00.001-08:002019-02-26T01:26:53.728-08:00In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part One)<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>(</b><a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_76.html" target="_blank">For the Introduction <b>go here</b></a><b>)</b></span><br />
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<b><u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">One: Chew Tze Chuan</span></u></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“You have to be more vigorous!” </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">To understand Chew Tze Chuan’s unlikely collaboration with Pierre Rissient, you must first know of Toh Hai Leong, the fiercely outspoken film critic, writer, archivist and ubiquitous figure at film screenings and festivals in Singapore throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. Always armed with bags full of paperbacks, VHS tapes, newspaper cuttings and other cultural ephemera, Toh was Singapore’s most relentless and passionate cinephile and had over the years crossed paths with Rissient, introduced by film programmer Philip Cheah (who can take the credit/blame for many such introductions). In 2004, Chew, then a fledgling filmmaker collaborated (as editor and co-producer) with veteran Singaporean director Eric Khoo on <i>Zombie Dogs</i>, featuring Toh playing himself, a scabrous, hilarious fake-documentary that celebrated Toh’s wildly funny monologues on women, sex, violence, porn and life in Singapore. Not long after that, Toh was diagnosed with diabetes, and was trying to manage his failing health while living a life close to poverty. Chew himself had his own struggles, and this is where the story begins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Chew Tze Chuan: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I was at the bottom of a pit and felt very depressed and Mrs Chew was freaking out and she called Eric and said, “Please save my husband.” This is 2005. So, Eric brought me the clipping of Toh Hai Leong in <i>The Straits Times</i><the a="" about="" article="" declining="" had="" hai="" health="" leong="" news="" newspaper="" run="" s="" short="">, with sunken cheeks and <he was=""> depressed, and we were equally depressed, and Eric said, “Chew, why don’t we do something for Hai Leong?” <o:p></o:p></he></the></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Ben Slater: </span></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You’d already done one film about Hai Leong.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>Yes, <i>Zombie Dogs</i>. So now we were going to do a documentary “to encourage him”, quoting Pierre Rissient, “to live life again.” That was the mission. Some time in the latter part of 2005 we started to shoot for 40 days, and then Eric showed it to Pierre. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Did you know about Pierre before?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> He had seen <i>Zombie Dogs </i>and gave Eric advice to restructure the whole thing (which they didn’t take), but I didn’t really know who he was. The first time I met him I was still shooting (the documentary). There was one scene at the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were sitting down together beside the pool (Pierre talks with Hai Leong about Korean cinema).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> And Pierre set up the phone call between Kang Soo-youn (the iconic star of Im Kwon-taek films) and Hai Leong, that’s in the film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> So generous of him. He called me and said, “Chew, I’ll call you in two hours and please be there.” And was really intense as usual. I had my old Nokia with the speaker and there we were, talking with Kang Soo-youn. Pierre really appreciated what we were doing… So he watched the documentary, and Eric says, “Pierre loves it.” Eventually, he told me to visit him in France, because Pierre couldn’t make it to Singapore, and we could edit together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> So you went to Paris.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> With the hard-discs and my laptop. We went to Benjamin Illos’s place (Pierre’s long-standing assistant). Benjamin was there, which is why he’s in the credits as one of the editors (Benjamin is credited as providing “friendly special assistance”, Pierre does not take a credit). The first cut was two hours, and then it went to 90 minutes, and the one that Pierre saw was about 67 minutes. I was quite happy with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> How was it working with Pierre?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>Benjamin was beside me, Pierre sat behind. Half the time he was yelling, or talking with a very stern voice. I wouldn’t call him a dictator but he was very concerned, and one of the main motives there was – “If you do it like this the Parisian audience will never get it!” I realized why he related to Hai Leong’s journey. He himself was taking insulin jabs, and by 4pm, despite the coffee he’d be dozing off, and then he’d get up and say “Chew, where are we?” He was maxing himself out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> What did he yell at you about?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>Anything that was too technical, like I would manipulate the frame-rate, using slow-motion to emphasise a gesture, he thought it was fake, contrived. He could see it was a bag of tricks. There are scenes he took out, like when my son had a fever and we were giving him paracetamol by syringe, and he refused, and I parallel cut with Hai Leong refusing the medication and bitching about it. I could see Pierre smiling, but he wanted me to cut it. It’s in the Singapore cut, but not in the Locarno (film festival) version, <i>A Friend Like None (</i>the Singapore title for the film was simply <i>F</i>), which was 45 minutes. On the last day of editing he was quite happy and we had wine and he said “What shall we call this?” Pierre was a gentleman for coming up with that name.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS: </b>He didn’t like <i>F </i>as a title?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>It was a bit ambiguous for him. He also said to me, “Chew, you have to be more vigorous!” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Make it faster and shorter?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> Exactly. One scene was really zestful. Kang Soo-youn was talking about seeing Hai Leong in Busan, and then there’s a straight cut, and we hear a screech and we see Hai Leong walking very briskly to the screening of a film. I thank Benjamin and Pierre for that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> Did my scene make the Locarno cut? (In the film I tell a story about the reception to <i>Zombie Dogs </i>when I showed it in a festival)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> Yes, I can’t thank you enough. You chose the place, the <i>kopitiam </i>(coffeeshop) opposite The Substation (an indie Arts Centre). Pierre said, “Who was this guy?” He hadn’t met you yet. After that he got very intrigued. He wanted to know who you were, actually he wanted to validate everyone in the film. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> So the cut that you showed at the Goethe Institute during SIFF </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">(the Singapore International Film Festival, which later became SGIFF) </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">was the longer ‘local cut’?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> The version you saw was based on <i>A Friend Like None</i>. I came back from Paris with 45 minutes and Philip (Cheah) was the one who said, “Actually Chew you don’t have to do everything he says.” Because Philip had watched the Director’s cut and it had been accepted by SIFF. So I scratched my head and took a look at the cuts and chose the best moments, so I kept it at 60 minutes. I was satisfied. It was the best of the best. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS: </b>What happened in Locarno?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>Pierre had helped it not only get into Locarno but in a very good slot, during the first three days. (Before the festival) Pierre told me to get the French subtitles ready or at least the transcript. I thought that Benjamin would get back to me, and I let it pass. Then, the doctor seriously discouraged me from bringing Hai Leong to the festival and I thought it wasn’t fair. I was down because after shooting Hai Leong got much worse. I felt I was profiting from his disaster. So it got re-slotted from the first three nights to the last three nights. And there were no French subtitles, so Pierre was furious; fuming. In the end Eric kicked my ass, and said "You better go." So, I went. Pierre was there for the first week and by the time I got there he was gone. I came back with the programme as a souvenir, and Hai Leong was smiling at first and then he was angry, “Why did you go without me?” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> But you saw Pierre again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> Whenever he was here. I saw him in 2014 during SGIFF.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> That’s the last time I saw him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>I met him for lunch and he was asking about my adventures in Manila and when I mentioned (director’s name redacted) he flipped, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”. (Zhang) Wenjie (then director of programming for SGIFF) was trying to calm him nicely, and Pierre said, “No, don’t talk about this.” I thought maybe he had a certain Euro-centric mindset about art-house or so-called “Good Cinema”, but then I heard him rail against the label “Art House”. I saw that this man has real integrity. He has an ideal about a certain purity in cinema. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS:</b> He respected ambition, but if you’re just trying out a style he would see through it very quickly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC: </b>At the end of the day Pierre will know if this person is doing it with his heart, if he sees sincerity in the film-making. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>BS: </b>Once he believed in a film-maker he would stick with them. I would sometimes say of a director, “There’s this one work that I don’t like”, and he’d say, “No, I don’t agree.” But if he thought a director was getting bad advice from someone else who Pierre didn’t like, then he would be very angry…. Did Abdul Nizam meet Pierre in 2014? <the an="" and="" award-winning="" cinephile="" director="" entirely="" few="" last="" late="" nizam="" projects="" self-funded.="" singaporean="" was="" were="" whose=""><o:p></o:p></the></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>CTC:</b> Yes! The night when they showed <i>Breaking the Ice</i><nizam film="" last="" s=""> (Nizam's last film) in SGIFF. There were two students (assisting Pierre in Singapore)<assistants for="" he="" in="" pierre="" singapore="" was="" while="">, and Pierre was watching the film and Wenjie said afterwards “Pierre wants to go for prata.” Nizam was busy doing his stuff, so it was Uncle Pierre me, Wenjie, and the students, and they were asking Wenjie, “Why did you programme this?” They felt it was not good enough. Then Rissient said, “It was a promising film, it was just that there were too many elements, and it would have been stronger if he’d just focused on one or two.” In the film there are underwater sequences shot on this cheap Kodak underwater camera, and it was after Terrence Malick’s <i>Tree of Life </i>(2011) with its underwater sequences, and I said that if Nizam had a million dollars to shoot those sequences in the neighbourhood swimming pool they would have looked a lot better than Malick’s, and Uncle Pierre laughed, but they <the students=""> didn’t. Nizam had made the film for nothing, just because people believed in him. That was the last time I saw Pierre; a wonderful night.<o:p></o:p></the></assistants></nizam></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><nizam film="" last="" s=""><assistants for="" he="" in="" pierre="" singapore="" was="" while=""><the students=""><br /></the></assistants></nizam></span>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Note: Toh Hai Leong died in 2015, age 58 and Abdul Nizam died in 2016, age 50.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><b>(</b>For Part Two of the conversations<b> <a href="https://sporeana.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-front-behind-scenes-conversations_23.html" target="_blank">go here</a>)</b></span></div>
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-16453477773831245702017-09-27T22:59:00.000-07:002017-10-02T21:13:45.417-07:00Saint Jack is NOW on Blu-ray!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Saint Jack</b>'s past existence on 'home video' formats has been somewhat patchy in the DVD era. There was the New Concorde "Roger Corman Presents/Directors Series" edition from 2000, which presented a decent if scratchy scan of the print alongside a few basic extras from Peter Bogdanovich; a commentary-track and a to-camera interview. After that went out of print, Australian DVD outfit Umbrella licensed that very same version around 2006, however the compression of the file left something to be desired and it was a moderately inferior looking-thing, paler in colour and lower in resolution. That was the edition that hit the streets in Singapore when the film was 'un-banned', and became a fast bestseller for a while. While flat-hunting in 2010 I'd occasionally see a copy on peoples' shelves, so I know it got around. When Umbrella stopped shipping or printing them (presumably the license had ended, or there was no more demand) the film was suddenly unavailable again for the first time since the 1990s, although there was a Spanish-subtitled version showing up on Amazon, which was another license of the New Concorde edition. Then in early 2014, I saw a mention in a forum that <a href="http://www.scorpionreleasing.com/" target="_blank">Scorpion Releasing</a>, a small DVD/Blu-ray imprint specialising in bringing out relatively obscure B-Movie, action and exploitation flicks, had announced that a <b>Saint Jack</b> disc was in the pipeline, even going so far to include the trailer on some of its releases. Hoping to get involved, I speculatively dropped an email to the anonymous "Info@" address with some blurb about my book, and to my great surprise got an email back from Walter Olsen, who, I think it's fair to say, is Scorpion Releasing. Thus, a correspondence that would last several years (on and off) was initiated, and to Walter's great credit, while the Blu-ray project was delayed or held off for years (a much improved in terms of pic-quality DVD from Walter popped up in the interim), he was true to his word and happily enabled me to impose myself onto the project, recording an exhaustive audio commentary and producing two short documentaries, 'Memories of Saint Jack' (which edits together interviews with a good number of <b>Saint Jack</b> cast and crew, including Pierre Cottrell and Lisa Lu) and 'The Singapore Locations of <b>Saint Jack</b>' AKA 'Dormant Glories At Dawn', a video essay by the brilliant artist Toh Hun Ping. These feature alongside all the old extras. There's also an excellent reversible cover with the stunning Polish poster image instead of the not-wonderful Corman-edition poster with all the critics' quotes. When you get your copy, change the cover immediately! The best aspect of the edition is of course the film itself, which is stunningly cleaned-up, and as I've said elsewhere, it's doubtful that we'll ever see a better copy. A few years ago Peter Bogdanovich told an interviewer (during the <b>She's Funny That Way</b> press) that he hoped to see <b>Saint Jack</b> be brought out by Criterion. Well, Walter's done an equally great job on far less resources, and if you love the film, you absolutely must get this. It's available <a href="http://www.diabolikdvd.com/product/saint-jack-code-red-blu-ray/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://roninflix.com/products/saint-jack" target="_blank">here</a> and if you are in Singapore and want to acquire one, drop me a line.<br />
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<br />benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-66742064348485869832017-01-31T19:42:00.001-08:002017-01-31T19:42:58.083-08:00"The Women Round Here..."<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EazjigEl8Jg" width="550"></iframe><br />
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This went online a few days ago. It's actually the video from a site-specific installation at a karaoke lounge in the Bugis area which is part of the art/film tour <a href="http://stateofmotion.sg/" target="_blank">State of Motion</a>, mentioned in my last post. The video is by Amanda Lee Koe, a writer and poet, whose collection of short stories <a href="http://shop.epigrambooks.sg/products/ministry-of-moral-panic" target="_blank">Ministry of Moral Panic </a>was widely acclaimed in 2013. It's directed by Kristin Tan, whose debut film<a href="https://www.sundance.org/projects/pop-aye" target="_blank"> Pop Aye</a> just opened the international section of Sundance, and picked up best international screenplay too. As far as I know, outside the work done by Toh Hun Ping focussed <a href="https://sgfilmhunter.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/round-about-midnight-bugis-street/" target="_blank">on locations</a>, this is the first time (as far as I know) that a Singaporean artist has directly 'responded' to <b>Saint Jack</b>. Amanda addresses the complexity of her relationship to <b>Saint Jack</b> as a text, while presenting a real, precious history of Bugis Street alongside <b>Saint Jack</b>'s documentation of that storied place. It's cool, funny, provocative and I wish it were longer...benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-43206745610689935872017-01-05T16:22:00.001-08:002017-01-05T16:22:48.818-08:00Singaporeana in 2017Two related events coming up incredibly soon.<br />
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Firstly a talk entitled <a href="http://stateofmotion.sg/programmes/" target="_blank">'The World of Saint Jack'</a> will be at the National Library on the 7th January. This is an attempt to get away from the very general introductions to <b>Saint Jack</b> that I normally do and present matters relating to the film in a more informal and digressive way, without apology! So, it's a structured ramble through some alleyways and side-streets connected to the movie. There will be a revelation or two around the identity of at least one person who Jack Flowers was based on - which involves poetry (!), plus something I just noticed about the 'Jack of Hearts' Treatment, and a tribute of sorts to Pierre Cottrell and Tony Yeow.<br />
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It's actually part of an event <b><a href="http://stateofmotion.sg/" target="_blank">State of Motion</a></b>, which is an annual exhibition around art/film curated by Kent Chan with help from my good friend Toh Hun Ping, who you will all know from his amazing <a href="https://sgfilmlocations.com/" target="_blank">locations archive</a>. I'd like to think that this year's theme 'Through Stranger Eyes' is inspired by the work I've done as the films they are focussing on have featured on this blog over the years, and they are showing <b>Ring of Fury</b> by Tony Yeow.... Talking of which:<br />
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A week later, on the 14th, Sherman Ong and myself will present <a href="http://www.sistic.com.sg/events/ccinema0117" target="_blank">Tony's Long March</a> at the National Museum of Singapore, in a double-bill with <b>Lost in La Mancha</b>. It's the first time the film's been seen since the Singapore International Film Festival in late 2015, and about time too! We'll be introducing it and doing a Q&A afterwards.benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-63326958808720205752016-02-23T16:48:00.001-08:002016-02-23T16:48:12.083-08:00SINGAPOREANA COMES TO LONDON!Last year this blog became a 10 film year-long season at NUS Museums, which included my first sighting of the infamous Hawaii 5-O episode(s) The Year of the Horse. This year it becomes a <a href="http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/2016/asia-house-film-festival-singaporeana-day/">one-day event in London</a>, as part of the <a href="http://asiahouse.org/events/category/asia-house-film-festival-2016/">Asia House Film Festival 2016</a>, and 'Singaporeana Day' will take place at The Cinema Museum on the 5th March, and will include <a href="http://sporeana.blogspot.sg/2013/05/coming-of-age-hollywood-arrives-in.html">Pretty Polly</a>, <a href="http://sporeana.blogspot.sg/2014/06/coming-of-age-hollywood-in-singapore-pt.html">The Virgin Soldiers </a>and a new HD (BluRay) file screening of Saint Jack, which will be the first time that's shown in the UK since it was released. I will be on hand to introduce each screening as lucidly as possible, and then at the end of this marathon of Singaporeana, I will be on a panel with some other luminaries from film-making and film criticism to discuss the films, their context and impact. All of this was made possible by secret legend Gareth Evans for introducing me to the good people of Asia House and then well-known legend Jasper Sharp, who is the festival director and organiser who got excited by the idea and really pushed it through against all the various challenges of prints and rights acquisition that we faced. I look forward to seeing UK people at the event, come and say hi!<br />
