Flash GORDON
Matthew Sweet hails camp classic ‘Flash Gordon’ as it returns to cinemas for its 40th birthday
December 1980. Innocent times. Mum and Dad, counting the days before the schools go back, pack you off to the cinema. They’ve seen the poster for Flash Gordon and it looks like good clean fun. As the lights go down, that’s what it seems to be. The imagery is intact from the Alex Raymond comic strip of the Thirties and the old Buster Crabbe Saturday-morning cliffhanger serial. Ming the Merciless bombards the Earth with hot hail. Flash and Dale blast off in Dr Zarkov’s rocket ship. And then we crash-land on Mongo. The campest, kinkiest planet in the cosmos.
Here’s Princess Aura, spreadeagled on the torture table in tight red satin. Leering over her is a black-clad sadist played by Peter Wyngarde, whom your mum fancied before his unfortunate incident in the gents at Gloucester bus station. Here’s Flash, in Tom of Finland fetish pants, being fondled in a coffin. And here’s Dale Arden, escaping from the harem before Ming the Merciless – buzzing with a “power potion” – arrives to loosen the cord of his dressing gown.
After 40 years, Flash Gordon is back in cinemas to corrupt a new generation, who have never heard Queen’s glorious pomp rock soundtrack, or seen a winged Brian Blessed bellowing in an orange sky. Adults in the audience may have to explain that the moustached man yelling, “Freeze, you bloody b------s!” went on to play James Bond, or that the boy reaching his hand inside a deadly tree stump also presented Blue Peter, or that the robed keeper of the deadly tree stump is the writer of Look Back in Anger. But they’ll probably just keep quiet during the snogging and flagellation.
“Like a fairy tale set in a discotheque in the clouds,” said the critic Pauline Kael. One, I suspect, where some of the drinks were spiked. One of the film’s many glories is that even some of its makers fell into it as innocently as its audience. Its star and director, for example.
Sam J Jones, the former US marine in the title role, was recruited after the mother-in-law of the small-butflamboyant Italian producer, Dino De Laurentiis, spotted him on Celebrity Squares. “The first day I walked on the set,” Jones recalls, “the first voice that went into my mind was: ‘This is overwhelming. I don’t know if I can do this.’ ”
Mike Hodges – the man responsible for the brutal British revenge drama Get Carter (1970) – was also full of selfdoubt when he was asked to replace the original director, Nicolas Roeg. “All my films had been rooted in fairly gritty problems,” says Hodges, “and this was a big film with a big budget and lots of special effects.” A recent wobble in his working life persuaded him to accept. “I’d left Omen II by mutual agreement – I was just hating making it – and my career didn’t look very promising at that point. If you leave a film, people regard you as difficult. But I had a family, and Dino flew me to New York on Concorde and provided me with the bumper fun book of Flash Gordon. But I have to confess I was terrified of the idea.”
A week into production, however, Hodges had worked out his relationship with the enterprise. An aristocratic Swiss painter had been given a large fee and studio space to produce oil paintings of the sky of Mongo. (They proved completely unsuitable.) Elsewhere, a team was working with Fiat on the blueprints for a space-age car. (There wasn’t one in the story.) The production designer, Federico Fellini’s great collaborator Danilo Donati, was commissioning the Mcalpine engineering firm to build a motorway through the set of Mongo’s forest moon. (Hodges scratched his head at this, and wondered if Donati had actually read the script.)
Hodges soon understood that he was a visitor at the court of Dino, a baroque environment entirely beyond the control of any director. Under such circumstances, it was usually best to go with the flow. When Melody Anderson’s Dale Arden was supplied with an armoured bikini and high heels for a scene that required her to execute a series of karate moves while firing a ray gun, Hodges added a little gag to make it workable. “She took her shoes off and put them down as if she was putting them outside her hotel room to be cleaned.” Another form of diplomacy was also required. His predecessor, Nicolas Roeg, had intended to make a serious science-fiction epic. Mike considered Flash Gordon to be a comedy, and was obliged to ask his crew to stifle their laughter when De Laurentiis was present. It’s this straight-faced quality that makes the picture such a pleasure. This is a film in which the lead character introduces himself while wearing a T-shirt with his name written across his chest in bright red letters. And the casting of Jones – giving a performance as compellingly blank as a Warhol superstar – is a stroke of genius.
“I saw a whole load of actors for that part,” says Hodges. “The character of Flash is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. To find an actor that could portray that kind of innocence – and who looked like a strip cartoon – was pretty difficult. And Sam was a sort of innocent, I think, in reality.”
That quality did not always serve Jones well. As principal photography on Flash Gordon concluded in December 1979, he began to get itchy about his fee. He was on a generous per diem and working so hard that he had no opportunity to spend it. “I had about £30,000 in my sock drawer,” Jones recalls. But his main salary had not been paid. De Laurentiis asked him to come into his office and settle the matter. Jones declined, thinking, quite rightly, that this was a matter for his management. Then he went home for Christmas.
But this negotiation went badly. His management attempted to extract a higher fee, and De Laurentiis – wound up by their hardball demands – decided to dispense with the actor’s services. The film was completed without him. Reshoots were done with a stand-in, his dialogue re-recorded by the British actor Peter Marinker. The anticipated Flash Gordon II evaporated like a hot hailstone.
“Why didn’t I go into his office?” asks Jones. “I think I have been asked this a thousand times, and it has just now occurred to me for the very first time. Why did I not at least hear him out? Why didn’t I do that?”
It was a nodal moment in his life. The break with De Laurentiis didn’t kill Jones’s film career, but as the Eighties wore on, his movies were increasingly the kind sold in wire baskets outside petrol stations.
Jones is now 65. He can watch Flash Gordon without bitterness.
It no longer represents the big movie career he threw away by accident – not least because before De Laurentiis died in 2010, Jones called him to make his apologies and ask for forgiveness. “Even before he replied,” he says, “that heaviness left my shoulders. It just fell off. I became a free man.”
The part continues to inspire him. Jones now works as a professional bodyguard, escorting VIP clients around Mexico. “I can always speak facts and truth at my age now,” he says. “I consider myself just like Flash Gordon. He is the go-to guy and Sam Jones is the go-to guy.”
He illustrates his point with a scenario from his new career. “If you and I are sitting in a room right now and someone attacks you, I do not care if they have guns or knives. I am not going to crawl under the desk or run out of the door. My job is to stop the threat that is trying to hurt you. It is my job, right? I cannot hide from that. So, yes, the similarities are really uncanny.”
At least someone, it seems, survived the trip to Mongo with his innocence intact.
Pauline Kael said the film was ‘like a fairy tale set in a discotheque in the clouds’