MODESTY BLAISE (1966: Dir. Joseph Losey)
As hard as it is believe, films based on comic books and strips were once considered the lowest form of big screen entertainment. Confined to cliffhanger movie serials, or low budget B-films, these adaptations of superhero and science fiction properties such as Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel, and Dick Tracy, were considered basic fodder sold to kids en masse for their Saturday afternoon's amusement. Written and directed with a perfunctory enthusiasm for the genre, they were disposable delights for youngsters reared during the turbulent WWII years. When television arrived in the post war period these heroes migrated to the small screen where the new medium became an electronic babysitter for a generation of baby boomers. It didn't take long for heroes such as Superman, The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon to excite the imaginations of television's captive audience. This remained the norm for most of the next decade with the exceptions being Superman and the Mole-Men (1951) and Batman (1966), both big screen spin-offs of their popular TV series. In fact, it would be the Europeans who would finally break the stigma for cinematic superheroes. In the U.K.and the rest of Europe there had been a tradition of adult comic strips produced for their many newspapers, even James Bond enjoyed a successful run in the dailies. Writer Peter O'Donnell began his career scripting comic strips, having cut his teeth adapting Dr. No for the Daily Express, and later creating the most famous illustrated female heroine ever to appear in print, Modesty Blaise. The eponymously named Evening Standard strip began in 1963 and ran virtually uninterrupted for 38 years with O'Donnell simultaneously publishing Modesty Blaise novels and short stories during that time. It had all started when O'Donnell was hired to convert a rejected first draft screenplay of a Modesty Blaise feature, into a tie-in book, marketed to promote the film version, thus inaugurating his career as a novelist. Although originally the intent of producer Joseph Janni, director Joseph Losey (These Are The Damned, Accident) had little use for a female James Bond, instead he wanted to utilize the character's exploits as a hook on which to hang a collection of satirical commentaries, an idea totally antithetical in tone to O'Donnell's original hard boiled pulp aspirations. What resulted was an amusing hodgepodge of genre and tone, mixing slapstick, surrealism, and social satire in an emblematic cocktail of psychedelic Sixties mod. Starring as Modesty, a mysterious criminal adventurer recruited by the British Secret Service, was sensuous siren Monica Vitti, the Italian IT Girl of the era thanks to her longstanding artistic and romantic relationship with auteur filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni ( L'Avventura, Red Desert). Sharing in this dangerous assignment is her Cockney sidekick Willie Garvin portrayed by Terence Stamp, whose screen charisma more than makes up for his less than stellar singing voice featured in the musical numbers. In the original strip Garvin was modelled by artist Jim Holdaway after the then young stage actor Michael Caine, coincidentally Stamp's own roommate at the time. Our two fashionable heroes, prone to hair and costume changes sometimes in the middle of a scene, are well-matched by the effete blonde-wigged villainy of diamond smuggler Dirk Bogarde, in the most playfully delicious of the film's many arch performances. Losey always decried the result, perhaps due to an arduous production hampered by constant script rewrites, and a self-conscious leading lady who forbade profile shots of her Roman nose. However despite such travails, its loyal cult still thrives to this day, embracing the film's provocative production design, sybaritic cinematography and snappy score, a campy concoction well represented by the indelible poster art of Bob Peak. DVD & BLU-RAY