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<br />benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-80640772421329407532015-11-03T00:49:00.001-08:002015-11-03T00:51:38.937-08:00Remembering Tony...<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI3XXMlwlLHsE3aqu6ACN0iiw9LQ_RxCdfVJE5NZbz1VtjEYJnCw0obPcORcZ0eys3xczpRO4nK1AtxsueyxCKISt4IhmXQv6jSr6dzIGaFFMtUirGpW4K_WFt-xxypq2j2QMeHASgfTay/s1600/_MG_3891.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI3XXMlwlLHsE3aqu6ACN0iiw9LQ_RxCdfVJE5NZbz1VtjEYJnCw0obPcORcZ0eys3xczpRO4nK1AtxsueyxCKISt4IhmXQv6jSr6dzIGaFFMtUirGpW4K_WFt-xxypq2j2QMeHASgfTay/s400/_MG_3891.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Image from <b>TONY'S LONG MARCH</b> (photo: Sherman Ong)</i></td></tr>
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During the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival, they'll be a tribute to Tony Yeow, the Singaporean film producer who died in June this year. Tony worked as the Unit Manager on <b>Saint Jack</b>, among many other things. He produced, conceived and co-directed about six feature films during his career; developed dozens more; produced and directed a bunch of commercials, documentaries and PSAs; was a TV presenter for a while; as well as an actor in big-budget TV miniseries and local theatre productions. Tony was a character. And Sherman Ong and myself set out to capture that in a film we shot between 2008 and 2010 called <b>Tony's Long March</b>. We'll be showing that at the tribute, and hearing from some of those who worked with him.<br />
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Details of the event can be found <a href="http://sgiff.com/talks">here</a>. Scroll down to find 'Remembering Tony'.<br />
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In the meantime, here's something I wrote about him for Time Out Singapore in 2008.<br />
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Singapore’s film industry has its fair share of colourful characters, none more so than Tony Yeow. A producer, writer, director, occasional actor and veteran of television and commercials, Tony was born in 1938, around the same time as the Shaw Brother’s set up their film studio in Jalan Ampas and so his career spans the history of film-making in Singapore until today.</div>
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“I’m a has-been that never was,” he ‘s fond of saying, and its true that Tony has been an outsider, hustling to get projects off the ground, facing indifference, censorship and critical hostility along the way. He’s also a survivor, and recalls several close escapes from death during his WW2 era childhood in Chinatown (one bad fall leaving him with two broken arms), which he credits to “somebody upstairs taking a liking to me.”</div>
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As a boy, Tony often slipped off alone to the cinema, soaking up martial arts and horror flicks, “I enjoyed it, but I never thought I’d end up as a film producer.” Instead, as the premature breadwinner for his family, he became a teacher, then stumbled into radio broadcasting, largely on the strength of his still-resonant, crystal-clear voice, a tool he deliberately cultivated to imitate colonial era English news announcers. He side-stepped into television, getting promoted as a producer and presenter, and managing to be in the studio in 1965, when Lee Kuan Yew tearfully told the nation of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia.</div>
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His first film, <b>Ring of Fury</b>, came in the aftermath of a year working in TV in Hong Kong, “they had colour, Singapore was still in black and white.” Tony had met Bruce Lee, who was deeply into disco, “He was always dancing. He broached the idea of doing a musical with me. Unfortunately a year later he died.” Inspired by Lee, Tony created the Singapore’s first and (so far) last martial arts action film, producing, storylining and co-directing a low-budget but very stylish tale of a humble noodle-seller (played by Peter Chong, a real-life Karate master) who battles against gangsters led by a man in a metal mask. Aside from showing many parts of Singapore in 1973 that no longer exist, the film has some memorably hard-hitting combat scenes. “We didn’t choreograph those,” Tony explains, “I told them where to run, and we just turned on the camera and they fought.”</div>
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The film was banned for its portrayal of crime at a time when Singapore was aggressively ‘cleaning up’. After a disaster like that, most people would bow out, but Tony found himself “bitten by the passion”. His second film, a comedy about fisherman-out-of-water called <b>Two Nuts</b>, didn’t change the tide of decline in Singapore’s film industry in the late 70s, and his production company Impact, turned to commercials, documentaries and government campaign films (such as ‘Stop At Two’, intended to curb overpopulation). During this period, Tony joined the crew of Peter Bogdanovich’s infamous <b>Saint Jack<i>, </i></b>the Hollywood film secretly shot in Singapore, and also took acting roles, including a part in the Australian mini- series <b>Tanamera: Lion of Singapore</b>, but the “impossible dream” hadn’t disappeared.</div>
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“Once you start on one film, it somehow leads onto another”, Tony says, and he kept toying with various ideas, inadvertently kick-starting the ‘revival’ of Singapore’s film industry with <b>Medium Rare </b>in 1991. Supposed to be a documentary-style account of the Tao Payoh murderer Adrian Lim, it drifted radically from this concept and is now largely seen as a terrible, albeit historically significant, flop. “<b>Medium Rare </b>could never be well done”, laughs Tony (he has a pun like this for all his films), who says he walked off the set on the first day of shooting and never returned. It did pave the way for more successful local films by directors</div>
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like Eric Khoo and Jack Neo, and that in turn gave Tony the chance to produce <b>Tiger’s Whip</b>, a comedy about an American looking for the titular Viagra-substitute that was intended as “spiritual film”, but ended up being “whipped pillar to post.” The lead actor, an American, was “a zombie, but very good-looking”, and the film also flopped.</div>
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“I had one more joust at the windmill,” says Tony of his virtually forgotten 2001 Malaysian action-comedy <b>The Deadly Disciple</b>, but he’s still going strong. After our interview he’s driving to town to “meet a friend who has an idea for a film”, and he has drawers full of screenplays, everything from knockabout comedies, to horror flicks and his period epic Little Red Star, about The Long March in China. If you meet Tony for even a short while, he’s likely to suggest you read one of them.</div>
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“I never made any good films,” Tony muses, by which he means that they didn’t make any money. For a moment he seems to regret his life-long involvement in an industry that wasn’t always kind to him but has certainly been interesting, “What else can I do? There’s no place to go”. Then he’s enthusiastically discussing some other new projects. As he says of that his much cherished Long March film idea – “It’s just a dream.”</div>
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-9275881325392603842015-07-30T03:02:00.001-07:002015-08-02T19:12:18.058-07:00Remembering Pierre Cottrell<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJsbu3-nS94TlXhDfpQi0xafkranemLQKt0O0IslHHB59T6PvWSl9Q2MLwmOmJ20YdH3KTJZqsLa2OyzOjHrz38Df5iXG98A_RP_3NulWO0rSBaQ_YyyW1O3lmNuVlLedGR5dDUXVXPngh/s1600/IMG_0428.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJsbu3-nS94TlXhDfpQi0xafkranemLQKt0O0IslHHB59T6PvWSl9Q2MLwmOmJ20YdH3KTJZqsLa2OyzOjHrz38Df5iXG98A_RP_3NulWO0rSBaQ_YyyW1O3lmNuVlLedGR5dDUXVXPngh/s400/IMG_0428.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lisa Lu and Pierre Cottrell, Singapore 2009 </td></tr>
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In the last two months two people who I met through my research into the making of <b>Saint Jack</b> have passed away. The first was Tony Yeow in early June, and I will write about him soon, and the second was Pierre Cottrell, who died a few days ago as I write this - on the 23rd July, and whose funeral was held yesterday in Paris. Last night, a few of us in Singapore who came to know Pierre gathered to have a glass or two in his honour. We were (and remain) the Singapore wing of the P. Cottrell Appreciation Society, and even though we knew him in what would turn out to be the last decade of his life, we had more than a few adventures with him, and had tales to tell, because that was the kind of guy Pierre was.<br />
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As we drank we translated Julian Gester's <a href="http://next.liberation.fr/cinema/2015/07/27/mort-de-pierre-cottrell-producteur-nouvelle-vague_1354801">obituary of him</a> in Libération and it's lamentable that so little has been written about Pierre in English, so one reason to write this now, is to collect some of the things we know about Monsieur Cottrell.<br />
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Pierre was one of that generation of post-war teenagers who fell in love with cinema at the perfect moment. He volunteered at the Cinémathèque Française, imbibing the history of movies for free, and it was here that he encountered seminal figures such as Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque, Eric Rohmer, who by then (in 1959) was editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and had directed some short films, and Barbet Schroeder who would found the company Les Films du Losange with Rohmer, later Cottrell would join them. However, before that Cottrell went off to America (when he was 18!) , and according to an oft-repeated story it was a self-imposed exile after he was threatened with a gun by another Cahiers writer and would-be film-maker, Jean Eustache.<br />
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Of course America was the source of Pierre's favourite film-makers - his deep, abiding love for 'Golden Age' Hollywood directors would last throughout his life and in 1960s Los Angeles he encountered Otto Preminger, Delmer Daves among others, and would fall in with the New Hollywood gang, most notably Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, and Nicholson's main employer, Roger Corman.<br />
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In New York he hung out with Bob Dylan down in the village, and embraced the underground film scene. He loved to tell the story about getting bust by the cops the night Jonas Mekas screened Jean Genet's "obscene" <b>Chant D'Amour</b>, according to some reports he was tearing the tickets, although he insisted he was the projectionist. One of his earliest credits was as a Production Assistant on Mekas's film of <b>The Brig</b> in 1964. Pierre was barely 20.<br />
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He went back to France to begin work with Rohmer, but kept up the American Connection. Famously, struggling actor Jack Nicholson moved into Pierre's Paris apartment in 1966 and spent many weeks enjoying the city and Pierre's company whilst getting his head together, before returning to Hollywood (and finally, success). And then Roger Corman arrived in France in 1967 to shoot a biker film, <b>The Wild Racers</b> and Pierre ended up as an Associate Producer (securing the services of Nestor Almendros as cinematographer) and from then on would become Corman's occasional go-to guy for difficult location shoots, including the rarely-seen Vic Morrow in Istanbul flick, <b>Target: Harry </b>in '69, and a decade later <b>Saint Jack</b> in Singapore directed by Peter Bogdanovich (whom Pierre had met in New York when they were both fresh young cinephiles) - but that's another story.<br />
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Pierre eventually became a partner in Losange, and he and Schroeder would produce Rohmer's great run of late 60s/early 70s masterpieces, starting with <b>La collectionneuse</b> in '67, for which Pierre was not credited, despite apparently editing the 'script' together from recorded improvisations by Rohmer and the actors, and then <b>Ma nuit chez Maud </b>(1969), <b>Le genou de Claire</b> (1970), and <b>L'amour l'après-midi</b> (1972). This was the peak. A time of celebrity and international travel. Pierre rubbed shoulders with everyone, and found himself at the Oscars in 1970, representing the nominated <b>Maud</b>.<br />
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In the mean-time, his friendship with Bob Rafelson, who he fondly referred to as 'Curly' (a nickname coined by Jack Nicholson) reached the point where the newly minted director offered Pierre 60 thousand bucks so that he could produce the first feature of his would-be assassin, Jean Eustache. Rafelson had met Eustache and found him appropriately crazy. The film they all made together, <b>La Maman et la Putain </b>(1973) took Rohmer's dialogue-heavy approach in an entirely new and extreme direction, and was something of a <i>succès de scandale</i>, getting booed and winning the Grand Prix and the Critic's prize at Cannes, being declared "an insult to the nation" by Le Figaro, and then going onto 'boffo' box office in Paris. Around that time Pierre's involvement with Losange and Schroeder also ended, and from then on he worked alone, moving from project to project on a freelance basis, although he would work with Rohmer once more on <b>L'anglaise et le duc</b> in 2001.<br />
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Pierre produced some fascinating films through the 1970s and into the 80s, including the almost entirely unseen <b>Flesh Colour</b> (1978), starring Dennis Hopper, Lou Castel and Bianca Jagger (!), Eustache's second feature <b>Mes petites amoureuses</b> in '74, and two films with Wim Wenders, including <b>Lightning Over Water </b>AKA<b> Nick's Movie </b>(1980), which owed much to Pierre's friendship with the film's subject, the ailing Hollywood maverick, Nicholas Ray, and another meta-film, <b>The State of Things</b> in 1982 (which somehow emerged out of a Raoul Ruiz film that Pierre was also producing, called <b>The Territory</b>), which featured Roger Corman in an acting role, and another of Pierre's heroes Sam Fuller (and reunited him with the star of <b>La collectionneuse</b>, Patrick Bauchau).<br />
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From the mid-80s producing work began to dry up. Pierre would find himself in Louisiana helping out Curly Bob, who was shooting the sex scenes (uncredited) on a soft-core porn adaptation of Milo Manara's erotic comic <b>The Click</b>. When Pierre told me this story I had my doubts, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i64bxSZj8lw">a clip on YouTube</a> shows a very debonair Pierre taking on the role of the butler with poise. Indeed, Pierre ends up on camera in some interesting places, including the aforementioned <b>Lightning Over Water</b>, as <a href="https://twitter.com/YosemiteBailey/status/626118370535055360">a 'Pornographer' </a>in Jacques Rivette's notorious <b>Out 1 </b>(along with his schoolfriend and fellow cinephile, Bernard Eisenschitz), and, decades later, (if he made the final cut) in U-Wei Haji Saari's <b>Hanyut</b>.<br />
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Having mostly fallen out of the producing game, his immaculate linguistic skills enabled a second career as a high-end 'Subtitlist', often for American and Asian films that were coming to Cannes, and the list of films and film-makers he translated for includes: Costa-Gavras, Spike Lee, Henry Jaglom, Lizzie Borden, Eric Khoo, Lino Brocka, Edward Yang, and (I'm sure) many, many more.<br />
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Although he'd rather have been producing films, Pierre's mastery of language lent itself to the subtitling gig, and anyone who'd spent time with him and/or received letters, emails or memos from him knew how he prided himself on wordplay and poetic turns of phrase (in French and English). There's a quote in Gester's obituary about how as a producer he would write beautiful things on mundane production paperwork. That's very Pierre. I've seen many of the memos he wrote for his director during the <b>Saint Jack</b> shoot, and even though his relationship with Bogdanovich was fractious, each one is courteous, friendly and perfectly constructed. He was, as our friend Michel says, a man of letters.<br />
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When I was writing my book on <b>Saint Jack</b>, I would speak to Pierre on the phone, but most of the best material came from long emails he'd send me, some of which was so potentially libellous I could never use it. He did me the great favour of organising a phone interview between myself and Roger Corman. This gave me a glimpse into his legendary 'fixing' skills. I was sent very clear instructions - a time (the middle of the night in Singapore), a phone number - and it all went like clockwork. Pierre prided himself on getting this stuff done.<br />
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When the book was completed and published I was somewhat dreading his reaction (I figured he'd think it was too sympathetic towards Bogdanovich). A copy signed with thanks was dispatched to Paris. To my surprise he sent me a wonderful note of appreciation, asking for five more books as soon as possible, which he wanted to pass to friends and colleagues, and of course he would pay for them (I sent the copies, but never a bill).<br />
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We met in Paris a year or so later, and there he was, in his big coat and glasses - quiet, intense but once he warmed up to you, there was humour and mischief. In November 2009, I, and future good friends of Pierre (Warren and Wenjie), were able to bring him out to Singapore for the Saint Jack 30th anniversary screening at the National Museum of Singapore, and he was so happy to be back. He brought prodigious gifts for everyone involved, which included an enormous cache of French cheese for myself. Gifts were part of Pierre's repertoire. There's a story a <b>Saint Jack</b> crew member tells of Pierre rolling up on set during a particularly gruelling section of the shoot - he didn't have their cash <i>per diems</i> because of a problem with the bank, but instead he had a mountain of sweet tropical fruit to pass around - how could anyone be angry? In 2009 I saw a flash of this at the end of our Saint Jack Locations Tour which I was conducting. We finished off at the Goodwood Park Hotel, and while we were outside by the pool, Pierre disappeared into the hotel lobby. He emerged minutes later with a fistful of postcards and handed them out to everyone. It was a lovely thing to do.<br />
<br />benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-50786400159649890572015-02-07T20:40:00.003-08:002015-02-07T20:41:24.689-08:00Announcing: The Lost Film Project!<h2>
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<b><i>La Testa Rossa (The Red Head), 1971?</i></b></div>
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An exhibition of four restored film stills, as part of 'Beyond The Horizon', a group show at the ADM Gallery in the School of Art, Design and Media in Singapore from the 4th February to the 14th March.</div>
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From the exhibition notes:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">"</span>While researching American and European films shot on location in Singapore, I came across a brief article in The Straits Times (11th January, 1971) announcing that an “Italian spy picture” was being filmed in the East Coast area under the title <b><i>La Testa Rossa</i></b> (The Red Head). Its director was unknown, Enzo Salvadori (misspelt as “Salfatori” by the newspaper). I assumed that the film was never completed.</div>
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About a year ago, further research revealed that a film of that name was released briefly in Italy (and other countries) in 1974, but we were unable to locate an archive print or video copy. My researcher Hun Ping acquired an Italian distribution catalogue from the early ‘70s and there was a Post Office Box address associated with the title. I sent an inquiry letter, not expecting a reply.</div>
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Six months later I received a package containing a 117 page typed screenplay in Italian for <b><i>La Testa Rossa</i></b> on yellowing paper, and four 35mm frames, apparently clipped from a extremely faded and damaged film print. A hand-written note accompanied the materials with just the words, “That’s all that’s left.”</div>
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For this exhibition, I’m presenting specially restored ‘blow-ups’ of those four images, alongside brief extracts of the script (the translation of which is ongoing) that may or may not correspond to the scenes depicted. The ‘film stills’ are precious glimpses of Singapore in 1971; fragments of an apparently lost film."</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">“The Girl points to the
wilderness behind them. Lee sees a FIGURE emerge out of nowhere – both utterly of
this land and a stranger. The Man screams.” Page 7</span></div>
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every wave. Then – finally, he’s quiet.” Page 113<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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My research into this intriguing film is ongoing.</div>
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<i>Thanks a million to Toh Hun Ping for his work as researcher and digital image restorer on this project, you can see his latest film location related website <a href="http://sgfilmlocations.com/">here</a>. </i></div>
benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-54482534500748409272014-06-05T19:52:00.001-07:002014-06-27T23:07:03.428-07:00Coming of Age: ‘Hollywood' in Singapore: Pt. 2<br />
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The Virgin Soldiers, John Dexter, shot: 1967/released: 1969</h3>
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<i>“It rained a lot, and steamed when the sun shone. It was always hot. But it was safe.” </i></div>
