“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. I am my own man.”

Patrick McGoohan was Danger Man John Drake, Dr. Syn (alias The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh), Edward Longshanks, Dr. Paul Ruth in Scanners, Agent David Jones in Ice Station Zebra and erstwhile nemesis to Columbo (he starred in four episodes – a record!) and many, many others in his long career, but to most of us he’s the creator and star of one of the most original and daring TV shows ever created. He was The Prisoner, the former British agent (John Drake, perhaps?) who left the service in an outrage (replayed in the opening sequence of every episode) and was subsequently sent to a kind of holiday colony for retired intelligence agents, a velvet prison created as a surreal mirror of the world. It’s an ingenious political allegory played as a conspiratorial mind-game. No other TV show dared be as enigmatic, as philosophically complex, or as genuinely suspicious view of global power politics.

Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, Danger Man

If you’re looking for a proper tribute to McGoohan, you can’t do better than a Prisoner marathon, but also note that in late 2008, Walt Disney released Dr Syn, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. The two-disc set feature the complete three-part series as original broadcast on Disneyland in 1963 and the subsequent feature film version edited down from the series. McGoohan is Dr. Christopher Syn, alias The Scarecrow, a rural country priest in 18th century Britain who leads a double life as a masked smuggler and gangleader, a kind of Robin Hood by way of Batman.

There are tributes aplenty across the web and David Hudson has done a fine job of collecting them at The Daily @ IFC.com. Also be sure to see Jim Emerson’s video essay on the opening sequence of the series on his Scanners blog here, which he reposted in tribute to McGoohan here.

Charlton Heston died on Saturday night, April 5 2008, at the age of 84 at his home in Beverly Hills, California.

Read the New York Times obituary here and Los Angeles Times obit here. A complete list of his credits are here on the IMDb. More links at GreenCine Daily here.

Heston was a American actor whose commanding presence defined his characters, a beefy slab of American leading man who anchored many an epic with the strength of his sturdy physical bearing anchored on the foundation of an intent gravelly voice and given life with eyes that focused his resolve into a dare. He was the human rock upon which films such as The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking and Planet of the Apes were built upon. But he was also a classically trained actor with great pride in his craft and he interspersed his Hollywood epics and genre pictures with excursions into Shakespeare (like Julius Caesar in 1970 and his 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which he also directed). And he proved himself a solid character actor with strong supporting turns in films as The Bog Country and Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, playing the scheming Cardinal Richelieu with an almost bemused attitude.

Off screen, Heston was also quite famous for his work in the NRA. He was a legitimate target of the left for his outspoken views on gun control, but he could also be quite self-effacing about his politics – his appearance as a guest host on Saturday Night Live in 1993 included an NRA spoof as well as skits built around Planet of the Apes and Moses from The Ten Commandments. In his final years, he also suffered from a condition similar to Alzheimer’s since 2002, which makes Michael Moore’s ambush of Heston in the documentary Bowling For Columbine, which ended with Moore railing against Heston (who had long since left the scene so Moore could place his camera where Heston had been), a fairly despicable act on all levels.

I have no single favorite Heston role, but in 1998 I had the rare pleasure of interviewing Mr. Heston for the release of the Walter Murch-supervised “restoration” of Touch of Evil (1958), based on the detailed notes give to the studio by Orson Welles (and largely ignored at the time). It was supposed to be the center of a essay on the film, but the article was canceled and the review never published. I publish it here for the first time.

I’ve been doing some research and I’ve read your journals and autobiography where you go into magnificent detail on the making of Touch of Evil.

Well thank you.

So I wanted to talk about some other things that I haven’t heard you talk about in interviews or read about in your books. One thing that struck me as I read your piece was that it seems like you had quite a rapport with Orson Welles.

Yes, that’s true. I had never known him before but of course I had see Citizen Kane and for that matter I’d seen Othello. And his reputation then as a filmmaker then was remarkable. I was amazed that the studio, when I suggested he direct the picture, they acted as though I’d suggested directing the picture but his work on the film was extraordinary, I thought.

Read more »

Brian Mark Blue, formerly Brian Henke, died on Saturday, March 8, after a long battle with cancer. He was 37 and is survived by his young daughter, Isabella, and his sisters, Heather Wildin and Hillary Brestar, among his many loved ones. (For a full accounting, please visit Brian’s obituary is here.)

On Friday, March 14, I attended his memorial service, arranged by Hillary and Heather.

