"sabre-tooth"

[sergebroom]

I recently finished – and very much enjoyed - Peter O’Donnell’s 2nd Modesty Blaise novel Sabre-tooth. It may have been written in 1966, but it really struck a chord, being about some bad guy who’s planning a takeover of Kuweit and of its oil, and Modesty and her friend Willie must infiltrate his organization and stop him before he strikes – on 9/11.

it's true that I wasn't totally happy with how the situation was resolved, but that’s quite all right, because, before we reach the end, we are treated to scenes like this…

“Princess, I been meaning to ask. How you getting on with Alice in Wonderland?”
“I can’t quite make up my mind.” She frowned at the ceiling. “If I’d read it when I was small I’d probably see it quite differently. But reading it now, knowing it’s a classic, knowing Carroll was a bit of a weirdie, I keep looking out for the symbolism and psychology of the thing.” She paused, reflecting. “I think I like the verses best, but I don’t like Alice. Why doesn’t she get frightened more?”
“Well, it’s like a dream, I suppose. You know, not real for the kid.”
“At her age, I got more scared by dreams than anything else.”
“Me too.”

…or like this…

He thought about a man he had found long ago; another Willie Garvin, a man who had never found that peace, who had found little joy in anything until that vividly remembered day when a dark girl of twenty, looking like a princess, had faced him across a table in a Saigon gaol and said: “You’re leaving now, Willie Garvin – with me.”
(…)
She was infinitely above him, though she would never have it so. Her mind had a lucidity and her spirit an impregnable strength that he could never dream of matching, but she seemed strangely unaware of that difference in them. There had been nobody to remake the world for her, as she had remade it for him; yet out of a childhood which he flinched from imagining she had emerged as… Modesty Blaise.

As I read the story, I thought that a movie adaptation would probably throw out what appeals to me in favor of slambang action and lots of pyrotechnics. That’s not what those stories are about. If anything, I found myself comparing this story to 1997’s The Saint, an old-fashioned kind of adventure where the hero uses his wits, besides the disguises and a few gadgets, to save not just the world but also the scientist he’s fallen in love with. Of course that movie dropped like a stone so why should they listen to what I have to say?

That being said, if I were in a position to make such a movie, here are the two people I’d cast as Modesty and Willie.


They may not be a perfect physical fit. On the other hand, Peter O’Donnell’s ideal casting were Julie Christie and Michael Caine, thus showing he was more interested in someone who could play the essence of a character than just look right.

Comments

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Is that Gabrielle Anwar?

I remember how luminously lovely she was in The Three Musketeers. Pressure to be thin does not seem to have treated her kindly. She looks drawn. And in need of an extended vacation in Tuscany, with large meals.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

She is quite thin, but she also has muscle definition, from what I've seen on TV series Burn Notice, which is where I discovered her. And she's funny. That being said, I think she could play Modesty, but people who have read everything about the character might disagree.

Meanwhile, an extended vacation in Tuscany sounds good.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

How about Famke Janssen?

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know...being originally a comic strip character, Modesty has a very specific look, and that actress doesn't look much like a Romero or Holdaway illustration. You might want to take a look at some of the art here (http://www.khherrmann.de/MB/Bilderindexthumb.shtml) for an idea.

The Michael Caine thing is a bit recursive - O'Donnell sent his first artist a picture of Michael Caine to use as a visual reference for Willie Garvin.

If you're going to keep reading the series, the third book is the one Neil Gaiman actually was working on a screenplay for (project indefinitely on hold), and fourth through eighth books (#6 is a short story collection) are in my opinion the strongest of the series.

Susan
http://www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I should have mentionned that most of my exposure to Modesty and Willie has been thru the novels. I had seen bits and pieces of the strip's art here and there, but not enough to keep me from forming a different image. It's true that Anwar doesn't look like Modesty - few women do - but I think she could pull it off. As for Caine having been the inspiration for Willie, that's quite interesting. I see Willie as a big guy, quite athletic, and neither word could be applied to the young Caine, but, hey, if he was good enough for O'Donnell...