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A few weeks ago Leslie Thomas died. He was a relatively prolific novelist producing a book a year for a long time, but, as the obits made clear, best known as the author of <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b>, a fictionalised account of his years as a conscripted private stationed in Malaya, and more specifically, Singapore between 1949 and ’51. This was the early phase of the ‘Malayan Emergency’ when British forces fought viciously with anti-colonial, pro-communist guerilla squads who’d shifted from being a local resistance against the invading Japanese (trained and armed by the Allies) to terrorists determined to ‘free’ Malaya from the British. It's a conflict little represented in fiction before or since. The literary precursors to Thomas’s book were Anthony Burgess’s <b>Malayan Trilogy</b> in the late 50s, and Michael Keon’s <b>The Durian Tree</b> in ‘59, filmed in 1964 as <b>The Seventh Dawn</b>, a forgotten attempt to render the Emergency as a big-budget war epic. None of these would have the popular impact of <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b>.</div>
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Published in 1966, a good fifteen years later after these formative events for Thomas (but only six years after the Emergency was declared over) the book was a massive bestseller in its time, both in the UK and America. An irreverent, iconoclastic look at military life in the aftermath of World War Two, <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> (<span style="color: #545454;">"</span>the best three words I ever wrote" Thomas later said) was firmly anti-war, anti-authoritarian and, most importantly, pro-sex, chiming perfectly with the period. Sales were aided by a series of lurid book covers (the first edition projects an image of a soldier in a jungle, Maurice Binder-style, onto a naked female torso) and its reputation for being “intensely erotic”, as Publisher’s Weekly helpfully blurbed for the paperback.</div>
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The story’s recounted mostly from the point-of-view of Thomas’s alter-ego, Brigg (ironically General Briggs was responsible for British strategy during the Emergency), a vaguely working class chap in his early 20s whose National Service stint brings him to Panglin Camp (a jokily renamed Tanglin Barracks, although Thomas was actually stationed at Nee Soon Camp) to be a pay clerk, doing admin in the arse-end of beyond (miles from the action), where the most useless, stupid and unfit for duty are deliberately “mislaid by the army".</div>
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It’s about the tedium of the posting - the practical jokes, the petty squabbles, being horny and bored and powerless in a foreign country. But riots break out in Singapore and even the pen-pushers get into the fray. At first Brigg’s only interested in losing his virginity; sights are set on Philippa, the daughter of the Sergeant Major, but he settles for ‘Juicy’ Lucy, a pretty Chinese dancer at the Liberty Club downtown, who’s never had a virgin before and loves it (coining the titular phrase). Meanwhile Philippa, resentful of her Singapore life, whose father openly worries she’s a lesbian, is deflowered by Driscoll, the tough-bastard Sergeant haunted by a wartime incident in which he accidentally shot his own lads, and whose hatred of the other Sergeant Wellbeloved, a cruel, incompetent racist constantly boasting of military heroics, becomes a crucial narrative thread.<br />
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Thomas sketches miniatures of Brigg’s mates - the train-obsessive Sinclair, openly gay Villiers and Foster, bespectacled Brook, overweight Fred Organ, and scheming Fenwick (who's convinced he’ll be discharged if he keeps his ears under water until he’s deaf) through a series of episodes big and small. There’s the interminable camp dance, a brutal dog-shooting competition, the anti-British riot (which sees Brigg try to play hero by ‘rescuing’ Philippa and her dotty mother), a long messy fight between Driscoll and Wellbeloved, R&R in Georgetown (where Brigg and Philippa finally have sex) building up to the novel’s climax – Brigg and the boys seeing real action when their train back to Singapore (through the Malayan jungle) is ambushed by bandits. </div>
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Thomas takes it leisurely, keeps the banter among the men earthy and often genuinely funny, and ensures the spectre of terrible violence is always close. An early chapter begins with the sentence: “When the Japanese had been in Panglin during the war they had taken some Australians down to the cricket field and murdered them.” He does this again and again, shifting from an amusing or relatively innocuous detail into something to do with death, as casually as you might mention a change in the weather.</div>
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Singapore is minimally described, like a scrawled map for a weekend visitor. There’s the “village” near the camp, the centre of town where the boys visit the Liberty Club “just off the Padang”. Lucy’s flat’s on “Sarangoon Road (sic)”. When the riot breaks out they roam the city, passing the Cathay cinema (showing Elia Kazan’s <b>Panic in the Streets</b>) and Raffles Hotel (for “people with money”) and setting up temporary camp in the “Golden World amusement park”. The only Singaporean character (let’s skip “Fuk Yew” the laundryman whose fingers Brigg accidentally shoots off) is Lucy. Sexually generous and deeply whimsical, she’s a stereotype but so fondly drawn that when Brigg finds out she’s been murdered by a gang of British soldiers who thought she’d passed them VD, it’s devastating. Even more so as Brigg pushes his grief away and wonders “if she did have the disease” (she didn’t). When the book was published, Walter Warwick, reviewer for The Straits Times (an expat with his own post-war memories), found it sensationalised, “The Pay Corps was never like this,” he sniffed.</div>
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In the late '60s, Ned Sherrin, on a hot-streak after producing <b>That Was The Week That Was</b>, was offered a job as an executive for Columbia Pictures in London. With theatre and TV contacts up the wazoo, Sherrin was a classy hire. The Vietnam War was still raging in Indochina, and the ‘youth picture’ with counter-cultural overtones was emerging as a commercial genre (Columbia were the studio that picked up – and made a fortune from - <b>Easy Rider</b> in ’69), so the story of young guys making love not war, seemed opportunistically right for the studio. Sherrin, by his own admission not a rock n’ roll guy, simply wanted to make a good film capturing the book’s spirit. </div>
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Credits for writing the thing are complicated. The top credit, "screenplay", goes to John Hopkins (the bigger font size in the opening credits says it all), but "adaptation" is credited to John McGrath and “additional dialogue” is by Ian La Frenais. Hopkins and McGrath both started off in television, primarily on police procedural <b>Z Cars</b>, episodes of which Hopkins wrote and McGrath directed. McGrath would become a legendary political theatre-maker in the 70s, but in the late ‘60s he was a jobbing screenwriter, adapting his own anti-war play, <b>The Bofors Gun</b> (1968) as well as Len Deighton’s <b>Billion Dollar Brain</b> (1967) for Ken Russell (the Edinburgh International Film Festival just annouced a <a href="https://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/films?src=section&section=Border%2BWarfare%253A%2BJohn%2BMcGrath%25E2%2580%2599s%2BWork%2Bin%2BTV%252C%2BTheatre%252C%2B%2526%2BFilm">tribute</a> to his screenwriting this year; <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> is absent). Hopkins was a prolific writer of lauded ‘Wednesday Plays’ and other one-off TV dramas, and had done a major rewrite on the troubled script for <b>Thunderball</b> (1965). McGrath probably did the first draft (hence the adaptation credit), which was, for whatever reason, substantially rewritten by Hopkins, and sitcom king La Frenais, a specialist in dry funny dialogue, came in for the polish.</div>
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The script retained the novel’s major set-pieces, leaning towards Brigg’s point-of-view, including a first-person voice-over narration glueing the various episodes together. As in any adaptation there are big changes and contractions. Rather than have Brigg and Philippa reunite in Georgetown, the film consumates their lust much earlier beside the pipeline during Brigg’s comical rescue, and once that’s done Philippa’s barely seen again. The most fundamental ommission is Lucy’s death, which I presume was just too disturbing to include. The culminative effect of these tweaks is that once Brigg and Philippa lose their respective virginities (rapidly crosscut together in that stylised late '60s style) both the romantic and sensual aspects of the book slacken off. A neater move is to make Wellbeloved's cowardice something that actually happens on-screen, placing him on the ambushed train (hiding in the toilet) in the film’s climax, rather than have Driscoll confront him about something that he reportedly did in the war.</div>
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John Dexter, a theatre-director associated with the great post-war theatre generation led by Laurence Olivier, was picked by Sherrin to make his cinema directing debut with <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b>. Hywel Bennett, a Welsh-born, London-raised and RADA trained young actor (with just a few TV credits at that point) got the plum part of Brigg, and established British star Nigel Davenport played Driscoll (around same time he recorded all of HAL’s dialogue for Kubrick’s <b>2001: A Space Oddysey</b>, and was Michael Caine’s reluctant wartime partner in Andre De Toth’s excellent, underseen <b>Play Dirty</b>), a rather too-young Jack Shepherd was Wellbeloved, and Lynn Redgrave (who’d just played Noel Coward’s <b>Pretty Polly</b> in the TV version of the Singapore-set story) was cast as Philippa, alongside her real-life mother Rachel Kempson (wife of Michael Redgrave), playing her mum. </div>
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That particular bit of casting was of vital importance to Singaporeans, according to The Straits Times, who, when they found out, devoted several articles to the “Royal members of British filmdom” deigning to visit the former colony. When filming had been announced earlier in 1967, Cathay’s managing director Tom Hodge, a tireless cheerleader for foreign productions in Singapore, was convinced the decision was due to the “tremendous success” of the <b>Pretty Polly</b> shoot the year before, “when the fullest possible co-operation was given by the Singapore authorities.” Location filming started with a week and a half in Port Dixon, Malaysia for the beach R&R scene and some jungle exteriors, followed by five weeks in Singapore, where they needed an army camp or barracks to stand in for Panglin.</div>
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Built in the late 1930s, Selerang Barracks was part of the British forces coastal defences, but when Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942, it became a prison, containing the overspill of captured British and Australian soldiers from Changi. It would be the site of a notorious stand-off between Commander General Shimpei Fukuye and every military POW in Singapore when the Japanese General demanded prisoners sign a statement promising to cease all escape attempts, after four had been caught fleeing from Changi. When the officers refused, Fukuye had every single prisoner marched into Selerang, squeezing an estimated 15000 men into a space designed for 800, most of them forced to live pressed together in the parade square with only a tiny amount of water and few toilets. At the same time the four escapees were executed on Changi Beach. After several days when it was clear that more would die in these conditions the officers capitulated. The POWs signed the document, many using nonsense or fictional names, Ned Kelly was a popular one with the Australians. This barracks, still under the command of the British Army two years after independence, was granted to <b>The Virgin Soldiers'</b> shoot, with its resident servicemen as extras.</div>
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In the lead-up to the arrival of crew, Tom Hodge let slip that “a local girl” might be needed to play Lucy, although that offer was soon downgraded to being a “stand-in” for the Chinese London-based actress Tsai Chin (Fu Manchu’s daughter in several Harry Alan Towers flicks), whose scenes would be shot in London on a set. After auditions they picked Ng Lee Ngo, a student who “seemed to be harbouring an anxiety” according to The Straits Times reporter on the beat. She was replaced by Denise Chew, an ex-Bunny Girl at the Playboy Club in London, glimpsed in the completed film very briefly (in two fleeting shots which keep her face hidden) chucking Brigg’s trousers into an alleyway. Two years later, the reviewer for The Straits Times would describe her performance as “brilliant”.</div>
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Filming in Singapore lasted five weeks, with the Redgraves flying in for the last nine days, before everyone shipped out on the 5<sup>th</sup> of October 1968, to begin a month of shooting on sets built in Shepperton. Almost all the interiors were built and shot there, including the barracks bar for the garrison dance scene, which features an impossibly brief appearance by a pre-stardom David Bowie, being shoved out from behind the bar. Bowie, who would later come to Singapore for real and make a film about it, cut his hair for the part (a big gesture in 1967), and was rewarded with about one second of screen time.</div>
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Before filming had started, Sherrin asked Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter for The Kinks, to write music for the film (and offered him a part - he wisely declined). Davies came up with a new composition, <b>The Virgin Soldiers March</b> for a full orchestra and brass band, and penned some unironic “noble” lyrics to accompany the theme. These were rejected by Columbia who hired two lyricists Eddie Snyder (who co-wrote <b>Strangers in the Night</b>) and Larry Kusik to write lyrics that they believed (according to Sherrin) were “going to lead the whole of young America marching on Washington”. Sherrin declared them “apalling”, and nixed them too (and rightly so, as proven by a tepid vocal version, <b>The Ballard of the Virgin Soldiers</b> recorded by folk singer Leon Bibb in 1970). </div>
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Davies’s music (credited to “Raymond Douglas Davies” ensuring it would be lost to only the most die-hard of Kinks fans), manages to be both plaintive and gloriously celebratory. It plays over the opening credit sequence, a relentless monochrome image/photo-montage of young soldiers, from the Napoleonic War through to World Wars One and Two, before we’re dropped into an initially baffling series of shots of uniformed boys in vivid color - the titular “Virgins” - waiting for the national anthem to be over so they get on with a night of drunken debauchery in The Liberty Club. Then we transition into the first pages of the book, with Brigg on early morning tea duty walking through Selerang/Panglin at first light, palm trees looming in the grey-blue sky as Hywel Bennett’s deathly hush of a voice-over sets the scene.</div>
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The film starts strong. It’s beautifully shot (by Ken Higgins a TV cameraman whose other notable credit was <b>Georgy Girl</b>), and has the good habit of dropping us into scenes that have already begun. Coming from theatre, John Dexter’s adept at choreographing sizeable groups of actors in the foreground of medium shots (often with some bit of business happening in the background), before cutting to close-ups of one of his young actors, yelling or looking utterly bewildered. It’s crisp and brisk and entertaining, until the episodic trudge of the narrative begins to weigh the film down around the halfway mark, as does the broad, theatrical delivery of the dialogue by most of the young soldier cast, who aside from Bennett (who we’ll get to in a bit) are nothing to write home about (save for Christopher Timothy and an improbable Wayne Sleep, the rest of the lads are destined for lifetimes in soaps and daytime TV).</div>
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Cinematic fireworks are saved for the train ambush at the end, which begins with a beautiful tracking shot from the outside, looking into carriage windows at night (prefiguring Wes Anderson’s <b>The Darjeeling Limited</b>), and then when the battle begins, deploying more tracking shots to capture the explosions and violent chaos. This entire set-piece was shot in the UK, with mocked-up train interiors in the studio and the exteriors, complete with a crashed Fifteen Guinea Special steam train (one of the last in existence), shot with rural Essex (on some miraculously sunny days for October) standing in for the Malayan jungle. Dexter would never make another film on this scale, he followed <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> with two peculiar independents, <b>Pigeons</b> (1970) and <b>I Want What I Want</b> (1972), and then returned to theatre and opera.</div>
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The aforementioned tone of the book, the way Thomas slides wry details of camp life alongside devastating revelations, proves unadaptable, although Dexter and co give it the good British try. Thomas could write a line like “Fred Organ, heavyweight kicker of anti-personnel mines, wasn’t listening.” but when you show a fat, loveable slob having his body blown-up during a football match, you have to do just that. Thomas's casual shocks (little literary landmines) become big drama on screen. Some things are toned down, as already mentioned, Lucy survives, and the scene where Wellbeloved confronts a naked “Malay girl” alone in her house during a kampong search is, in the book, clearly an attempted rape, foiled by Brigg and company, whereas in the film it’s sinister but not a precursor to violence (Wellbeloved was looking for “a bit of bare tit”, as Driscoll observes, clarifying that he’s a disgusting creep, but not a rapist). </div>
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The idea of the ‘anti-hero’ was a topical one in the late '60s, as conflict and rebellion around the world led to a sustained questioning of what exactly a hero was in so much culture of the era. The film never allows us to consider Brigg as a hero for a second, even when he appears to be rescuing Philippa and her mother, he’s clumsy and terrified (just as in the book), and his primary motivation is erotic rather than heroic. During the train ambush the film actually takes Brigg’s anti-heroism further. Trapped in a foxhole with the far more experienced (in the book, traumatised) “jungle soldier” Waller (played by future Commander of the Night’s Watch, James Cosmo), he accidentally causes Waller’s death by calling for him at the wrong moment, which leads into his cowardly departure from combat, saving himself from death by running away and then inadvertently avoiding court-martial by finding a train full of soldiers to come to the rescue. </div>
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Hywel Bennett as Brigg. He’s 27 but looks barely 18, and has a striking, open (Bowie-like) androgynous face (a decade before the booze and the fags and the years turned him into Ricki Tarr, John Le Carre’s fucked-up spy-lover in <b>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy </b>- undoubtedly his best performance – and four years before he sexually cavorted again to a Kinks soundtrack in the execrable <b>Percy</b>), he projects a straightforward innocence in <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b>. The film wants Brigg to go to the Heart of Darkness, to have his innocence wiped away and demonstrates this by flinging dirt on his face before important close-ups, as if that’s enough. One wonders how Bennett would have handled Brigg reacting to Lucy’s murder, but we’ll never know. The film doesn’t want to end the way the book does, with Brigg on the truck out of Singapore and a terrible gag about the Chinese laundryman, so it deliberately fumbles the joke and closes a few seconds later, once Brigg’s revisited all the freeze-framed faces of the film’s dead, with himself at the end of it. And then we see those monochrome images from the titles again, the eternal boy-soldiers of history, destined to be victims of other people’s pride and greed and stupidity forever more, and Ray Davies’ funeral march begins a final time, majestic, sad and bitterly ironic.</div>
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Although shooting was finished well before Christmas 1967, the film took an unnaccountably look time to edit and appears to have been kept ‘on the shelf’ until almost two years later, October 1969, when it was released in the UK, and February 1970 for America. Finally showing up in Singapore cinemas in May of that year. It was relatively successful, enough to be referred to repeatedly as a “hit” in all of Thomas’s obituaries, although it didn’t trouble any top ten box office lists. These were during vintage months for cinema, especially in terms of films that pushed the barriers on sexuality and violence. Thinking about <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> alongside Lindsay Anderson's <b>If...</b> or even Sam Peckinpah’s <b>The Wild Bunch</b> (released a few months earlier), makes it seem like a pretty minor achievement.</div>
