Joseph Losey (1966)
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the making of Modesty Blaise ‘saw creative clashes from [sic] director Losey and Blaise creator [Peter] O’Donnell over the vision of the final film, Losey wanting to create a “pop art”-inspired spoof of the spy movie craze prevalent at the time, in contrast to the relatively serious and grounded tone of the source material …’ I don’t know O’Donnell’s original but his heroine’s moniker sounds less than serious – the implication of her first name humorously contradicts the implication of her surname or, at least, its homophone. (Never mind that O’Donnell, again according to Wikipedia, named her for Merlin’s tutor Blaise in Arthurian legend.) At the same time, Losey’s alleged approach raises immediate doubts. Whether you like him or not, you could never accuse this director of a light touch: if you drew up a short-list of film-makers ill equipped for nimble pastiche, he’d have to be on it. Besides, the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the James Bond pictures – which had begun in 1962 with Dr No and, by the time Modesty Blaise was being developed for the screen three years later, epitomised ‘the spy movie craze’ – made them less than easy to spoof effectively.
Losey’s choleric tendencies might have qualified him for an aggressive parody of the 007 franchise, using his female super-agent protagonist to subvert the sexual balance of power in the Bond universe. Even though Modesty (Monica Vitti) repeatedly gets the better of men who sometimes end up looking silly, this doesn’t really happen: if required, she does the same to women as well as men – so does her sidekick Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp). When Losey starts a scene with a close-up of a girl’s cleavage, the choice of shot seems not a comment on Bond-movie conventions but merely an example of them. More generally, Modesty Blaise, with its various exotic locations – Amsterdam, the Mediterranean, somewhere in the desert – and flash cars, becomes less a dig at than an illustration of conspicuous waste in international movie-making.
This film is altogether too listless to function as a lampoon of pictures that, whatever else they might have been, were energised, efficient entertainments. There’s the odd meta moment to proclaim Losey’s awareness of what he’s up to. Modesty leafs idly through newspapers prominently displaying the O’Donnell cartoon strip (with art work by Jim Holdaway). A minor baddie, about to come to a sticky end, exclaims ‘Splat!’ But if he did want to pastiche contemporary spy pictures, Losey is very selective about what he can be bothered to poke fun at. I enjoyed a bit where Modesty and Paul Hagen (Michael Craig), a British secret service man and an old flame of hers, swap champagne glasses repeatedly and at high speed, to avoid drinking from the glass laced with knockout drops (Hagen loses out, of course). But the only sustained fun in the film comes from the exuberant décor (Richard Macdonald and Jack Shampan) and costumes (Beatrice Dawson). The camerawork includes, as well as some eccentric angles and arbitrary zooms, movements from one place to another that suggest Losey didn’t know what he wanted, or care. There are sequences where his direction is characteristically too deliberate, others that suggest he’s fallen asleep.
The vibrancy of Jack Hildyard’s lighting of Med exteriors, in combination with the vivid colours and patterns of wall coverings and furnishings indoors, gives the film the pop-art look Losey was supposedly after. You wouldn’t need to see many shots of Modesty Blaise to know what decade it was made. There are references to other 1960s cinema images that have little to do with the vogue for spy movies, unless you count T E Lawrence primarily as a secret agent. The plot involves the British government’s recruiting Modesty Blaise to help get a shipment of diamonds through to Sheikh Abu Tahir (Clive Revill), the ruler of a small but oil-rich Middle Eastern kingdom, thereby thwarting arch-villain Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde), who’s also a long-standing adversary of Modesty. The (in theory) climactic showdown between Gabriel’s acolytes and the Sheikh’s forces sees the latter streaming across the screen like joke extras from Lawrence of Arabia. Although the British diamonds are in exchange for a discount on the Sheikh’s oil exports, this is still an era when Arabs of both sexes are presented as mildly comical, thanks to their funny clothes – another element that makes Modesty Blaise, to twenty-first-century eyes, very much a period piece.
It also anticipates films from later in its own decade. As well as the poppy, pleasantly inane title song (sung by David and Jonathan, aka Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway), the soundtrack includes ‘We Should’ve’, a duet for Modesty and Willie. They sing a bit then seem to think better of it; a few screen minutes later, they’ll have another go. (The music for these songs is by Johnny Dankworth, with lyrics by Benny Green and, in the case of ‘We Should’ve’, Evan Jones. Elsewhere, Dankworth’s orchestral score gives the impression he’s trying to convince himself, as well as the audience, that what’s on screen is zanily comical. He seems to fail on both counts.) What a number like ‘We Should’ve’ is doing in the spoof Losey had in mind is unclear but the Vitti-Stamp rendition of it limply foreshadows contemporary star actors and non-singers in big-budget musicals like Camelot (1967) and Paint Your Wagon (1969). Gabriel’s Mediterranean lair could be next door to the secluded island home of the Elizabeth Taylor character in Losey’s Boom! (1968), a film that somewhat replicates the confused inertia of Modesty Blaise.
Peter O’Donnell, who wrote early versions of the screenplay, claimed afterwards that ‘the finished movie retained only one line of his original dialogue’ (Wikipedia again). Losey’s better films have in common a Harold Pinter screenplay; it may be significant that, although Pinter worked on this script, his name doesn’t appear on the credits alongside that of Evan Jones (who also did the screenplay for King and Country). Losey’s seeming indifference to the plot not only ensures that Modesty Blaise is style over substance; it’s also tough on his high-powered cast. As Sir Gerald Tarrant, senior partner in a British secret service double act with the fatuous Paul Hagen, Harry Andrews, a fine actor, seems an awkward one. In addition to Abu Tahir, Clive Revill plays Gabriel’s literal-minded Scottish accountant, McWhirter. It’s no coincidence that Revill is easier to take disguised in (light) brown face and burnous than when looking himself. Dirk Bogarde’s uber-camp Gabriel is very occasionally amusing. Given how many ‘funny’ lines he has, that’s a low strike rate. Rossella Falk, as Gabriel’s psychopathic head of security, delivers her lines excruciatingly slowly and over-emphatically.
The problem is that these actors, perhaps from anxiety, decorate everything they do with a comic sigh or grimace or smirk; because there’s no rhythm to any of their exchanges, they’re performing in a vacuum – and overacting. Monica Vitti’s playing of Modesty is full of artificial flourishes too but the effect is different. It’s sometimes enjoyable to watch a glamorous, self-confident star make the best of a bad job through effortlessness, coasting by on sheer presence, but that’s not what happens with Vitti here. This was her first English-language role (there weren’t many to follow). She often sounds as if she literally doesn’t know what she’s saying.
Terence Stamp, although considerably younger than O’Donnell’s Willie Garvin, fares better – best, in fact. He’s so thoroughly convincing, physically and vocally, as a Cockney Lothario that he nails the caricature with the minimum of effort, then has moments when he transcends it – when Willie is a disturbing blend of boyish charm and vicious potential (echoes of The Collector). Stamp’s easy agility in the action sequences, allied to his looks, makes you think he’d have made an effective, and a distinctive, James Bond. For this viewer, that would have been a waste of his talents though his appearance in Modesty Blaise probably damaged his career too. It’s alleged that he rejected the title role in Alfie to play Willie Garvin. That can’t have been a good decision yet Terence Stamp is one of the few things in Losey’s film – perhaps the only human one – to give pleasure.
14 May 2020
