2 1GT Friday July 31 2020 | the times
arts
I
t sits on the very edge of my
memory. There was a vast
cinema on Highgate Road
in London called the Forum
whose decorative theme was
Imperial Roman. And 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
six or seven, that I first encountered
Flash Gordon.
It is amazing how recently things
were black-and-white. In the US comic
strip (hard to find over here) 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 were
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 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 not
a few fearsome space creatures.
Side plots include the love that
Flash and Dale bear 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-and-white 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. And it’s my turn to
suggest a movie
for us all 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 and this week Flesh
Gordon is showing on screen three atof “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 character who looks
like Robin Hood on a planet that
is essentially a slightly dangerous
version of the Rainforest Café.
If you’re beginning to think that this
is all an exercise in high camp, you’re
not far wrong. It doesn’t matter that
the lead actor, a man called Sam J
Jones, wearing a dyed blond mane
that I would swear Donald Trump
took as his model, not only couldn’t
act, but was clearly told not to try.
He is the anti-De Niro, and in
fact it’s better that way. Ming
the Merciless is played by that
magnificent, dangerous old Swede
Max von Sydow (a bit like casting
Simon Russell Beale as the Doctor in
Doctor Who), and you don’t need too
much acting going on around him.
What remains are two gloriously
over-the-top performances by Ming’s
rebellious princes, Timothy Dalton as
Barin and Brian Blessed as Vultan the
King of the Hawkmen.
The Hawkmen. This seems to be
a race of Second World War Germanthe Odeon on Oxford Road. 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. Long enough to
discover that Flesh, Dale Ardor and
Dr Flexi Jerkoff were now on a
mission in a rocket-powered vibrator
to the planet Porno to thwart Wang
the Perverted’s wicked plan to drive all
earthlings mad with his sex ray. Many
breasts had already been bared, but it
was the appearance of the ravenous
penisauruses that actually occasioned
our departure. I was eventually
forgiven, but I think the next film
I chose was Le Grand Meaulnes. No
penisauruses in that story.
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 US
president, Leonid Brezhnev was the
general secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (and no, weGordon’s alive! My great big
As Flash Gordon is rereleased, David Aaronovitch — a
lifelong fan of the fantasy hero — argues that this ‘spaghetti
soap opera’ of a movie is so much more fun than Star Wars
Sam J Jones as Flash
Gordon. Right, from
top: with Ornella Muti
as Aura; Brian Blessed
as Vultan. Left: Max
von Sydow as Ming
the MercilessSam J
Jones
not only
couldn’t
act, but
was clearly
told not
to try
didn’t like him) and PW 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, and 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. And, 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
this summer 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 is a
spaghetti soap opera. De Laurentiis’s
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 the great 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
mixture of laser blasts and
medieval blade work. A 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 gamei
William Dennis Hunt as Emperor
Wang in the pastiche Flesh Gordonik
d p ( r s t
in
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