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Thomas followed <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> with a several novels that mixed military characters, humour and sex, before returning to Brigg again with <b>Onward Virgin Soldiers</b>, which jumps forward in time to discover Brigg (improbably) enlisted in the regular army and serving in peaceful Hong Kong in the 1970s. Four years later Thomas completed the trilogy with <b>Stand Up Virgin Soldiers</b>, which jumps back in time and begins moments after <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> ends, with Brigg learning that he has to return to Panglin for another six months – so (if I may be so bold) the threequel is a prequel to the sequel. Thomas realised that what people actually wanted from a <b>Virgin Soldiers</b> book was more of the same, and he gave it to them (complete with shamelessly resurrected Lucy), and a film version was quickly put into production.</div>
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The casting of Robin Askwith, toothily grinning icon of everything grubby, desperate and sad in low-budget British cinema of the 1970s, as Brigg, tells you all you need to know about the movie of <b>Stand Up Virgin Soldiers</b>. He and director Norman Cohen, then guiding Askwith through the pleasureless <b>Confessions</b> series of sex-comedies, were the Scorsese and De Niro of smutty crud. <b>Stand Up</b> was filmed between <b>Confessions of a Driving Instructor</b> and <b>Confessions from a Holiday Camp</b>, and much of it plays like ‘Confessions from Singapore’, including Miriam Margoyles as a Chinese whore called Elephant Ethel (offensive at every level), topless ‘native girls’ bathing in the river, deadening slapstick, staggeringly crude dialogue, and when the soldiers finally soldier very late in the film it’s a shameless, insincere attempt to simulate the tragic heft of the first film. Nigel Davenport as Driscoll is the only returnee, and he’s a decade older, heavier and wearier – poor bastard. Thomas’s influence (he has sole screenplay credit, he'd not write another film) is felt during the protracted romance between Brigg and a nurse, played with visible hesitation by Pamela Stephenson. The whole thing was shot in Elstree studios (home of the <b>Confessions</b> films), and although Thomas told The Straits Times that Singapore had changed too much by ‘76 to film there (a significant and not inaccurate observation), the production was just far too cheap (and disinterested in authenticity) to have ever seriously considered a location shoot. As a sidenote, the year that <b>Stand Up</b> was released, '77, also saw the stage premiere of Peter Nichols' <b>Privates On Parade</b>, a musical based on Nichols' time in an entertainment unit for the troops in Singapore and Malaya in the late 40s, with the Emergency as a backdrop. It was filmed in 1982, none of it in Singapore.</div>
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While <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> was never masterpiece, it’s a fascinating adaptation of a deceptively powerful book, telling a story about a mostly forgotten war and a specific time in Singaporean and Malaysian history. The tawdriness of the sequel managed to tarnish the memory of the original. The VHS tape of the original film was ubiquitous in Smiths and Woolworths when I was growing up, and I just assumed (from the awful cover and the blurb on the back) that it was another bad sex comedy.</div>
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Meanwhile (back in the '60s), Singapore now had two big-budget Hollywood films under its belt and it looked as if the dream of it becoming a legitimate centre for high-profile American film production in East Asia was becoming reality. In September 1968 the press announced excitedly that six “big budget films” were aiming to film in Singapore over the next two years. MGM had two in pre-production, Fred Zinnemann's version of <b>Man’s Fate</b>, starring David Niven, and an adaptation of James Clavell's <b>Tai Pan</b>, starring Patrick McGoohan. In 1969, the year <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> finally saw the light of day, both got very close to starting, Singaporeans were cast, including hundreds of extras, crew were employed and bills were racked up with local companies. The Zinnemann was a day away from its first day on set. Both were cancelled. The dream was over, as was the film industry in Singapore. The next notable foreign film shot in Singapore was <b>Wit's End </b>just before Christmas (and its director Joel Reed remembers the anger over <b>Man's Fate</b>), and then almost nothing until 1978 when Peter Bogdanovich showed up, and we know how that turned out.</div>
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benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-69468409670583232712013-05-18T19:38:00.000-07:002013-11-22T01:04:52.083-08:00Coming of Age: ‘Hollywood' in Singapore: Pt. 1<h3>
Pretty Polly AKA A Matter of Innocence, Guy Green, 1967/1968</h3>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the years following
independence in 1965, Singapore’s local film industry may have been the verge
of extinction, but the city-state briefly became </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">the</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> place to make movies. Or at least to talk about making them…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Between 1966 and
’69, the local papers frequently reported the arrival of producers from Europe
or America intending to film in Singapore, breathlessly listing reasons why it would
be a wonderful place to shoot. The combo of tropical, visual other-ness with
widely spoken English, great hotels, food and relative freedom from crime,
corruption and political instability (while Indochina is burning), made it a
perfect location for Asia-set stories. In that brief period a dozen Singapore-bound
“big budget” projects were announced as imminent, but by 1970, only two had
been made, <b>Pretty Polly</b> (1967/68) and <b>The Virgin Soldiers </b>(1969). All the rest fell
apart and were swiftly forgotten.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bubble of
interest in Singapore as a shooting location for large-scale English-language ‘Hollywood’
films, had more or less evaporated by 1970. Instead the Lion City became the
occasional setting for B-movie programme fillers, Eurotrash James Bond rip-offs,
Italian pirate flicks, and slushy TV movies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">To this day,
<b>Pretty Polly</b> and <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b> are the only Hollywood studio-backed films
to be shot in Singapore (<b>Saint Jack </b>doesn’t count; although it was certainly a
‘Hollywood’ movie, its producer Roger Corman was (and is) a true independent). Neither
of them are particularly well remembered today, <b>Pretty Polly</b> has never even been
released on VHS or DVD.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There are strange
synchronicities between them. Both ostensibly British pictures part-financed
(and later distributed) by Hollywood studios (Universal for <b>Polly</b> and Columbia
for <b>Soldiers</b>); both featured well-known young actresses and character actors of
the era; both had famous screenwriters but journeymen directors; both adapted
from literary sources based on the author’s experiences of visiting Singapore;
and finally both are ‘rites-of-passage’ stories, portraying youthful
protagonists losing their virginity to Singaporean lovers of questionable
morality. As the colonial era ended, and the old men stayed or went home to die,
the next generation came to Singapore to get (literally) fucked, an experience
that would change them forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’m going to
take a long overdue look at these films, return to their literary sources and
authors, explore the movies themselves, the ways they were adapted and how they
adapted to their ‘real’ locations, and through the newspaper archives learn
something about how the films were received. As usual I’m interested in the
ways Singapore has been captured, fictionalised and transformed by cinema. But
I’m also curious about this particular period, a crucial transitional moment
when the Malay film studios were ceasing production; the ‘new’ Singapore was
looking abroad (i.e. to visitors from Europe and Hollywood) for recognition,
endorsement and excitement; and how the dream of Singapore as a cinematic
gateway to Asia quietly died. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">By the mid
1960s, when Coward’s only Singapore-set short story <b>Pretty Polly Barlow</b> was
published in a collection of the same name, he was well past his prime. In
plays and songs the louche, satirical and provocative polymath had tapped into
an idiosyncratic sense of Englishness with immense popularity from the 1920s into the dark days of World War Two. During the ‘60s however, Coward’s new
plays failed to catch the public imagination, but he remained an iconic
presence on screen and stage, and his pre-war theatre successes were in
constant revival, especially among expatriate theatre troupes in the crumbling
and former colonies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Pretty Polly
Barlow</b> is reputed to be one of his favourite stories. Though published in 1965
it’s likely that it was originally written (or at least sketched out) years
before. It harks back, without nostalgia, to an earlier era of Singapore, the overheated
British colony that Coward first visited in March 1930, during a
round-the-world trip, exactly the kind taken by Aunt Eva and Polly in the
story, except Coward was accompanied on his travels by his deceitful American
lover, Jack Wilson. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Singapore,
and more specifically the Raffles Hotel, where Coward stayed, he encountered a young
company of English actors,‘The Quaints’, doing the rounds of expat enclaves.
They were playing at Raffles' Jubilee Theatre at the time, and famously, when
an actor fell ill, Coward gamely stepped in and took the role of Stanhope in
R.C. Sherriff’s First War drama <b>Journey’s End </b>with five days rehearsal.
“However one may disagree with Noel Coward’s conception of Stanhope”, sniffed (Singapore's main newspaper) The Straits Times in its review, “Noel Coward’s acting is worth going a long
way to see.” The young leading man of the company was John Mills, who’d become
a close friend, and whose daughter Hayley would so many years later play Polly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coward returned
to Singapore at least twice in the 1930s, but there’s no account of any visits
after the war. Reading <b>Pretty Polly Barlow</b>, he seems scarcely aware of the rapid rate
of transformation that the country was undergoing, but there are a few
indications that he’d refreshed his knowledge. Polly’s first sight of the
island, as she approaches it on the cruise ship is “muddled and gray and rather
sinister”, and she discerns skyscrapers through the murk. Much later, in one of
the story’s key scenes, she visits "a strip of beach where there was a
ruined gun emplacement half hidden by oleander trees", and this is all we get
of history, the war and the failure of empire. The crucial role played by
contact lenses in the plot signifies post-1950s, and there is a single topical
reference to indicate the story is actually taking place in the 1960s; a
cattish remark about boring plays at the Royal Court in London (a favourite
Coward bugbear). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Revealingly,
Coward’s description of Bugis Street is frozen in the 1930s, “Every nationality
in the world seemed to be represented in the endless procession of tightly
packed humanity shuffling slowly along.” Then he refers disparagingly to
the “ubiquitous whores, none of whom
were young or even remotely attractive”. Although the definitive history of
Bugis Street has yet to be written (someone please do this!), it’s known
anecdotally that the culture of transvestite and transexual prostitutes (which
Coward would surely have remarked upon) began only in the 1950s. Before the war
it had been a more conventional red-light district lined with Chinese and
Japanese brothels. The ‘new’ post-war Bugis Street, with its glamorous
‘ladies’, is captured in the film version of Pretty Polly, but we’ll get to
that later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coward was fascinated with the
shifting morality of the modern era, particularly in regard to youth, sexuality
and romance. Ugly Ducking/Cinderella figure Polly, an apparently boring
shop-girl in her early 20s rendered fatally unattractive by “aggressive
spectacles” is plucked out of a drab suburban existence by well-to-do and
repellently snobbish Aunt Eva, to be her gopher on a round-the-world cruise. We
meet them as they arrive in Singapore, supposedly to be met Eva’s “black sheep”
brother Robert Hook, a rubber planter and old Asian hand who lives “fifty miles
of jungle road” up country. But Uncle Bob sends his excuses, claiming to have a
terrible fever, and Amazahudin, an elegant Eurasian (half Indian and half
Chinese we're told, with a Muslim-sounding name), a ‘tour guide’ who speaks in that absurdly
over-articulated way of ‘Indian’ characters (written by English men) of the time.
Almost immediately, Polly is filled with desire. Loathsome Aunt Eva checks into
Raffles, consuming "three large gin slings" and a lot of prawn curry,
and checking out from a stroke. Singapore kills her in a matter of hours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is Polly’s
chance to wake up and start living, and she seizes it without hesitation. Amaz
seduces her that very night (her virginity lost on the beach), and he organises
what we’d now call a ‘makeover’ in the form of contact lenses (finally getting
rid of those glasses) and a new bouffant hairdo courtesy of the “screaming”
Ambrose Wah Hai (Singaporeans with improbable Western/Chinese names are a
running – and unfunny - joke). Then Uncle Bob shows up, assuming his niece to be
a quivering wreck, but discovers the newly transformed Polly, a creature he
beholds in equal parts admiration and horror. Bob’s accompanied by Lorelei
Chang, "one of the most highly paid models in Singapore", and also "a
pampered little sexpot". He also reveals to Polly that Amaz is "an
oversexed little rabbit", whose mixed race, in Bob’s eyes (and quite
possibly Coward’s), is a sign of corrupt morality. None of this much impresses
Polly, whose trajectory to becoming an independent woman of the world is
unstoppable. Although Polly’s in charge, it’s hardly a proto-feminist tale. She
knows she can’t settle for foreign, exotic Amaz (although she adores him) rather
she pragmatically sets her sights on Rick Barlow (They already share a last
name!), a too-good-to-be-true handsome American millionaire with whom she
leaves Singapore. Marriage, money, babies and the good life await!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coward presents Singapore as a zone of erotic
possibilities. Amaz (Bob tells Polly) is a gigolo and Lorelei (Amaz tells
everyone) started off her career at the Yum Yum bar “sleeping with every Tom,
Dick and Harry for a drink of beer and a cheese sandwich.” The purser of the
ship that brings Polly to town demonstrates a typical night for a single male
visitor to Singapore: picking up a Eurasian girl in the “New World pleasure
gardens”, after which he visited “several bars, eaten, hazily, a confused
Chinese dinner, and finished up, sexually incompetent but defiantly
cheerful." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But things are
more interesting than that. Uncle Bob is portrayed as something of an ageing stud,
somewhat different from the whoring expats of Paul Theroux’s <b>Saint Jack</b>. He
works out on a rowing machine to keep in shape and lured Lorelei away from her
rich Chinese businessman lover because of mututal lust. In one curious passage,
Bob stops off after the dusty ride into Singapore at the Adelphi Hotel
bathrooms to freshen up, flirtatiously encountering a male toilet attendant who
gives him a massage. Much later when Bob reminds Lorelei that Amaz is an “old
friend”, her reply “Everyone in Singapore knows that” and the angry,
threatening response it elicits is certainly suggestive. The only explicitly
gay character is Ambrose, who shows up at Bugis Street with his German sailor
friend, Gunther, who inevitably speaks no English (“but we manage”). Arguably
Coward isn’t here to judge anyone’s desires, but Polly will leave Singapore for
a great (conventional) life, and the rest will remain in the Lion City, leading
their exciting, but somewhat tawdry “secret, sinful” lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LIn1CCaeHTs" width="420"></iframe></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In July 1966,
only a year after it was published, the story was dramatised as a television
play on Britain’s commercial channel, ITV, to some acclaim. A studio-filmed
production, it was part of the ‘Armchair Theatre’ series of one-off TV dramas.
It was (unusually for the slot) 90 minutes long and starred Lynn Redgrave as
Polly (Redgrave would ‘return’ to Singapore for <b>The Virgin Soldiers</b>) and adapted
by American playwright William Marchant, a personal friend of Coward’s. It’s
possible that its modest triumph on TV encouraged a bigger budget, starrier
version to quickly go into production. At the time the budget for the movie
<b>Pretty Polly</b> was reported as being six and a half million dollars (which in
today’s money would be around 45 million bucks), a very serious budget in 1967.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Keith Waterhouse
and Willis Hall, a power-house writing team of that era, were tasked with the
adaptation. They’d first collaborated on a stage adaptation of Waterhouse’s
novel <b>Billy Liar</b>, then later the movie (and still later, the TV series). By
’66, when they got the job on<b> Pretty Polly</b>, they were also doing an uncredited
rewrite on Hitchcock’s <b>Torn Curtain</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At the end of
February 1967, former child-star sensation, Hayley Mills arrived in Singapore
to begin filming <b>Pretty Polly</b> on location. At age 12, after one British film, Mills had been embraced by Walt Disney’s emerging live action
studio, becoming their ‘starlet’ for six years (in such ‘classics’ as <b>Pollyanna</b>
and <b>The Parent Trap</b>), and became one of the most popular child actors in the world. By the time she arrived in Singapore she was 20 and attempting, with mixed
fortunes, to make the transition to more ‘grown-up’ material. Famously her
‘boyfriend’ was film producer Roy Boulting, thirty years her senior (and whom
she would later marry), and this combination of fame, youth and worldliness
made Mills a source of constant fascination for the The Straits Times, who followed
the production doggedly, mostly to report on Mills’ appearance (see-through
dress, Cheongsam, glasses, smoking). What she felt about this attention is not
recorded, but it’s worth noting the timing of the date the actress left
Singapore - 17<sup> </sup>April, the day before her 21<sup>st</sup> birthday. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of her main
co-stars in <b>Polly</b> was Trevor Howard as Bob Hook. Upon arrival, the lengendary
British actor gruffly lied to The Straits Times, “I haven’t starred in a
British film for 17 years.” Despite languishing in a lot of mediocre Hollywood
fare he’d been Oscar nominated seven years earlier for Jack Cardiff’s film of<b>
Sons And Lovers</b>. A notorious alcoholic, Howard was in his mid-50s by ’67 but
looked older; overweight and slightly frail (especially when required to wear a
sarong), hardly the rugged, sexual adventurer that Coward describes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Shashi Kapoor,
cast alongside Mills as her lover Amaz, had also been a child star, but his
career had only flourished and by the 1960s he was <i>the</i> romantic leading man of Bollywood, more famous than ever
before. Before <b>Pretty Polly</b> he’d taken the bold step of acting in early James
Ivory-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala collaborations, <b>The Householder</b> (1963), and<b>
Shakespeare-Wallah</b> (1965), both uncommercial, low-budget films, the latter of
which also involved a romance between him and a young English woman (Felicity
Kendal). <b>Pretty Polly</b> was another move in that direction, but it took him away
from India, and was on paper at least, a more mainstream prospect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Director Guy
Green had been David Lean’s cinematographer for his early black and white films
(Green had an Oscar for <b>Great Expectations</b>, one of the most beautiful films
ever shot). He’d switched to directing in the mid-1950s, but the results were
mixed, a number of largely forgotten war films had led him to <b>The Angry Silence</b>
(1960), <b>The Mark</b> (1961), and <b>A Patch of Blue</b> (1965), with Sidney Poitier, also
exploring interracial romance, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the
American South at the time. These were largely somber, gritty films (with big stars), <b>Pretty Polly</b>, a light, colourful comedy (albeit touching on
race and sexuality) was a complete departure in terms of pace and style.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first images
in <b>Pretty Polly</b> are proudly ‘on location’: flashes of painted, smiling Buddhas
(from Haw Par Villa), pans and zooms across Chinatown (the neon-lit outline
of the Majestic Cinema), the Supreme Court, sea-side fruit stalls, a skyscraper,
some HDB flats, the Singapore river. We’re far from an ersatz tropicana. In the
midst of this an aged hawker pushes his cart by and grins disconcertingly at
the camera, a statement, if ever there was one, that what we’re seeing is real.
Michel Legrand’s addictively jaunty, repetitive theme plays over all of this,
giving way to the voice of Aunt Eva (“Singapore… that’s another place you’ll
see”), and we’re suddenly in London, and it’s raining. Bespectacled Polly is
going to meet her Aunt who will make her fateful offer. The message is clear,
Singapore is tropical, fascinating and strange, and London is wet and very dull.
