Legendary hellraiser was Saddam’s secret weapon
Oliver Reed was one of the great hellraisers, a boozer who could strike terror into the hearts of anyone who stood in the way of him and a drink. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who tortured and murdered at will.
And so when, in one of the oddest movie projects ever made, the Iraqi despot hired the English actor to star in a homegrown blockbuster, it was a close call as to which of them would be the more terrifying figure.
The extraordinary story of the production has now emerged in a British TV documentary, Saddam Goes To Hollywood. It reveals how the film – which was thought to have disappeared without trace – has been lying in a garage in Surrey for the past 35 years.
Saddam kept a close eye on the production, got his henchmen to issue threats when things went wrong, and was a deeply unnerving background presence.
‘‘It was extremely intimidating,’’ said actress Virginia Denham, who worked on the film.
In the end, however, it was no contest. Reed was much, much more frightening. As Denham notes: ‘‘Oliver Reed was a weapon of mass destruction.’’
His drinking was so heavy, and his behaviour so appalling, that the Iraqi authorities tried to get him sacked. But because half the film had already been shot, they had to ignore the fact that Reed was throwing hotel managers around, and worse, and persevere regardless.
The film, The Great Question, also known as A Clash of Loyalties, told the story of an Iraqi revolt against British colonial rule in 1920.
The producer, Lateif Jorephani, told Saddam, who was bankrolling it, that it would cost up to US$30 million. ‘‘Saddam Hussein said, ‘OK, fine, carry on, whatever it takes. But don’t let me down. Make a good movie’,’’ Jorephani recalled.
By the time filming started around Baghdad in 1981, the IranIraq War had started. Iraqi actors would disappear because they had been conscripted. Roger McDonald, a camera assistant, said: ‘‘Three or four weeks later, we would get a message saying that this poor actor had been killed.’’
The movie was chaotic, late and over budget, and the actors lived in fear of Iranian air attacks. When they were filming an attack on a train, they had to abandon the set because an Iraqi commander thought it was an Iranian invasion and was about to start shooting.
Whenever filming stopped, Reed would become restless.
‘‘Oliver Reed and boredom is not a good mix,’’ said actor Stephan Chase. ‘‘Oliver managed somehow to be poolside at about eight in the morning with an enormous bowl of sangria.’’
Once, when food failed to arrive, he threw the manager of the restaurant across the room; on another occasion, he urinated into a bottle of wine and told the waiter to give it to the next table.
But no matter how drunk Reed was the night before, he always turned up on set on time and knew his lines.
Actress Helen Ryan said: ‘‘Oliver was easy to survive as long as you were working with him. What was not so easy to survive was playing with him.’’
Denham said: ‘‘The only time I was frightened was of Oliver Reed. [He] was a weapon of mass destruction.’’
Somehow, the film was finished, but the first cut, according to Jorephani, was terrible. It was recut, and Saddam ‘‘liked it very much’’, he said.
They never found a distributor, however, and all that remains are the original rushes, sitting in rusty cans in Jorephani’s garage in Surrey.
The screening of the documentary coincides with the publication in Britain of an English translation of a novel by Saddam on the 10th anniversary of his execution.