FLASH! AH-HAAAA
Revelling in a kitsch classic
It sits on the very edge of my memory. There was a vast cinema on Highgate Rd in London called the Forum, where every Saturday morning children from the council estates, the local slums and the middle-class semis, would turn up with their sixpences, imbibe the unforgettable smell of badly cleaned out shell-shaped ashtrays, fidget on the red plush seats, and shout at the top of their voices when the manager appeared to announce the beginning of the show.
And it was there, aged 6 or 7, that I first encountered Flash Gordon.
It is amazing how recently things were black and white. In the American comic strip, the heroic ‘‘quarterback for the New York Jets’’ was very colourful: yellow hair and scarlet outfit. In the cinema, he and the marvellous universe that he and his sidekicks explored was monochrome. Somehow it didn’t matter, we made the adjustments in our heads. It was all so exciting.
Flash Gordon first saw life in a comic strip in the 1930s. And his was a simplified, Americanised version of a Jules Verne-type story. The hero just happens to be quite close to a rocket when the Earth is menaced by an intergalactic despot called Ming the Merciless. So, in the company of a mad scientist called Hans Zarkov, and a young woman called Dale, Flash finds himself shot into the environs of Ming’s home planet, the unsatisfactorily named Mongo. There, he discovers exotic if undependable allies, and together they battle Ming’s many minions and fearsome space creatures.
Side plots include the love that Flash and Dale have for each other, the rather improbable lust that Ming feels for the very suburban Dale, and the raging lust for Flash felt by Ming’s underdressed daughter, Aura. Although it has to be said that these secondary themes were not prominent in the serial episodes that we Saturday morning kids got to see. So Flash Gordon was part of my childhood. We now roll on through the end of the black-andwhite movies, to a period when even the Carry On films are in colour. It’s 1974, I’m a student, and I am living in a communist-feminist commune in Manchester. It’s my turn to suggest a movie to go to. My friends will tell you that this is always a tricky moment with me.
No colour film has been made of Flash Gordon at this stage. But sexual liberation is storming the bastions of good taste, and someone has produced an apparently witty erotic pastiche of the original story,
Flesh Gordon, which is at the Odeon on Oxford Rd. Wouldn’t it be fun for my women’s movement friends if we all went to see it?
Of course it wouldn’t. We lasted about 15 minutes. I was eventually forgiven, but I think the next film I chose was Le Grand Meaulnes.
And now we travel to 1980, and I was back in London and had just begun leading the National Union of Students. Margaret Thatcher was in No 10, Jimmy Carter was the United States President, Leonid Brezhnev was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and no, we didn’t like him), and P W Botha presided over apartheid South Africa (and we surely hated him).
Three years earlier Star Wars had revolutionised cinema (or so everyone said), and its sequel was about to hit the screens. And, as we know, the interminable saga has bored parents witless and puzzled their offspring ever since.
Originally, George Lucas had wanted to make a new Flash Gordon, but because of some arcane battle about rights or money or something like that, he couldn’t. If only the rest were history.
In 1980, 40 years ago, Dino De Laurentiis did it. The man whose father owned a spaghetti business and who went on to produce some early Federico Fellini movies, as well as (of course) a spaghetti western, relocated to the US in 1976 and set up his own studio. That year he remade King Kong. Soon after, he acquired the rights to Flash Gordon.
Who minds about all that, you’re thinking. Movies are about directors and actors or, at a pinch, writers. Whoever went to a film because of the producer? But if De Laurentiis hadn’t produced
Flash Gordon and put together the team he did, that film would never have become a cult classic, and the remastered version wouldn’t be being released because no-one would have cared.
What De Laurentiis brought to the sci-fi world was Italian surrealism, and I don’t know whether it has ever been called this, but Flash Gordon isa spaghetti soap opera. De Laurentiis’ designer for the movie was his countryman Danilo Donati, a mad genius who had designed for visually extraordinary movies such as Fellini’s Satyricon and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex.
So there is no attempt at realism. As American film critic Roger Ebert wrote when reviewing the film’s release: ‘‘At a time when Star Wars and its spin-offs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, Flash Gordon is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is.’’
Nothing looks as you would imagine the future world to look. For a start, anyone seems to be able to breathe oxygen anywhere in space; the space ships actually look like ships with decks; Disney-like castles hang in mid-air; there are planets shaped like potato wedges; the weaponry is a mix of laser blasts and medieval blade work; and duel is fought with whips, and why would you want a whip in space?
In one of the most famous scenes, the hero – thought to be dead – rides what looks like a silver space Lambretta at a slow speed between cardboard mountains towards a frankly unintimidating enemy fortress. Earlier he plays the game of ‘‘is the deadly space creature with the fatal bite in this hole of the old tree stump that I’m putting my arm into’’ with a
can possibly be contained. There are and it’s not at all obvious how this ed or maintained because it spends sing and fighting. the final mass attack of the g down from magenta and pink y Stukas to attack Ming’s main one of the most celebrated scenes in also the one that delayed a lease. r, Mike Hodges (who took over from Nicolas Roeg after a falling-out) Chroma key compositing that ion of backgrounds so it looked as n fly was fine, but you then had to res holding up the Hawkmen from ome prints this didn’t quite take. m all recall its dialogue. Although most none of its memorable lines changes, dialogue isn’t quite the nearest we get is possibly when the Aura is being tortured and her n underling to ‘‘bring me the bore h she responds: ‘‘Not the bore nkly, what more do you need to
nown line is Dale’s urgent reminder ly distracted boyfriend: ‘‘Flash, I only have 14 hours to save the
th its mock solemnity and its cod was never so much fun. By contrast, ve us almost the best theme song in he soundtrack is by Queen with hen disappeared without sequel. As The Times, London
available to stream now on YouTube n DVD/Blu-ray on August 26, and is t cinemas until next month.