And then it’s goodbye to Mum at the bakery stall (warning about the dangers of
foreigners), and we’re back to where we want to be. Singapore. And Polly gets
the full James Bond treatment: Matt Monroe crooning ‘Pretty Polly’ with lyrics
by Don Black (“Soon you will awake/and you’ll want to take/the world”), while a
Maurice Binder title sequence juxtaposes a silhouetted, shadow-puppet ‘Polly’ blue
screened against the approaching Lion City. Polly gazes at the exact sights (a
breast-feeding mother and a sailor bathing himself) that Coward describes in
the first paragraphs of the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Indeed,
much of the film plays out remarkably faithfully, Waterhouse/Halll take long
stretches of dialogue and scenes verbatim, clearly in admiration of Coward’s
witty, acid banter. The opening is accurate, right down to the “ancient
Cadillac” that Amaz brings to pick them up at the Quayside. Although the trip
to Raffles Hotel becomes an opportunity to deviate, not only to squeeze Bob and
Lorelei into the story much earlier (Bob’s attempts to evade Aunt Eva on a
trishaw leads to some crude slapstick mayhem with cars and fruit stalls), but
for Polly to ‘see’ more of Singapore, including rows of HDB washing bamboos, a street
barber and temples. Throughout, the film can’t resist ocassionally lapsing into
a pure tourist-documentarian gaze, catching images, gestures and reactions of
the real locations on the fly, before cutting back to the characters, or even
placing them right into the spectacle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
death of Aunt Eva (played by Brenda de Banzie, a veteran stage actress
best known for playing Laurence Olivier’s wife in <b>The Entertainer</b>) is a
deliberate non-event in the Coward; she falls ill in her room after lunch,
calls Polly, and then Polly calls for a doctor, and Amaz waits with her, initiating
their courtship as Eva fades away. Coward then cuts (quite cinematically) to
Bob’s reaction to the news of Eva’s death on the phone, “Goddamn bloody hell!” Instead,
the film sets Eva’s demise at the hotel swimming pool, where lithe European and
American guys flirtatiously frolic with bikini-clad Chinese girls (shot at the
Goodwood Park Hotel pool; a decade later a very similar scenario would be staged
there by Peter Bogdanovich for <b>Saint Jack</b>). Eva, clad in a
ridiculously prudish bathing suit, finishes her lunch poolside and after belittling
Polly for a final time slowly submerges into the deep end and doesn't surface. Cut
to a Mount Alvernia ambulance speeding past the famous BP de Silva jewelry
shop, and then a further shift to the tranquil hospital, where Amaz consoles
Polly, then finally we cut to Bob hanging up the phone in Johor. Bob and
Lorelei then play out a scene from the story where Bob proposes driving down to
Singapore right away, and Lorelei literally seduces him into postponing the
trip. Unfortunately, it’s depressingly enacted. Trevor Howard unenthusiastically
caresses the bare midriff of Kalen Liu (a Hong Kong model who’d been in Burt
Kennedy’s <b>Welcome to Hard Times</b>) and then lunges into a clumsy mix of a hug and
a kiss.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After
Eva’s death, Amaz and Polly’s mutual courtship sticks closely to the story,
with minor changes. Waterhouse/Hall play up Amaz’s discomfort at financial
transactions (paying bills), to show us that he’s out of his league, he also
seems to be known by everyone they come across, implying he’s quite the player
on the Singapore (The Jack Flowers of his day). Crucially, the handsome American
Rick is no longer (and improbably) called Rick Barlow, rather he’s Rick Preston, visiting hotelier and man-about-town. As incarnated with bug-eyed, grinning intensity
by lightweight song and dance man Dick Patterson, Rick is no longer a Prince
Charming, rather he’s charming sleazebag, not without attraction for Polly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inevitably
Polly’s adventures take her around the island. The crew shot in Singapore for
seven weeks and certainly made the best of it. A short walk and talk between
Raffles Hotel and a Japanese restaurant is an excuse to see the grotesque
Chinese sculptures of Haw Par Villa (the Tiger Balm family-owned ‘attraction’,
which depicts various hells, used in several spy moves of the period). Polly’s
virginity is lost on a rustic looking East Coast beach, complete with Malay
fisherman wandering around, and when she and Amaz return there the next morning
for a sentimental goodbye, there’s a kampong in the background. Along Jalan Sultan, Polly gets contact lenses and hairdo, but not before we witness a lavish
Chinese funeral procession - the first thing that Polly sees with her ‘new’
eyes. The spectacle was certainly staged: we glimpse the whole street scene through
a second-storey shophouse window, and many extras stare straight back at
us. The hapless ships’ purser Critch (drunkenly escaping from a money-grabbing tart)
manages to get mixed up in the ritual, another episode of awful slapstick (the film has several).
Nevertheless, the funeral is captured in a series of curious, documentary-style
close-ups, of musicians, masks, decorations and faces. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">British
Forces school English teacher, David Prosser plays hair stylist Ambrose as a
camp Australian. He must have been a last minute replacement, because the shop
signboard still says ‘Ambrose Wah Lai’. <b>Pretty Polly</b> would be Prosser’s only
film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
the second half we take the trip to Bugis Street (both a “jolly”
and an “evil” place, according to Amaz), a perennial source of fascination for
tourists and film-makers arriving in Singapore during this era. Polly and Amaz
wander through a somewhat staged bustle, but cut away to ‘real’ glimpses of
transvestites (Two decrepit colonels comment on the “chappies”, just so we’re
clear), good time ang mohs, and hawkers frying noodles. Drunk, and surrounded
by attentive males, Polly declares, “I’ve never been so happy in all my life.”
Then, the merry-makers, led by Rick, Ambrose, his boyfriend Gunther and the
sailors decide to go to a party (“there’s always a party”) on “127 Racetrack
Road). They wake some sleeping Trishaw guys to get there, iniating a ‘madcap’
trishaw race through the streets similar to the one in <a href="http://sporeana.blogspot.sg/2011/11/smith-and-jones-run-amok.html">Five Ashore in Singapore</a>;
slapstick silliness that's a desperate attempt to produce laughs and
energy. Amaz gets stuck with the slowest driver, allowing him to speak the film’s
only Singlish – “Chop chop lah!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
an effort to generate dramatic heft that's not present in
Coward’s story, Waterhouse/Hall create an antagonism between Amaz and Rick
and bring it to the boil at the party on "Racetrack Road" - the film’s heart of
darkness. If Polly’s in Singapore to look for excitement and sexual abandonment,
this is where she’ll find it, but there’s a price to be paid. Downstairs in this semi-abandoned hotel, which according to my fellow blogger <a href="http://sgfilmhunter.wordpress.com/">Toh Hun Ping</a> is probably not the Mitre Hotel (a notorious hang-out for spies and divers to which it bears a passing similarity), a throng of young revellers (a mix
of foreigners and locals) groove out, and one young lady performs an (off-screen)
striptease. Polly explores the hotel, observed and pursued by Rick, as she finds
couples kissing, men gambling with girls in their underwear, and further up, a
gang of men salaciously chase a girl into a room. At the top of the house she discovers an
entire Chinese family, complete with crying babies, cooking a meal. Rick appears
and she wonders if they should “return to civilisation”, but he has one last
thing to show her, a sad little bedroom, sparsely decorated with a few pin-ups
and a metal (single) bed. Polly quickly surmises that this is where Rick intends
to fuck her and although she states plainly, “I’m not going to make love to
you.” Rick kisses her. Amaz interupts the seduction and throws an embittered Rick
out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">In
departing from the Coward, one can see that </span><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Pretty Polly</b><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> might be viewed as
Amaz’s story after all. It's the tale of (as Rick summarises) “the King of the Fixers…
meets the woman next door” and discovers his moral compass. Amaz is played pretty
brilliantly by Kapoor. He can do the silly sentence constructions effortlessly, and yet shows the profound unease of this charming man. It’s
a complex, somewhat unfathomable character, mainly because he’s seen largely from Polly's point-of-view, and it’s a powerful moment when he reveals that the cheap bedroom they
are standing in, the one where Rick was about to bed her, is in fact his home. That's when he's finally exposed. Amaz
is an empty man, a fake Singaporean, fake tour-guide and a fake lover, and the
ultimate gesture of love is to show that to Polly. It’s the film’s best scene,
when all the jollity, slapstick, risque innuendo and tourism gives way to some
real pain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Unlike
the story, where Polly has snaffled Aunt Eva’s jewellry and is happy to
leave Singapore for her happy-ever-after with Rick in Hong Kong, it’s Amaz in
the film who tells her go back home, and she who doesn’t want to go. Back at
the beach as the sun comes up they get existential – Polly says he’s a “good
person”, and Amaz says that’s only because of her, “I am what I am, and you are
what you have become.” He’s just a part of her journey, not the place she wants
to go. As they walk away, back towards the kampong, the shots of fishing boats
moored in the sand and the sound of a tropical dawn (and a plane coming into
Changi) are pretty staggering, and it’s the one time when the film brings
together fiction and reality into something seamless. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
follows another invented scene of Polly visiting Bob at his “Chichak Buloh” rubber
plantation with some Malay workers. It appears tacked on to give Trevor Howard another substantial scene,
and for him to say the (nonsensical) line “The sun sets on the empire and it gets bloody freezing
cold at night.” There’s some nice Johor scenery as they drive to his house and
the revelation that Bob is just a manager; he represents all that can go wrong
if you stay in Asia past your welcome. He tells her to take Eva’s money
and keep travelling, which gets her back on the boat, thinking about Amaz while
a handsome young (white) man eyes her up on deck and the parrot is waiting for her in the
cabin - ending the film exactly the way Coward’s story closes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After
seven weeks the <b>Pretty Polly</b> cast and crew left Singapore for London, where
they’d spend two weeks shooting interiors (Raffles’ hotel rooms, the ships
cabins, the London prologue). The producer Sydney Streeter (who’d worked with
Powell and Pressburger) was effusive in his thanks to everyone in Singapore. They'd had full co-operation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
few months later, The Straits Times ran ‘How Pretty Polly Benefited The
Republic’, which broke down the statistics: 85 trishaws, 35 boats and 132
hawker stalls had been “hired for the screening (sic)”, and quoted
Cathay-Keris’ English boss Tom Hodge, “many films with Eastern backgrounds can
be expected to be made in the near future”. As their studio’s home-grown
products declined, Cathay were keen to partner up with all the foreign crews,
and Hodge was always quoted in the press on these matters.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmcTn6cn551z60iNBSpL4m8riIhDftOG1N6z6ZISpOisImzbSvezVqHMn1RVDkF6tDIx6nVeJihIBpdnGroVjLW95-AdeCVPmcWNikMDPqJ46KsWVgjRdlWVoyEWp2eDQ3-u0wVWhb1bwP/s1600/Polly+Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmcTn6cn551z60iNBSpL4m8riIhDftOG1N6z6ZISpOisImzbSvezVqHMn1RVDkF6tDIx6nVeJihIBpdnGroVjLW95-AdeCVPmcWNikMDPqJ46KsWVgjRdlWVoyEWp2eDQ3-u0wVWhb1bwP/s320/Polly+Poster.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Pretty
Polly</b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> was finished quickly, premiering in London in October 1967. In January
’68 it was retitled (rather dully) </span><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A Matter of Innocence</b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> and released in the US
to little fanfare. Renata Adler in the New York Times gave it a pasting,
pointing out that it was similar but not as good as </span><b style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Shakespeare-Wallah</b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">. She had
a real problem with Amaz’s dialogue, hearing it as “imperialistic” but
acknowledging that it “is always interesting to find any film that tries to
depict in any way at all the lives of Westerners… who are trying to live in and
come to grips with the problems of the East.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">By
Christmas ‘67, The Straits Times were hyping it up as “one of the most
entertaining films ever to hit the screen here” and promising its release in
the New Year. But that didn’t happen. Mysteriously, after all the excitement
and hubbub over the shoot, the film was never released in Singapore, it wasn’t
even submitted to the censors. There was no follow-up, certainly no <b>Saint
Jack</b>-like denunciation of its negative depiction of Singapore, it just simply
disappeared. I'll speculate that as it was something of a flop internationally, no one wanted much more to do with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Watching <b>Pretty Polly</b> today, one can see why it's been forgotten: it’s tonally uneven (not in a good way), crudely lurching between
sentimentality and cynicism, broad, painful slapstick and sensitive drama. It has the
faintly embarassing air of people from an older generation telling a story that
they’re convinced is shocking, and trying and failing to plug into the late
1960s <i>zeitgeist</i>. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There is something to
be said for how it develops Coward’s premise, finding the connection between a
young woman ‘becoming’ the person she’s capable of being and a confused young
man who trades on the false glamour of tourism, but craves something real. It’s
not a good film, but it works effectively as metaphor: Amaz is Singapore.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i>For an amazing visual journey into the locations and the colonial mindset of <b>Pretty Polly</b>, please visit Toh Hun Ping's <a href="http://sgfilmhunter.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/pretty-pollys-ambulatory-gaze1/">series of posts on the film</a>, which trace exactly where the film was shot and how those places have evolved or been demolished over the years. I can't recommend this highly enough.</i></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-88082521061866987912013-04-24T02:39:00.000-07:002013-04-24T02:39:33.286-07:00Wit's End: Updated<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Jht0QXOjcm4" width="560"></iframe><br />
<i>From L-R: Marvin Farkas, Harvey from Make-Do, Joel Reed on Skype and Martin Merz at the Arts House for the Wit's End Book Launch, The Arts House, Singapore, January 2013.</i><br />
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Towards the end of 2012, which is when I wrote about <b>Wit's End</b> for the blog, I began to hear rumours that Marvin Farkas, the producer/ cameraman behind the film, who'd ignored my earlier attempts to interview him was publishing his own book on the experience of making <b>Wit's End</b> in Singapore. Frankly, I didn't believe it. The idea that a first-hand account of the making of a film that nobody had every heard of would ever make it into print seemed very unlikely. But I was, not for the first time, completely wrong. Some folk I know at The Arts House, an 'arts' venue in Singapore based in the old and surprisingly dainty parliament building, confirmed that they were hosting a week or two of screenings of <b>Wit's End</b> that was pinned to a book launch. Then, I got an email from Harvey from <a href="http://makedopublishing.com/">Make-Do</a>, a Hong Kong based publisher who had put out Marvin's original memoir, <a href="http://makedopublishing.com/marvin-farkas/">An Eastern Saga</a> (which has nary a mention of the <b>Wit's End</b> adventure). Indeed, Marvin <i>had</i> written about <b>Wit's End</b>, and it was going out as a book, and Harvey wanted to republish some version of my blog as an afterword. Chancing my hand, I asked to read the manuscript so I could better understand what the book might require, and without any hesitation Harvey sent it over to me. </div>
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Marvin's account is, as you'd expect, highly subjective, and certainly differs from the stories I heard from Keith Lorenz and Joel Reed. There's a lot of detail about the nightmarish process of finding funding for the film, and the consequence that Marvin found himself essentially trapped into making a low-budget film in a hurry under far less than ideal circumstances. Keith Lorenz, who by all accounts was pretty instrumental in coming up with the idea of the film along with Ian Ward, is largely ignored, and a great deal of space is spent dealing with the highs and lows of Marvin's love life during the production, including a torrid affair with the (English) teenage daughter of the then managing editor of <b>The Straits Times</b>. Much of tone of the book is along the lines of "Hey it was the 60s", and Marvin was certainly under no illusions that <b>Wit's End</b> made a lick of sense or would even be a half-decent film, but as he notes the final version was worse than anticipated, it was "slow and drab". </div>
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I reworked my blog into a short piece called 'No Regrets for Singapore: The Extraordinary Story of <b>Wit's End</b>', which I'll post at some point, although much of the material can be read in my earlier <b>Wit's End</b> post. Then, I was invited to speak at the launch of the book at the Arts House, which was a fun, chaotic event, pleasantly derailed by the presence of Joel Reed on a screen above us, who was happy to talk at length about both Wit's End and Joel Reed. Having been indelibly marked as a youth by reading a lurid description of <b>Bloodsucking Freaks</b> in the Joe Bob Briggs collection that Faber put out in the late 80s, it was surreal to be virtually sharing a stage with him, in Singapore of all places. The enigmatic Robin Steinberg recorded the whole thing and you can watch it on YouTube (see above). The Arts House, it should be noted, made a big effort to enhance the screenings, not only with our event, but a great display of photos and stills and even a guided tour of the locations. Proving that the heritage machinery of Singapore can embrace even the most dubious and bizarre cultural products. And I also discovered an earlier <a href="http://goodmorningyesterday.blogspot.sg/2009/06/singapore-scenes-from-hollywood-movies.html">article about the locations</a> that had been published in 2009, and realised that some of the scenes shot on Upper East Coast road are a couple of bus stops away from the building where I write these words.</div>
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If you want to buy Marvin's book, with my afterword and a foreword from Joel, click <a href="http://makedopublishing.com/witsend/?e=bslater">here</a>.</div>
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<!--EndFragment-->benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-66929355830998860782012-05-28T03:41:00.000-07:002014-12-02T17:57:20.948-08:00Inside and outside 'Wit's End'<b><i>"Empty moments have a strange secret beauty. Sometimes images themselves develop their own life, their own secret stardom"<br /> Werner Herzog</i></b><br />
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<b><i><br /></i></b>benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-11740412236045379122012-05-28T01:53:00.000-07:002012-05-28T19:42:13.694-07:00The 'Wit's End' Story<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Hy1GmAJZ4oE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>
One of the first images in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070087/">Wit's End</a> AKA <b>The GI Executioner</b> is of an elderly Chinese man lying on his side preparing then smoking an opium pipe. Unfortunately this gentleman isn't a character we're going to learn anything about, he appears once more, at the end of the titles (about 70 seconds later) continuing his pursuit of opiated bliss (presumably for real) over the celebratory statement 'Film shot entirely on location in Singapore'. Aside from some interiors in the now long-gone Cathay Keris studio, this claim is true. Filmed in Singapore at the very end of 1969, <b>Wit's End</b> was the first American film to be entirely made in the Lion City until <b>Saint Jack</b> almost a decade later. The reason you almost certainly haven't heard of it is because it fell off the radar until the early 1980s. Exploitation film company Troma, who gleefully acquired cheap movies with some degree of violence, sex and grotesquerie, repackaged <b>Wit's End</b> as <b>The GI Executioner</b> (a title with no relevance to anything in the picture) and it apparently sold well on VHS (and is still available on DVD).