Bt the way, thanks for the link to the art. It felt like a wonderful trip to the days of my youth, when I was exposed way less to American superheroes, and way more to European artists. Hmmm... My wife never knows what to get me for Christmas.

[(Anonymous)]

They are reprinting all the strips with additional background material in very nice editions (see http://www.kenpiercebooks.com/modesty.htm). I am buying them verrrrrry slowly, since once I run out of those I'm really going to be short on fresh MB material. But every few months I go by my local comic store and get one. The strips and books are not entirely consistent with each other, but there are a lot of crossover characters. And being European, they're not too shy about nudity. But this was the original conception of the character and the strip ran longer than the novels did. (O'Donnell gave it up just a few years ago.)

Susan
www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

And being European, they're not too shy about nudity.

I was wondering about that. Oh, I saw plenty of nudity in the European comics of my youth, but sex, not so much. And especially not where the main character is a woman who isn't of the 'fallen' kind.

[pedanther]

The strips and books are not entirely consistent with each other, but there are a lot of crossover characters.

The strips and books are frankly irreconcilable; I made my peace with this long ago, although I know people who refuse to admit it. (Case in point: Both the strip series and the book series begin with Sir Gerald coming for the first time to ask Modesty for help, but each presents an entirely different version of both what he wants her help with and what he offers her to get her to agree.)

I see the books as O'Donnell doing a sort of condensed good-parts version of the series. Our newspaper here, when O'Donnell stopped writing new Modesty Blaise, just started running the whole series again from the beginning, so I'm now seeing the early years of the strip for the first time - and I keep meeting plot set-ups and action set-pieces that I recognise from having seen them, in more refined form, in one or other of the novels.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember having read somewhere that O'Donnell's first novel started as a script he had written for a Modesty movie, and that it was ignored, so he decided (or someone suggested to him) to turn that into a novel. I guess I should look at the books as an alternate version of the strip.

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone who's accustomed to fanfic will have no trouble with dealing with different versions of the same material; the novels and comics are just alternate canons. I prefer the novels, but the comics will do for a fix.

(Speaking of which, there are some Buffy/Modesty crossover pieces, but they're more amusing if you've read further into the series so you can pick up the references.)

Susan
www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I prefer the novels, but the comics will do for a fix.

I expect that, due to the different media, the comic strip didn't have Willie be as introspective as he was in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this entry.

I wonder how Charles Stross will handle Modesty in his next spies-meet-Lovecraftian-horrors novel.

[(Anonymous)]

Forgot to say: one thing I really like about Sabre Tooth is Modesty's final scene with Mike Delgado. (Spoiler here: http://www.sayyide.de/html/sabre_tooth.html)

A not-terribly-spoilery scene from my favorite, The Impossible Virgin (book #5) is here: http://www.sayyide.de/html/the_impossible_virgin.html I think TIV is the funniest of all of them, and it has the infamous bit about the sheep in it.

Susan
http://www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. That infamous bit about the sheep. I'm missing that book and a few others in the series, but that situation should be remedied soon as it occurred to me this morning what I could ask my wife for my birthday.

Gaiman worked on a movie adaptation? I wonder if that was for Quentin Tarantino. If so, maybe its just as well that the project is pretty much defunct. Much as I liked Kill Bill, I don't think Tarantino would have been the right director.

[(Anonymous)]

My Name is Modesty (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347591/) was released as a "Quentin Tarnatino presents" and Tarantino is known to be a fan (watch Pulp Fiction carefully to catch the novel making a cameo!) I don't think he had much to do with the movie. You should avoid the movie until you've read most of the books, by the way, since half the fun is squealing about references like Garcia, whom you probably haven't encountered yet.

I admit that even though O'Donnell has hated every film treatment done of his work and wishes he could retrieve the rights, I'm very curious to see what Gaiman would make of Modesty. I think he's a true fan.

Susan
www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

What exactly did O'Donnell and fans dislike about the infamous movie fo the 1960s? Was it the actress? I thought that Terrence Stamp as Willie would have been fine. Is it that the actors were fine, but the feel of the whole thing, while faithful to the details of the original, got it all wrong?

