ROYAL FLASH (1975: Dir. Richard Lester)
With the great success of the Musketeers films behind them, Lester, and his screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser took the next logical step and adapted one of Fraser's own Flashman novels to the screen. Rather than starting with the first book in the series, they hedged their bets with the second, a clever reworking of an old Hollywood chestnut, The Prisoner of Zenda, featuring Harry Flashman, the now-matured bully from Thomas Hughes' novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, used as a brilliant foil to launch a pointed satirical attack on the hypocrisy of Victorian heroism. The film features a panoply of hilarious stuffed shirts including: Oliver Reed, seething Germanic menace as Bismarck, and Alan Bates, amusing himself and the audience, as slippery spy and bon vivant Rudi Von Sternberg. Malcolm McDowell, who at the time, had cornered the market on naughty schoolboys you loved to hate, is the very personification of the pompously preening and cowardly Flashman. Once again Lester is able to indulge his penchant for opulent costumes and luxurious old world production design, comically enhanced by trompe l'oeil visual gags and elaborate slapstick antics. Its unfortunate failure with audiences put an end to the idea of an ongoing series of Flashman films. DVD REGION 1 & 2
No comments:
Post a Comment