<p>
Back in 1969, this is the torrid tale of Dave Dearborn, a washed-up American journalist ex-Marine and would-be novelist-playwright running a groovy nightclub on a boat called The Junk; moored a brief bumboat ride away from Clifford Pier. After the aforementioned opening credits sequence (see above), we first get to meet Dave as he's being joylessly fellated by a local working girl (a real prostitute, according to the film's director). Dave, played by stage actor Tom Keena, is caustically depressed and seems to be at the titular 'wit's end' ("look what I ended up with, a lot of bad memories and this lousy bar"). Pretty quickly he becomes a pawn in a scenario involving the CIA, a local gangster, Chinese and Russian spies. He also has a complicated love life, moving from his local “maiden” to an adoring young American innocent abroad (Janet Wood), a buxom American stripper improbably working a bar in Bugis (Angelique Pettyjohn) and the Big Love of his Life, Mai Lee (Vicky Racimo), mistress of a local gangster, much to Dave's chagrin.
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Tonally the film slips all over the place, from bleak, downbeat thriller to softcore farce and exotic espionage caper. Two or three set-pieces oscillate between high camp absurdity and sublimely lurid unpleasantness. Notably the protracted death of Angelique's character on the boat, completely naked and wielding a handgun (prompting the tagline "The Wildest Nude Shootout in Film History"); and the aftermath of a pretty neatly staged mini-massacre in an abandoned building which prompts Dave and Mai Lee to fuck (rather unhygienically) amongst the corpses.
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The acting is uneven to say the least, veering from strained competence (Keena) and enjoyably game (Wood and Angelique), to dead wood (most of the locals, the expats and Racimo) and flagrantly atrocious (the guy who plays a British spy disguised as a hippy with a scouse accent).
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Also it's impossible to ignore the relentless interrogation of Dave's sexuality. Mostly this is in relation to his muscle-bound 'Kiwi' friend Peter, whose murder sets much of the plot in motion. Despite the fact he has many female lovers, seemingly everyone Dave meets - the girls, the police, the secret agents, the antagonist and even Dave himself, loudly wonder if he's gay, culminating in a scene of leather-bound humiliation at the hands of a flaming super-criminal and his queer minion. It's a very literal enactment of sexual insecurity.
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Unsurprisingly this jarring, schizoid work has a complicated production history which I've pieced together through research and correspondence with the director <a href="http://www.joelmreed.net/">Joel M. Reed</a> in New York (best known today for the notorious <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Sucking_Freaks">Bloodsucking Freaks</a>), and Keith Lorenz in Hawaii. Lorenz is co-credited for devising the story along with fellow Singapore-based journo Ian Ward.
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The idea to make a feature film in Singapore comes from Marvin Farkas, a Yank who'd got a taste of the Orient as a sailor in WW2, and returned in the 1950s primarily as a commercial photographer and news cameraman, based out of Hong Kong. As recalled in his memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Eastern-Saga-Film-Memoir/dp/988184195X">An Eastern Saga</a>, Farkas had visited Singapore earlier in the 60s and been smitten. "Marvin said that Singapore was an old fashioned place with seedy cafes and opium dens," Reed says, "(he) had a studio in Hong Kong and raised the money from some old Asian hands." For the story and the script he turned to two young foreign correspondents, Ward and Lorenz, both living in Singapore and, in their spare time, running The Junk, a hip night-club-bar-restaurant on a restored junk-boat. "I had wanted to make a 1969 version of <b>Casablanca</b>," says Lorenz, who wrote a treatment which revisioned Bogart's Rick character as "a disillusioned American foreign correspondent escaping from his war reporting job in Saigon, and drinking and womanizing from a hammock on his junk in the Singapore harbor."
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Although the archetype of the White Man Adrift in Asia was hardly original, there are faint pre-echoes here of Paul Theroux’s Singapore novel <b>Saint Jack</b> - a failed American writer adrift in Singapore who gets mixed up with gangsters and spies, and The Junk, while certainly not a brothel, with its “Malay carvings and bevy of attractive girls” (according to The Asia Magazine in ’68) might be some sort of floating precursor to Dunroamin’ – the idyllic club Jack Flowers sets up in Theroux’s book.
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Lorenz first came to Singapore in ‘62 as a young advertising man then shifted to Bangkok ("much more wild"), before returning in ‘67 as a foreign correspondent for American media outlets. As Lorenz describes it, the late '60s were a happening period in Southeast Asia: "the Vietnam war was playing out, Sukarno was haywire in Indonesia, massacres in Java, remnants of communist insurgency in Malaysia, the residue of British influence (in Singapore), the rise of Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP, the flavor of a languid, low-rise, Asian port city with still a colonial melange... It was very special." And it was definitely worth trying to capture some of those flavours in a movie.
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Farkas would shoot the thing, but he brought out a young painter from New York (famous for illustrating classic Jazz album covers) called <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/03/nyregion/david-young-dies-at-71-painter-and-friend-to-jazz-artists.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">David Young </a>to direct. According to Lorenz, Young "came out to Singapore early for script writing, location scouting, hiring, and pre-production with my help," but he was troubled and drinking too much. He'd "just begun to get the ambience of Singapore when he sort of fell apart." Joel M. Reed enters the scenario at this point. The fledgling director had bumped into Farkas previously in New York and was recruited to track down Young, who'd returned to the city with Farkas's cash and a promise to write a producible script. Farkas joined them and Reed witnessed an almighty row between the two of them, Young demanding more money. "At one point in the conversation Marvin said, 'That does it. Joel's directing the picture.' I stupidly accepted and ruined a good part of my career." Although he’d started film-making for legendary skinflick producer Joe Sarno ("by accident" he says), Reed hoped he was heading to Broadway and/or Hollywood.
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He read the first draft and saw that Young had "copied a script of <b>Casablanca</b>, changed the names, and moved the location to Singapore." Lorenz, who still has a copy of this draft, says it was faithful to his and Ward's original story. Reed began a rewrite, keeping the Dave Dearborn character and some of his dialogue and love life, while adding the spy plot and the more explicit sexual and violent elements to “perk up a rather dull script”. Although Lorenz and Ward’s place, The Junk would remain a key location, Lorenz wasn't happy about the changes. "He (Reed) persuaded the cash people to let him make it raunchy and campy, whatever you want to call it. He decided to be both writer as well as director, and got his way… I lost all interest quite soon... (and) it could have been great." Reed feels he did the best he could with the material, but "when I saw Singapore for the first time, I knew the whole script was wrong. The expats that backed the movie still envisioned it as a 1940s movie. Even <b>Saint Jack</b> didn't get it right."
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Incredibly, given the censorship problems that Peter Bogdanovich envisaged when he was shooting <b>Saint Jack</b> a decade later, <b>Wit's End</b> was seemingly accepted by the authorities."It was an official production," Reed recalls,"The Government read the script and I met Lee Kwan Yew… (at) some sort of official reception… They had no trouble with the script since it was apolitical." Reed claims that officials demanded to be present only when nude scenes were shot and "I think our casting director got one laid in a dressing room."
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The production coincided with an event that looms large in the secret history of Singapore's film industry - in 1969, Oscar-winning director Fred Zinnemann intended to shoot his adaptation of Andre Malraux's <b>Man's Fate</b> in Singapore. When <b>Wit's End</b> arrived to crew up, Reed says, "Everybody stuck their noses up at us…they all were going to be in major picture. We were peanuts." Then MGM abruptly pulled the plug on <b>Man’s Fate</b> (which was never made), "and the same people were soon chasing me down the street and banging on my hotel door."
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Aside from the aforementioned Clifford Pier and The Junk, they shot in Chinatown, Bugis Street, rural Pasir Ris and Mount Faber, Reid Bridge and Boat Quay, Raffles Hotel (a scene in the temporary lobby), the Ocean Park Hotel (unconvincingly standing in for Raffles upstairs), a swanky mansion on Garlick Avenue as the gangster’s lair, and an abandoned, graffiti-strewn building in the Tiger Balm Estate. There are two lengthy scenes displaying young Singaporeans, expats and ‘girls’ wildly grooving to music - snapshots of how late-sixties hedonism looked in Singapore - one supposedly in a Bugis Street bar called Adonis, and another apparently shot on The Junk (which leads to a dreadful bit of continuity when Dave leaves the party at The Junk and then gets on a boat to… The Junk). There are also several scenes in depopulated back alleys, and many of the locations have a ‘dead’ atmosphere, as if the city has been emptied of all but a few self-conscious extras, although occasionally a child or an old man can be seen half-hiding within a frame.
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Long passages of the film are sluggish, and after looking at the sequences closely, you notice how scenes have been elongated. Much of the time characters enter and exit rooms, kickstarting scenes that could begin much later and resolving scenes that have long outstayed their welcome. Often, even the briefest of scenes begins and ends on an ‘empty’ frame. This may be less a stylistic device and more a way of ‘padding’ out meagre footage. But unknowingly this becomes a gift to those of us looking from a different perspective, the fascinated watchers from the future, who see every second of <b>Wit's End </b>as a rare and precious document of what Singapore was during Christmas 1969, a world that’s almost entirely disappeared, but shimmers back to life for a moment, thanks to this largely thankless film.
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Back then <b>The Straits Times</b> blessed (or cursed) the production with some breathlessly enthusiastic coverage, including an interview with Tom Keena who declared straight-faced that he was so immersed in the role that “I am Dearborn now.” Six months later, a writer for (long defunct) local entertainment magazine <b>Fanfare</b> travelled to Hong Kong to ask one of the producers, Michel Renard, what was going on. Renard’s confident that it will “go well in the States” (“… and I hear our color’s supposed to be good too.”) and that Singapore won’t get to see itself “mirrored on the celluloid screen” (the reporters phrase) until early 1971.
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Actually, Singapore never got to see <b>Wit’s End</b>, and still hasn’t to this day. The film had a Stateside release in 1973 under the title <b>Dragon Lady</b> (“packs the punch of the Orient!”) but more or less disappeared. Then Farkas’s brother sold it to Troma in the 80s and it was revived and reissued as <b>The GI Executioner</b> with a tagline designed to suggest <b>Death Wish</b> in the Far East, “They tried to kill him ... drug him, torture and pervert him, but they could not stop the one-man execution squad...”
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For his part, Reed, who promises more stories about the film in his autobiography, "had a wonderful time and saw a little of the old Singapore and made many friends." The place made enough of an impression for him to write "a light hearted mystery
play taking place in an old Mansion on East Coast Road which manages to combine both the old and new."
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Lorenz didn't see it until the '90s, when Reed sent him a tape, and although he disliked the film, "It was nostalgic seeing the Junk and the old Singapore that I knew. Some of Dearborn's lines conveyed what I had intended: a disgruntled, disillusioned war correspondent who had enough of the horror of war, and just wanted to hang loose on a boat."
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<i>Huge thanks to Joel M. Reed and Keith Lorenz.</i>benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-72970424251668076582011-11-12T15:31:00.000-08:002011-11-24T16:53:22.929-08:00Smith and Jones Run Amok<span style="font-weight:bold;">Cinq Gars Pour Singapour, France, directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel (1967)<br /></span><br /><iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lsb2oWV5y4Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">This piece was commissioned for the National Museum of Singapore's Film Quarterly, a new publication that will complement the programming of the Cinematheque. Cinq gars, sadly is not showing at the Museum any time soon, but you can view a watchable dub of it on YouTube, see above.</span><br /><br />Once upon a time, if you were making a film and wanted to conjure up Singapore, you only needed the residents of your local Chinatown, a job-lot of wooden planks, bits and pieces from the fancy-dress shop and a parrot. But post-war, or specifically post-Independence Singapore, was a different entity. It demanded to be visited rather than imagined; it had textures and atmospheres that no studio carpenter could recreate. With affordable air tickets film-makers could be tourists, breaking into far-flung tropical countries with suitcases full of cash, phone numbers of fixers, lightweight cameras and the gift of the gab. No wonder so many foreign-made films from the 1960s shot in Singapore concern espionage and secret missions. Travelling light but with an agenda was glamorous – they felt like spies, <span style="font-style:italic;">they were spies</span>, capturing images like secrets. <span style="font-style:italic;">Cinq gars pour Singapour</span> (neatly translated, with rhyme intact, to <span style="font-style:italic;">Five Ashore In Singapore</span>) is already a double-agent, a French film pretending to be American. The motley crew of actors belong to various and mixed nationalities, and I haven’t even mentioned the Swedish-French blonde bombshell and the Italian heavy who plays a Chinese bad guy. Somehow the hybridity of these sorts of bizarre Euro co-productions filters all the way through the credits. <br /><br />Filmed (I assume) in 1966 and directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel, previously assistant to <span style="font-style:italic;">nouvelle vague</span> luminaries Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, the film’s story is adapted from a Jean Bruce paperback published in 1959. Bruce was the creator of the ‘French James Bond’, OSS 117, to whom there’s a none-too-subtle nod during the opening credits, when the film’s protagonist, the blandly titled and performed Art Smith (played by Sean Flynn, more later) is picked up at Payar Lebar Airport by a car parked in lot number 117. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Cinq gars</span> enjoys the spectacle of arriving in Singapore so much that Art Smith enters twice. Once by plane, complete with bureaucratic close-ups of entry visas, when he’s told by a knowing local girl that “we have Smiths and Browns arriving everyday”, and later by boat after a rendezvous with the other four titular Marines, dropping anchor at Collyer Quay. This latter sequence, in terms of its historical documentation of Singapore, is the film’s highlight. The now-demolished Quay itself teems with people, and our five guys strut their stuff through the beautiful entrance hall while the film’s title song promises “Somewhere in Singapore… we’ll find pretty girls.” The camerawork is loose, handheld and buzzed on the energy of a new place and experience. They hit the street, jostled by trishaw hustlers, and jaywalk over to the General Post Office (now The Fullerton Hotel, a few feet from where <span style="font-style:italic;">Saint Jack</span> told the CIA to “fuck it” a decade later), diving into a labyrinth of street stalls, shops, heat and food. The cameraman captures all this lurking behind pillars, shooting across roads, leaning out of the windows of higher buildings. It’s guerrilla <span style="font-style:italic;">and</span> gorilla film-making, as the actors-playing-Marines leer at local girls, marvel dumbly at tat in the shops and gape incredulously at a noodle-consuming pedestrian. <br /><br />The film was shot entirely on location, and there’s a tension between the roving eye of Jean Charvein, the cinematographer, regarding Singapore as a landscape to be absorbed and recorded in all its myriad wonders, and the two-fisted narrative, which casts various sites around the island as an arbitrary series of obstacles and props to be smashed over and destroyed.<br /><br />The plot is simple and goofy. Seventeen Marines on shore leave in Singapore have gone missing in a month. Art Smith’s sent to solve the mystery, with four tough guy Marines led by Kevin (Marc Michel slumming it after being Jacques Demy’s leading man and the enigmatic prisoner in Jacques Becker’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Le Trou</span>), who tells Smith that the missing men “dissolve in the midst of revelry” after getting drunk and meeting a girl “or something that approximately resembles one”. Singapore, a zone of escape and erotic possibility, has become a new, covert battlefield.<br /><br />So, our five heroes, including English boxer Terry Downes (with incomprehensible cockney drawl) and Denis Berry, the French-born son of blacklisted American director John Berry, hit town, pretending to be regular Marines. They’re as charmless and wooden as porn actors. Dialogue is painfully stilted and highly functional (lots of numbers, orders and repetition). In the lead, Sean Flynn, seems coolly disinterested in being charismatic, acting to cash in on his father’s name (his first lead role was as <span style="font-style:italic;">Son of Captain Blood</span>). <span style="font-style:italic;">Cinq gars </span>was his last film and it’s as if he quit before the shoot started. Just four years later he would disappear completely, into the badlands of Cambodia as a photo-journalist, never to be seen again. <br /><br />Before long the lads are creating havoc around Chinatown. They start a trishaw race, drunkenly goading the poor drivers. During this raucous ‘comedy’ there’s a blinking cutaway to a handle-bar, and for a split-second we see a metal-framed family photograph belonging to a driver. A sliver of documented humanity caught on the fly. They hide from police in a cinema that has a ‘Majulah Singapura’ banner hanging above the box office, a reminder of the country’s freshly independent status (that and the predominance of Malay spoken by both police and villains). On screen there’s a newsreel about the Vietnam war; Toublan-Michel’s attempt, albeit briefly, to problematise the military fun and games. Indeed, the next section of the film, where the Marines hit a sleazy dive (‘The Paradise Limited’) and bully a luckless <span style="font-style:italic;">mama-san</span>, rejecting the “ready for Boogie street” hostesses as too ugly, and start a demented fight with the girls (fists versus stilettos), carries an authentic whiff of the nihilism, racism, violence and misogyny of an American soldier letting off steam in Asia. As Monika, the film’s archetypal Caucasian woman in a cheongsam, comments in a show-stopping monologue, these men aren’t interested in the beauty of women, only “the smell of death”. <br /><br />The team are desperately trying to get kidnapped, and finally they get their wish, intoxicated by loudly bubbling champagne and “pretty girls” (one of whom, we’re told, had danced with William Holden) in a ‘Private Club’ (a hotel restaurant) belonging to a fez-wearing smoothie improbably named Ten-Sin (all the ‘Chinese’ characters have these kinds of names). Events escalate and gradually, through a series of interminable fist fights, gun fights, explosions, torture sequences and chases, we travel vicariously around Singapore in ’66, wishing we were in the company of less brutal, more appreciative tourists.<br /><br />They fight on a beach on the East Coast at dawn; clean up in a suite at the now-demolished Cathay Hotel (where the windows are cleaned by Samsui women), track down information at Pulau Brani, the <span style="font-style:italic;">kampong</span> on water, which features some stunning footage before a house is blown up; they gatecrash the <span style="font-style:italic;">mama-san</span>’s funeral in Chinatown, harassing an elderly Chinese woman who actually gets some lines; they run around the lushly green and jungly Keppel Golf Course, and finally get to a vast mansion in Telok Blangah, the villain’s lair.