[pedanther]

It's taken me a while to formulate a coherent response to this, partly because seeing the phrase "faithful to the details of the original" in the same sentence as the infamous movie is doing weird things to my brain.

You know how sometimes you get big-budget film adaptations where the film-makers change so much that you wonder why they bothered? The infamous movie is one of those.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's one of those adaptations. I can understand how sometimes things have to be changed to accomodate the other media's storytelling tools. I understand also how sometimes it's better to go for the essence of a story instead of its specifics. The first X-men movie is a good example of that. But I fail to see why that'd be necessary for Modesty. Like you said, why bother if you keep only the names nd throw out even the basics of why people liked a story?

[pedanther]

I know that that's a rhetorical question, but I think actually it's because film marketing people figure that the names are all you need to get the fans into the cinema, and it doesn't matter what they think when they find out that the names are all that's left, because by then you already have their money.

The interesting thing about the infamous movie is that it started out trying to be a faithful adaptation, or at least putting up a show of trying. They even commissioned a script from Peter O'Donnell himself (the one you mentioned earlier that became the basis for the first novel). But then they brought in other people to rewrite it. Then some other people to rewrite it some more. And the director started working in some of his own gimmicks and preoccupations, never mind whether they were suitable. And by the time it hit the screen, it had mutated into a melodramatic technicolour nightmare about some people who just happen to be named Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Sure, using just the names did get the fans to spend their money so who cares? Mind you, they probably would have made a lot more money if the fans had been treated to more than the names because happy fans tend to tell others who normally would stay away "You must go see this!", while unhappy fans will warn others who normally would stay away that they should indeed stay away.

I keep being reminded that people who are supposed to be smarter than me really are stupid.

[(Anonymous)]

From a review at http://www.moria.co.nz/fantasy/modestyblaise.htm:

"Losey at all points treats Modesty Blaise as farce – such as a car chase sequence that features Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp singing songs and eating ice-cream while cars run around in circles trailing smoke from coloured flares. And the climax throws ridicule to the wind, featuring a shootout with Vitti and Stamp singing about marriage and the shiek riding in as cavalry in Jeeps emitting coloured smoke. The plot follows the original comic-book story and O’Donnell’s first novel fairly closely but does the rather remarkable job of appearing totally incoherent while doing so.

"Monica Vitti is badly miscast. The role of Modesty Blaise requires someone who can move with a lithe, dangerous grace while also suggesting an eminent desirability. Unfortunately Monica Vitti is blonde (for the most part) and comes with a thick Italian accent. She seems to spend almost the entire film lounging about and languidly pouting, giving the impression that she would rather be eating chocolates while being groomed. She suggests nothing of a bright thief who is two steps ahead of the game. And most of all she is utterly useless when it comes to the action scenes, which Joseph Losey appears to have directed without any interest in using stunt doubles. Terence Stamp fares little better than Vitti, making a rather unconvincing Cockney. Dirk Bogarde’s performance is truly amazing for the opportunity it allows him to come out of the closet and all but openly parade his real-life homosexuality."

Susan
http://www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I had been thinking about adding the movie to our NetFlix queue, if only to satusfy my cravings for cinematic cheese, but it might be too cheesy even for me. Then, again, like Revenge of the Jedi, this might be something that'd be fun to watch with other fans, if only for the razzberries and the bad jokes and the invectives and the pop corn that we'd throw at the TV screen.

By the way, yesterday, my wife gave me most of the novels I was still missing. They're not the recent Souvenir Press editions, but British paperbacks from the early 1970s. The art is decent, and the artist made Modesty look a bit like Famke Janssen, which got me thinking that she might be believable in the role.

[(Anonymous)]

Except that judging from the X-Men movies, she can't actually act.

Susan
www.rixosous.com

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

It's true that those movies didn't give her a chance to do much - although I think she did better than Halle Barry with the little she was given to do. I seem to remember that Janssen did OK as a crazy assassin in Pierce Brosnan's first James Bond movie.

Speaking of those... Casino Royale's Eva Green might make a good Modesty. She may not look like Modesty, true, but she can act.