<br /><br />Ta-Chouen (played by Italian b-movie veteran, Andrea Aurelia) is a tubby Fu-Manchu first seen draped on a circular bed, smoking opium and surrounded by half-naked girls, leading our amoral heroes to declare him “a gentleman of good taste”. One of the harem is the aforementioned Monika (the extraordinarily intense Marika Green, from Robert Bresson’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Pickpocket</span> and aunt of Eva Green), who shows up teasingly throughout the film. When Art Smith confronts her on the bed, silently angry at her sexual betrayal (sleeping with the enemy and a Chinese), it’s the film’s only dramatic moment, cutting back and forth between their impassive, beautiful faces. The soldiers torture Ta-Chouen in his own chamber (with electrodes to his head and punches to the face), until they find out about a new rendezvous on the beach (rustic Sentosa this time). In a pleasantly realistic detail, Ta-Chouen smuggles comatose Marines out of Singapore in the back of a ‘Cold Storage’ truck belonging to Kun & Company (2 Kuching Road, Singapore 4). Finally Art Smith and a buddy discover the missing Marines’ fate, to be kept on a tanker out to sea in the ship’s deep freezer. The soldiers are literally kept on ice, part of some diabolical experiment of Ta-Chouen’s. After all the action and forward momentum of the film, it’s appropriate that the heroes should spend the last ten minutes stuck in a dark room slowly freezing to death. The meat-headed become meat. Or they would have done if they weren’t rescued. By the preposterous closing, Art Smith and Monika are in loving embrace and all the soldiers are apparently defrosted.<br /><br />The problem with <span style="font-style:italic;">Cinq gars</span> is not it’s inherently colonial view of Singapore as an exotic playground for male adventure, which could so easily have been simulated in a studio backlot, but rather that at times the Singapore in the film is proved to be so tantalisingly real. It breathes, and the camera is present to capture the moments, the details and the expressions, but then we return to these dead-faced young men and their search for more dead-faced young men. We are shown but kept distant from the life of the city in 1966, a vanished place and a people we want to properly encounter, not just the Smiths and Jones who still arrive every day.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Many thanks to Vinita Ramani for getting me to write this.</span>benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-30630473593149688382011-03-02T22:19:00.000-08:002011-03-02T22:57:44.198-08:00A Good Man In Singapore<span style="font-weight:bold;">World For Ransom, US, directed by Robert Aldrich (1954)<br /></span><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom7.jpg"><br /><br />Dan Duryea. If you love <span style="font-style:italic;">film noir</span>, this is a name to cherish. A lithe, sneering presence in some great films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, skin pasty from too many studio interiors, large jaw clenched tight as if swallowing back pain or pride, and his voice, a perpetually nasal, lazy whine. He could be a wise-cracking smartass or a sinister tormentor, both sometimes. Memorably he hounded Edward G Robinson in a diptych of Fritz Langs, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Woman In The Window</span> and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Scarlet Street</span>, playing the dubious lover/controller of femme fatale Joan Bennett. He could also turn on the charm, most memorably as the dreamily psychotic villain Waco, in Anthony Mann’s W<span style="font-weight:bold;">inchester ’73</span>.<br /><br />Duryea was rarely leading man material in film, but he had a lesser known career on super-cheapo TV. And that’s what brought him to ‘Singapore’ if you will. For several years in the mid-to-early ‘50s, he was <span style="font-weight:bold;">China Smith</span>, a cynical adventurer, for some reason tossed ashore in Singapore, solving mysteries and outwitting villains in this exotic locale. The film we’re looking at, <span style="font-weight:bold;">World For Ransom</span>, is alleged to have been shot off the back of the second series (<span style="font-weight:bold;">The New Adventures of China Smith</span>, made in California), recycling sets and cast to a create some bottom-of-the-bill fodder. Aside from the setting, a post-war, heavily militarised Singapore/Malaya, what makes <span style="font-weight:bold;">World For Ransom</span> of particular interest is that the director is Robert Aldrich. This was the great macho-man’s last stop before heading towards far more exciting territories, Westerns with A-list star Burt Lancaster (<span style="font-weight:bold;">Apache</span>, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Vera Cruz</span>), and arguably the last great <span style="font-style:italic;">film noir</span> (the one that imploded the genre), <span style="font-weight:bold;">Kiss Me Deadly</span>. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Ransom</span>, a quasi-<span style="font-style:italic;">noir</span>-slash-adventure, with its hugely compromised ‘hero’, and the Cold War-era H-bomb MacGuffin is, at a stretch, a rough dress rehearsal.<br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom1.jpg"><br /><br />It opens with one of those ersatz ‘Oriental’ streets cluttered with coolies (later referred to as Foo Chow Road “near the docks”). We meet Duryea’s character, deep in the sprawl, profusely sweating (all the men are drenched in the film, as if the entire overdressed male population of Singapore is steeped in nervous tension), a Yank in a suit, tie and hat, who stumbles along, while a naval foghorn sounds in the distance. Duryea is Mike Callahan, a distant Irish-American relative of ‘China Smith’ we suppose, who quickly finds himself in a hellishly expressionistic stairwell, caught between two sinister Chinese hoods. This is the first of the film’s many stylistic flourishes, and although clearly working with hackneyed, uninspired and excessively talky material, Aldrich is determined (when he can) to make the film a visual feast for those attracted to bizarre angles, smoothly purposeful camera moves, and most of all, looming objects in the foreground. With a promise of “free transportation” Mike agrees to go see Johnny Chan, “the biggest racketeer in Singapore”, who grills him about Julian March, a friend of Mike’s who’s wrapped up in some dodgy business, to which Mike pleads ignorance. “You could be on the level. Half of Singapore thinks you are,” consoles Chan, after slapping his face.<br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom2.jpg"><br /><br />The writers of this highly plotty plot were clearly inspired by (or ripping off) <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Third Man</span>. Julian replaces the amoral Harry Lime figure and Marion Carr plays his wife, Frenessy (odd name), who Mike’s foolishly in love with, much as Holly Martins adored Alida Valli in Carol Reed’s masterpiece. There’s also an initially antagonistic military man, Major Bone, who becomes Mike’s buddy, and Mike gets to dive into some sewers (in Singapore, in the 50s?!). Mike’s known Julian since pre-war Shanghai, when they competed for the love of Frenessy. He was called for duty, and so Julian got the girl. Now they’re all washed up in Singapore which has become for each of them, a private hell, Mike gambles and drinks, Frenessy performs an tame male-drag act at a club called The Golden Poppy, while Julian’s busy exploring Singapore as a zone of erotic possibilities. When we first meet him he’s off to “meet a charming young lady called Willow Blossom, or… a young lady not so charming but I hear considerably more talented.” <br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom4.jpg"><br /><br />This cad’s played by the smooth (but sweaty) Patric Knowles, a Yorkshire lad who ran to Hollywood and became a low-rent Errol Flynn (once Will Scarlett to Flynn’s Robin Hood—his biggest gig). Everyone’s worried about Julian, including Frenessy, who tasked Mike with following him, and although he keeps protesting he’s a “big boy”, Julian’s indeed fallen in with a ludicrous bunch of panto villains (like something out of the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Batman</span> TV series) led by Gene Lockhart as a chess-playing mastermind Pederas, and amateur heavyweight boxer (and very amateurish actor) Lou Nova as his heavy, Guzik. They conspire to kidnap top Nuclear bomb-maker, Professor O’Connor (Arthur Shields, an Irish John Ford regular) who’s coming through Singapore on his way to Australia (nothing changes!). After an efficiently staged set-piece along ‘Airport Road’, where Julian and gang intercept the car sent for O’Connor, Julian pretends to be a Brit officer at ‘Singapore Airport’ and scoops up the Prof. And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for pesky photographer Wong (a very intense Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son) who snaps Julian in mid-operation. The Governor of Singapore (professional blusterer Nigel Bruce, long serving Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes) declares it a “National Emergency”, and orders a blockade of the “causeway to the mainland”, not the only time in the film that Singapore is described as a mere adjunct to Malaya.<br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom5.jpg"><br /><br />Meanwhile, Dan Duryea has got drunk, beaten up, fallen asleep, and is dragging himself around Singapore in a state of semi-conscious, intense self-loathing. Aldrich makes Mike’s powerful negativity the guiding principle of all Duryea's scenes—spaces are dark, obscure, stuffed with forbidding obstacles. The composition screams “Sucker!” when Frenessy galvanises him into action by promising him he “has a chance” with her. Not only is Mike clearly being set-up by Frenessy, but also by the Brits, who shake him down (“You’ve had a good run in Singapore but you’re coming to the end of your rope.”) so that he’ll escape and lead them to Julian. During the back alley chase sequence, Aldrich has Duryea run through a kaleidoscope of stark frames-within-frames, until he impersonates a topless rickshaw puller, a disguise that makes him literally invisible to the British military. This leads to a cute homo-erotic visit to gangster Chan’s bedroom (“What do want?”, “Most of all, a shirt.”). <br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom6.jpg"><br /><br />The Brits regroup with the Governor and pile on a ton of exposition about Mike, who “gave a good account of himself” in the war, is a “beach comber and soldier of fortune… he knows the China Coast like the back of his hand, he’s wanted everywhere.” They’ve lost him, and “there’s not a sign of him, between here and Penang.” Unctuous Pederas turns up, offering to sell O’Connor to the Brits, explaining that he’s doing the deal in Malaya so he can also offer this “new kind of horror” to the nameless, obviously Commie “enemy”. Mike busts out of Singapore by sewer and jalopy, followed by the avuncular Major Bone, and they head up to Ipoh in record time. Mike knows where Julian, the heavies and the scientist are holed up, ‘The Village of Death’, a deserted <span style="font-style:italic;">kampong</span>, which lives up to its nickname. Aldrich delivers a serious action set-piece as Mike and Bone take on the might of several machine-gun weilding, grim-faced Chinese-American extras. Bone’s shot, and Mike grabs some grenades and turns himself into a walking bomb (see first image), the closest we ever get to a ‘World for Ransom’. After this stand-off, Mike rescues the Prof, but has to kill Julian, who’s more cowardly and corrupt than even Mike suspected. <br /><br /><IMG SRC="http://gonetopersia.com/downloads/ransom8.jpg"><br /><br />Back in Singapore, Mike delivers the double-bad news to Frenessy that Julian’s dead and he's the dude what did it. She matches it by telling Mike a/ she doesn’t love him, and b/ she’s a very bad girl indeed, not the saint that Mike imagines —“How do you think I could be so friendly to someone close to the Governor?” Actress Marion Carr emotes her heart out here, successfully auditioning for her role in <span style="font-weight:bold;">Kiss Me Deadly</span>. <br /><br />So, sad old Dan Duryea’s killed his best friend, been betrayed and slapped around by the woman he loves and pretty much everyone else in town. He does what any good man would do in Singapore, takes his hangdog mug back to the bustling throng of Foo Chow Road, and towards the always welcoming neon of The Golden Poppy, much as Jack Flowers will disappear into Clarke Quay a couple of decades later. Tigers all round?benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-16672958653184066522010-10-27T00:40:00.000-07:002014-11-11T02:57:56.476-08:00The Up Escalator Forever: Bowie in Singapore<span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet, UK, directed by Gerry Troyna (1984)</span><br />
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A thin white man wanders around a near-deserted shopping mall. It’s night. His drift is purposeless, but he keeps moving. What secret rendezvous is he heading towards? Is he being followed or is he following? Eerie sounds in the background. Muzak from another planet. That’s the clue. Perhaps the walker isn’t human. A misplaced alien sleepwalking through an decentred landscape. He’s come down to earth to look for the past, but instead he’s found the future. Strip-lit walkways and glittering atria; a musical fountain; a deranged architect’s plan for some deluded utopia. But no one’s here. Structures long since abandoned by their original users, now patrolled only by guards and the occasional foreign interloper. <br />
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The alien goes where the escalator delivers him. He sits. Lost. Scared. <br />
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What is this place?<br />
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David Bowie in Singapore is irresistible. But <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span>, a hybrid documentary-fiction-diary film conceived and concocted by Bowie with director Gerry Troyna in 1983 doesn’t just take place in Singapore. Bowie, coming to the end of his epically long <span style="font-weight: bold;">‘Serious Moonlight’</span> tour decided that after shows in Australia and New Zealand he would head up to South-East Asia (originally Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Hong Kong, but KL fell through). These countries were not yet on the stadium tour circuit, and so it was a rare and particularly difficult thing to pull off. Ever the innovator, Bowie must have sensed an opportunity to discover something new, and he wanted a camera crew along to capture the experience.<br />
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Named after an apocalyptic track off the enormously successful <span style="font-weight: bold;">Let’s Dance</span> album, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span>, is an atmospheric if fragmented account of Bowie’s visits to the three major Asian cities. Even at the time it must have made for a rather quirky ‘rockumentary’, and now, virtually unseen for decades, it’s become a historical artefact, an eccentric record of ten days of working tourism in Asia in late 1983.<br />
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The project began when Bowie contacted Troyna, a young film-maker whose ground-breaking 1980 documentary <span style="font-weight: bold;">Deccan</span>, about travelling through India by train, had impressed the star. Troyna recalls meeting Bowie in the Savoy in London, and later being flown out to Tokyo (where Bowie was touring) to discuss the film. They got on well, and Bowie commissioned him to make the official document of what was openly referred to as “The Bungle in the Jungle.” This wouldn’t be a conventional tour-film, Troyna hired screenwriter, Martin Stellman, to draft a rough script, and began the complicated process of setting up production units with fixers, crew and researchers in each city before Bowie touched down.<br />
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In <span style="font-weight: bold;">Cracked Actor</span>, an infamous BBC documentary about the rock star made in 1974, Bowie had appeared deeply uncomfortable, strung-out and gawkily articulate. Nine years on, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span> shows us the remade and remodelled Bowie. Supremely charismatic and suave, he’s a global traveller equally at ease drifting through the airports, hotel lobbies, streets and finally the cavernous stadiums of Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. He could be a diplomat, a businessman, politician or movie star - the only giveaway is his dyed straw-yellow hair. <br />
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The film divides geographically into three acts, Hong Kong, Singapore and then Bangkok (this reshuffles the real order of travel, Bowie flew into Singapore from New Zealand first, then to Bangkok and finished with two shows in Hong Kong). Each segment roughly follows the same formula, follow Bowie as he experiences each city. Then, let fiction creep into the fact of Bowie’s presence. There's different results each time. <br />
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Bowie arrives in Hong Kong to be hustled through a throng of fans and press, with paltry security – a few devotees touch his hair. “That was quite a reception,” he deadpans in the limo later to Corinne ‘Coco’ Shwab, his long-serving personal assistant (also in <span style="font-weight: bold;">Cracked Actor</span>). Then breaks into a throaty rendition of the classic Chinese song, <span style="font-weight: bold;">May Kway</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Mei Kwei?</span>) – which he associates with Hong Kong (it’s from Shanghai). There’s a press conference where he talks up the Asian (Japanese) influence on his music and style. We shift to a sub-plot, three slightly fey members of a Bowie covers band (a decent stab at <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ziggy</span>) plan to attend their idol's gig, but the drummer can’t afford a ticket, and wanders Kowloon (there's an incredible travelling shot of the washing hung outside a vast tenement) trying to rustle the cash. Meanwhile, Bowie kills time in a hotel suite quipping with a tour promoter about ticket prices (very expensive), watches TV (ancient kung fu flicks, crazy adverts and a colonial Rule Britannia), and dines on a boat with local socialites (with whom he is utterly charming), sitting near the first of a series of ‘mysterious Americans’ who will quietly plague him throughout this leg of the tour (more on them later). Our young Hong Konger friend sells some records to a grumpy music store boss, and voila, he has entry to the concert. Not that difficult. Cut to Bowie on stage, kicking into the inevitable <span style="font-weight: bold;">China Girl</span>, complete with mimed self-kissing, and then a high energy rock-out <span style="font-weight: bold;">Look Back in Anger</span>.<br />
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Now we get to the section that concerns this blog. As the music from HK fades away, Bowie sits in the plane delivering him to the next destination. First we’re in a tranquil Hindu temple, which I’d guess is the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road. Bowie, now clad in white suit and fedora strolls around a depopulated, sleepy Chinatown, accompanied by the relentless beat of construction. Passing the street where Jack Flowers has his day-job in <span style="font-weight: bold;">Saint Jack</span>, and wanders into Thian Hock Keng Temple on Telok Ayer Street contemplating an enormous Buddha and getting his fortune told (we never find out what it is). In a taxi, Bowie has a discussion about freedom and control with a chatty and very open Indian cab driver, concluding with an astonished Bowie asking how people are executed for drugs offenses: “They hang them.” Cue martial music (played by a school band), over a very pointed montage which includes a campaign banner ‘Come on Singapore, work together better’, a man hanging a framed photo of Lee Kuan Yew outside his shophouse, an old building being demolished and a row of blank HDB ‘slabs’ (as Rem Koolhaas would put it). It already all feels very different from Hong Kong, and there’s a reason for this.<br />
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Bowie had arrived in Singapore a few days before the gig and found there was a strong possibility that the concert would be cancelled. “The Singapore authorities are not friendly toward rock & roll,” he writes in the diary-like introduction to the<span style="font-weight: bold;"> Serious Moonlight</span> tour book. <span style="font-weight: bold;">China Girl</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Modern Love</span> were banned on the radio, and a rumour of an “impromptu guest appearance” at a youth club had, according to Bowie, led police to threaten his local promoter with imprisonment. <br />
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This was Goh Poh Seng; doctor, poet, playwright, novelist, night-club and live music impresario. Goh (who died in January this year) was a fervent champion of the arts in all incarnations, including pop music. A year before he’d received the Cultural Medallion, the biggest gong that the Singapore state bestows on artists, but that didn’t stop him facing resistance all the way with the Bowie show, which was taking place in Singapore's largest venue, the now-closed National Stadium. Goh had taken it on at the last minute and it was (at that time) the biggest concert that anyone had ever organised in Singapore. “You need at least three months to prepare for a concert like this, if you’re sane,” Goh told The Straits Times when it was announced, “we’re doing it in one month.” Bowie describes him as “wonderful and fearless.”<br />
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Troyna recalls that until the gig happened they all “thought we were going to get thrown out.” This situation isn’t referred to in <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span>, but a high level of tension and discontent creeps into the Singapore segment. Troyna says that the script outlined the “points we wanted to make about each country", Singapore was intended to reflect “alienation and submission to the state”, but of course there would be a great deal of improvisation. The director walked around Orchard Road and discovered Far East Plaza, Singapore’s newest and (at that time) largest, shopping mall, opened only a few months earlier. It was a suitably “alienating” place. Bowie agreed. So, in the film, while a phone rings in his empty Ming Court ‘Emperor’ Suite, its occupant walks through the night in a black trenchcoat. Heads down Scotts Road and up an escalator to an overhead bridge drenched in blue neon, his yellow hair the only sign of life. The eerie-sinister soundtrack is <span style="font-weight: bold;">Sense of Doubt</span>, a Bowie/Eno collaboration (from the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Heroes</span> album) which had, two years before, scored a walk through junkie infested Berlin in Uli Edel’s notorious <span style="font-weight: bold;">Christiane F</span>. Ironically, here it’s used to lend atmosphere to the sterile sci-fi weirdness of "The Biggest Tourist Shopping Centre in South-East Asia". After his escalator odyssey and a surreal scolding from a diminutive security guard, Bowie sits, looking pensively unimpressed, beneath the glittery kitsch of the musical fountain and a row of fake, plastic Christmas trees. In the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Serious Moonlight</span> book, Bowie recalls the moment he faces the Singapore crowd, “I am supposed to say something to the children in the Singapore audience. These children who are doomed to ride the up escalator forever.”<br />
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“Can we go somewhere where there are no skyscrapers?” Bowie asks a cab-driver the next morning. Depressingly he gets dumped at Raffles Hotel, passing a mustachioed American, who gets a mysterious sound effect and a freeze frame. Troyna says this little <span style="font-style: italic;">leitmotif</span> (it occurs in Hong Kong and Bangkok too) was inspired by the fact that it was clear to everyone that Bowie was “being closely watched” wherever he went. Perhaps the CIA; nobody ever found out, but Bowie in Asia was bringing out the spooks. <br />
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Then he’s amidst ghosts of a different kind. Inside the faux-colonial splendour of Raffles Hotel, Bowie seems as equally apprehensive as he did back in the mall. He’s swapped cold futurism for tropical nostalgia and found both equally wanting. Suddenly we’re back to Chinatown, and Bowie fancies entering a building where a Chinese Opera troupe is rehearsing. Two young women, Theresa and Tsiu-Lien stop to talk on their way to the rehearsal, neither of them seem to be aware of who Bowie is, and insist on asking “my boss” before they’ll let him in. Theresa delivers the bad news. The boss says no, “Sorry ah… how?” Disappointed but unfazed, Bowie promises to try and attend their show that night (after his own). Troyna says that the rejection was completely spontaneous, and it was blamed on either superstition or that “they were worried that they’d get in trouble.”<br />
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Although there’d been a conscious effort not to show typical ‘back-stage’ material in the film, the opportunity to contrast the different levels of ‘performance’, the Chinese Opera and the Rock Concert, was irresistible. So we have footage of the lighting rig being mounted in the National Stadium (Bowie writes: “The lights were flown in from all over Malaysia. Many arrived broken, and those intact not much more powerful than a bedroom lamp.”) and Bowie departing from the hotel, while Theresa leaves her cluttered Chinatown shop-house. Out in the stadium a crowd is gathering, watched closely by uniformed police. Backstage Bowie’s interviewed by a fairly hapless young DJ, William Xavier (now better known as easy-listening maven, Mr X) while the rest of the band sit, giggle and mock in the background, not without encouragement from their leader. Bowie turns it around and starts to question the DJ, “What is rebellious here? What does rebel mean?” asks the man who sang <span style="font-weight: bold;">Rebel, Rebel</span>, and we see Xavier, well aware of the 16mm camera inches from his face, struggle between trying to act cool and knowledgeable in front of Bowie and giving an extremely guarded, cautious answer (Rebellion in Singapore he explains, has been “kept within reasonable limits”). <br />
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Meanwhile, the Chinese Opera has bestowed its own glamour on Theresa and Tsiu-Lien, and they hit the stage in full make-up and regalia, as Bowie, over in Kallang, speaks the first lines of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Heroes</span>, “An apposite choice,” says Troyna, and we’re into the gig.<br />
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In his newspaper review the next day, Philip Cheah, then reporter for long defunct paper, The Singapore Monitor, called it “the only real rock concert in years.” He pointed out that the stadium was less than half full, “but at least we were heroes, just for one night.” In the tour book, Bowie himself describes the heat, the discomfort and terrible sound; looking out at the blank, other faces, the twitchy armed cops and “for a moment I feel I am playing to the tiger-infested jungle that existed here until the arrival of concrete a few short decades ago.” Then he suddenly connects with the audience and “for one night it can mean everything.” <br />
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Bowie performing <span style="font-weight: bold;">Heroes</span> is intercut with scenes from the Chinese <span style="font-style: italic;">wayang</span>, so much so that the song eventually seems be placed into the mouths of the singers. Before he turns his back on the audience in the stadium Bowie grins, almost laughing, suddenly, finally happy. Then for a moment, Bowie’s in the audience at the opera, surrounded by aunties and uncles, looking extraordinarily handsome, and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Heroes</span> has become their song, Singapore’s song. Its final chords played out over a beautiful close-up of an opera performer (is this Theresa?). An equilibrium is found between music and image. A symbolic moment for a weary showman; performer gives way to other performers and becomes the audience, a final reversal. It’s ambiguous, but it’s also hopeful. And that’s how David Bowie and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span> leave Singapore.<br />
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Bangkok with its mixture of sacred (temples) and profane (go-go bars) has an utterly different feel to Singapore, <span style="font-style: italic;">it flows</span>... and it concludes with Bowie apparently living in solitude on the river. He seems happier in Bangkok, even his wardrobe is more relaxed (Chinos and a short-sleeved shirt). He’s a civilian here, almost another wide-eyed <span style="font-style: italic;">farang</span> tourist, cruising the clubs and the river. In Hong Kong he was the jet-setting rock star-idol glimpsing the sprawl from the back of the limo. In Singapore he was a stranger in a strange land, a drifter fuelled by discomfort and tension. Singapore makes him the alien. So, of all the cities in December 1983, the Lion city-state is the one that’s the most ‘Bowie-esque’.<br />
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Back in the UK, Troyna assembled a cut of the film to show Bowie. They’d always intended for him to provide a voice over, making the whole film a kind of travelogue-diary of the star’s thoughts and impressions. But that never happened. Bowie watched it, liked what he saw. Troyna delivered his version (just short of 80 minutes), without a voice over, and that was the end of it. Bowie sold it to Virgin, and a 60 minute VHS version was released exclusively to their shops, and the full-length <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ricochet</span> remained unseen until 2006 when it was included as an extra on the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Serious Moonlight</span> DVD. <br />
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And in 2004, Bowie returned to Singapore.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Thanks to Philip Cheah, Regina De Rozario and Gerry Troyna for sharing their invaluable information.</span>benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7283560510166171117.post-80514133749807996852010-08-08T13:34:00.000-07:002010-08-08T22:37:15.896-07:00National Day Special: Opposition Parties<span style="font-weight:bold;">A Very Dangerous Game – Series 3/Episode 2 of Danger Man (1965)</span><br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game1.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(Singapore circa 1965... or is it?)</span><br /><br />Patrick McGoohan in Singapore? Sadly, not this time; the exotic Orient encountered by super-spy John Drake in this 1965 episode of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span> (AKA <span style="font-weight:bold;">Secret Agent</span> in the US) is a stereotypical colonial fantasy conjured up on a soundstage in Shepperton studios with sundry pieces of ‘stock’ footage. No one involved left London. This was the typical strategy for constructing a fictional ‘Singapore’ in the pre-War era. Hollywood had done it many times before, including John Brahm’s Far East <span style="font-style:italic;">noir</span>-adventure, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Singapore</span> in 1947. But from the start of the 60s, lighter cameras and cheaper air tickets popularised location shooting, even for b-movies, and by ‘65 there’d been several Sandokan films (based on Emilio Salgari’s Italian tales of heroic Malay piracy) and a few ‘Eurospy’ flicks making limited use of real Singapore and Malaysian locations. This episode of <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span>, however, was for the telly, and then, as now, budgets and schedules were tight, and why hop on a plane for fifteen hours when you can make any locale in the world down in Studio B?<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game9.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(McGoohan: Calculating coldness with an undertow of bizarre eccentricity)<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span> began in 1960 as a vehicle for the peculiar charisma of McGoohan, an American raised in Ireland and England, groomed for TV stardom by media mogul Lew Grade. The original series pre-dated the first James Bond film; and in retrospect we can see that the weekly hijinks of super-agent John Drake anticipate the entire Eurospy genre, and as the series got more, shall we say, baroque, it paved the way for the stylised antics of <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Avengers</span> (and dozens of imitators) as well as McGoohan’s pet project, <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Prisoner</span>. By 1965, Bond was big and McGoohan (who had an unusually authorial influence on his own series, even then) was supposedly intent on making John Drake a more downbeat, realistic counterpart to Ian Fleming’s creation. That’s not born out by this episode, which is lightly comic, and, in terms of plot, completely ludicrous; but it’s not without interest in depicting Singapore in the year of independence.<br /><br />The set-up introduces Simpson, an embittered toff essayed by the wonderfully seedy Anthony Dawson, ranting to a blonde companion about “going out to Singapore to lecture for the British Cultural Mission…can’t get a decent job here in England”. There are many connections between James Bond and <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span>, but casting Dawson is the most self-conscious—he’d had a part in <span style="font-weight:bold;">Dr No</span> and then became the body-double for 007’s pussy-stroking nemesis Blofeld in two sequels. Back in <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span>, Simpson needs to prove he’s not just any old foreign talent, “You know I’ve got a very big job waiting for me in Singapore,” he assures us, repeating for good measure, “A very big job.” This sounds ominous! Pretty soon, Simpson is in the hands of the authorities, and in an inventive touch the <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span> titles (with the great demented harpsichord theme tune) play over a silent sequence of John Drake chain-smoking his way through the interrogation (torture?) of Simpson. Ending in a crash-zoom on Anthony Dawson’s beleaguered face. The episode’s directed by Don Chaffey, a reliable pair of hands (who went on to direct Jason and the Argonauts), but aside from this flourish, his work here’s strictly pedestrian.<br /><br />Anyway, the game’s afoot, Drake will fly to Singapore pretending to be Simpson to infiltrate “the opposition”, a phrase used many times as a euphemism for Communist spies (I don’t think the word Communist is ever used), the writer of this, David Stone, who’d written dialogue for Polanski’s <span style="font-weight:bold;">Repulsion</span>, could never have known the special resonance of the term “opposition” in Singapore then (or now), but he should’ve been aware that this was five years after the supposed defeat of Communist guerrilla warriors in the Malayan ‘Emergency’. Reds in the tropics of Southeast Asia were no joke—although as we shall see, this episode is determined to treat them like one.<br /><br />Before his trip to Singapore, Drake gets a forged visa from Charles Carson, who’d played a spy in Hitchcock’s <span style="font-weight:bold;">Secret Agent</span> thirty years earlier, and warns Drake that the Chinese have been playing the “dangerous game” of spying for “three thousand years”. Then he gets gadgets from young Christopher Sandford, better known today as the biographer of Jagger, Cobain and Polanski. The casting in these shows is fascinating! <br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game3.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(Not the Raffles Hotel? Could be in London with a couple of rickshaws)<br /></span><br />Stock footage time! A jet plane with the BOAC logo gives way to an impressive overhead cityscape of Singapore—complete with location title. Except it isn’t Singapore, it’s Hong Kong island. Then a glimpse of the Raffles Hotel exterior which I don't think really is Raffles Hotel, Drake refers to it as ‘Hotel Imperial’. In his very sparse un-Raffles-like hotel room, Drake meets the buttoned-up “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia”—the British Council by any other name. It’s the first of two references to Singapore as being part of Malaysia, which shows that the episode was written before 9 August 1965 (it was broadcast in October that year) or that they didn’t really care too much about the political situation on the ground.<br /><br />McGoohan has immense fun in this and many other scenes playing Drake/Simpson as an boorish drunk, prone to aggressive body-language and improvised Irish drinking songs – the actor was a notorious boozer in real-life. He insists the cultural director has a glass with him to quicken their friendship, and on being rejected, drops a knowing pun – “No Bond!” Simpson is due to lecture the locals on “the British way of life”, ironic, given that the region has already had far too much of this during many decades of colonial rule.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game5.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(The Franco-Chinese-Russian 'Linda Lee' played by Yvonne Furneaux)<br /></span><br />One of the more bizarre tropes of foreign films shot in Asia in this period (60s through to late 70s) is the image of the Caucasian woman in a <span style="font-style:italic;">cheongsam</span> (form-fitting Chinese style dress). Whereas white male heroes stubbornly flounder round the tropics in suits and ties, women are more inclined to ‘go native’. Obviously, it’s meant to be sexy and exotic without breaking the ‘taboo’ of inter-racial attraction. Here we have a particularly strange creation, ‘Linda Lee’ played by French starlet Yvonne Furneaux (who’d already acted for Fellini, Polanski and Antonioni) speaking with a bad Russian accent. She says she’s a journalist for the fictional ‘Singapore Evening News’, and she’s got one thing right: “Singapore is such a provincial town in so many ways”. Actually, she’s an “opposition” spy, who calls everyone Comrade and detests the bourgeois way of life. She drags Drake off blindfolded to see her master.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game4.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(I want to believe this is City Hall)<br /></span><br />More stock footage! A clip of what looks like the road near City Hall, and this is possibly the only actual footage of Singapore in the whole episode, but I'm not entirely sure. There's some neon signs that look like they're from Hong Kong. But as the episode continues, they eventually give up trying and we’ll see some rickshaw drivers zipping through a Shepperton car-park.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game7.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">('Those rickshaws are very useful)</span><br /><br />A more straightforwardly racist trope of the Eurospy genre is the Caucasian male actor made-up to look like a sinister Chinese (<span style="font-weight:bold;">Dr No</span> is the most famous, although they’re all descendants of Fu Manchu), and here we have Peter Arne as Chi Ling, with truly horrible ‘slitty’ eye make-up and prone to a patronising bow and hand-clasp gesture (incidentally Arne was tragically murdered in 1983). Chi Ling’s meant to be a paranoid buffoon, who has glass furniture as “a security precaution, nothing can be hidden from me.” He trusts no-one. It’s all meant to be jolly hilarious. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game8.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(Peter Arne in Chinese drag)</span><br /><br />Chi Ling intends to use Drake/Simpson to entrap the secret head of the British spy network in Malaysia (the second reference to the larger country, which is a big clue as to who the head actually is). Drake is driven off again, and then has to figure out that Chi Ling’s hide-out is actually the Singapore New Press building (see the banner at the top of this blog)! So the “opposition” have taken over the print media! Sadly, this is where the lovely Linda Lee will be shot dead by a Chinese heavy, for no good reason.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.gonetopersia.com/downloads/game6.jpg"><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(SIngapore: Den of vice and sex)<br /></span><br />Still acting sozzled, Drake pitches up at a Singapore bar-cum-brothel, modelled on the one from T<span style="font-weight:bold;">he World of Suzie Wong</span>, mockingly spurns the advances of a English-accented bar girl, “out of my way you wanton lotus blossom!” and discovers that the British secret services run an ‘Operations Room’ behind a prostitute’s boudoir, staffed by the obligatory Burt Kwouk and Mike Pratt (Randall, from <span style="font-weight:bold;">Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased</span>). Here we discover that there’s an even more senior “opposition” leader who secretly broadcasts very declamatory Mandarin (quite a contrast to the barked Cantonese of Chi Ling’s heavies). Drake sets in motion a cunning plan, but not before he gives a talk on English madrigals, in homage to Holly Martin’s lecture in <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Third Man</span>, complete with obnoxious questioner at the end (can madrigals can be compared to The Beatles? An unconscious nod to Singapore’s struggle with rock and roll?). <br /><br />In a double-twist, Drake uncovers that the “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia” (Geoffrey Bayldon, who’d return to ‘Singapore’ the following year in <span style="font-weight:bold;">King Rat</span>) is not only the chief British spy, but also the head of the “opposition”. When this is revealed, Drake darkly mutters “Not the first”, which feels like the one truly authentic espionage moment in the whole episode—this was only two years after Kim Philby and friends had been exposed as high-level Soviet moles in British intelligence. Drake’s plan, to trick Chi Ling into shooting his boss, succeeds, and the punchline calls back the “three thousand years” bit, with McGoohan imitating the Chi Ling’s bow and speech with the odious line, “as humble beginner… would be grateful for enlightenment”. A suitably smug end to <span style="font-weight:bold;">Danger Man</span>’s first and last excursion to Singapore. <br /><br />Cue the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u6jYfJgj-o">demented harpsichord</a> and long live the opposition!benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00378220442838632027noreply@blogger.com0