Brian was one of the most enthusiastic people I have had the pleasure to know. He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Seattle in 1995 and started working at Scarecrow Video. I was down on the floor putting out new additions to the inventory when my defining moment came. I was merely an observer – I didn’t even catch the conversation that led up to it, it was some testosterone movie or bizarre cult film that Brian was trumpeting with all the enthusiasm and excitement he brought to any discussion of a film that captured his heart – but I remember the response vividly. Ariana, his good friend and co-worker, simply eyed him with a look of appreciative amusement and said, “Brian, you are such a boy!” He simply beamed with his cat-that-caught-the-canary grin. The key there is that she said “boy” and not simply “guy.” While the word carries with it a hint of adolescence and immaturity, I think it captures something pure and youthful and fresh in Brian. As those who knew him would surely agree, Brian’s unrestrained enthusiasm and excitement made him seem younger than his years, someone who still responded to the jaded world with eyes wide open, ready and willing to be surprised and enchanted whenever he was.

I worked with Brian for three years at Scarecrow. I saw countless films with him. I was at his wedding to Holly Blue (Brian took his wife’s name, explaining: “How could I ask a woman I love to take the name Holly Henke?”). And when I left the store in 1998, I trained him to take my position. At the time, Scarecrow was teetering on bankruptcy and leadership was in a state of chaos and denial. The stress was making me miserable and, with mixed feelings and a great deal of anxiety, I gave my notice. The owner, George Latsios, treated my departure like some kind of betrayal and barely acknowledged me as I said my goodbyes on my last day. I was feeling all but abandoned when Brian and Holly invited me to spend the evening with them and gave me a tremendous amount of support. They probably had no idea how important that was to me, but it meant the world to me.

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Ousmane Sembène died in 2007 at the age of 84. In February, New Yorker released his final
film, Moolade, on a two-disc edition, filled with featurettes on Sembene and his work and a 25-minute video interview conducted with the director as Moolade was being released. My review will run in my Tuesday DVD column.

In the meantime, here is an introductory essay I wrote about Ousmane Sembène for a Seattle retrospective sponsored by Northwest Film Forum in 2001, expanded with excerpts from my coverage in the Seattle P-I and updated to include Moolaade.

Ousmane Sembène: Godfather of Black African Cinema

“In response to a student’s question about his background, Ousmane Sembène recalled that he had been expelled from primary school in Senegal for striking back at his French teacher who had slapped him. His fisherman father was not particularly perturbed by this cataclysmic event – cataclysmic because it closed the school door permanently for Sembène. In fact, he was pleased with his son’s strident defense of his invaded personhood.” – from Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers

Senegalese born Ousmane Sembène remains the elder statesman of black African cinema and one of Africa’s most important novelists. Practically self educated, Sembene took a succession of jobs, notably soldier and dock worker (where he became active in the unions and became a delegate) before he turned to writing while in his late 30s. He slipped himself into France after WWII to master the language and wrote his poems and first novels in French, spending over a decade in Europe before returning home to Senegal in 1960. Already recognized as one of the leading African novelists, he worked and lived in France, wrote in French, and was published and read primarily in Europe. The contradictions bothered him: even if he chose to write in his native Wolof he wouldn’t be read outside the universities or intellectual circles. To reach a wider audience – and, even more importantly, an African audience – he turned to filmmaking.

He trained for 2 years in a Soviet Union film school before returning again to Africa and after an unreleased documentary commissioned by the Mali government he made his first acclaimed film at the age of 40, Borom Sarret (1966), a devastating look at the poverty of Senegal’s urban slums through a day in the life of a poor cart driver in Dakar. Writing the script after spending a month learning the lives of cart drivers in Dakar, Sembène condensed an entire day’s worth of experiences into 20 minutes of deceptively simple drama, a neo-realist approach transplanted to the devastating poverty of Senegal’s urban slums. Shot on the most meager of budgets and performed by an almost completely non-professional cast, Sembène turns his technical limitations into a powerfully direct and rich style, capturing not simply the life of one man but the social culture of the newly independent Senegal and the problems still to overcome.

Read more »

Kon Ichikawa died on February 13, of pneumonia, at the age of 92.

He directed over 80 films in a career that spanned more than 70 years. He entered the Japanese film industry in 1933 as an animator, directed by first feature (Musume Dojoji, aka A Girl at the Dojo Temple) in 1946 and (according to the Internet Movie Database) his most recent feature (The Inugamis) in 2006. Yet, apart from a few key features, his filmography is less well known and certainly less available stateside than the films of many of his colleagues.

The Kon Ichikawa never secured the international reputation of fellow studio professionals Akira Kurisawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Yasijiro Ozu, but the versatile director made an indelible mark with two of the most powerful anti-war dramas made in or out of Japan. The lyrical and introspective The Burmese Harp (1956) follows the odyssey of a Japanese soldier in Burma during the waning months of World War II who steals the robes of a Buddhist monk to make his way back to his platoon and undergoes a spiritual transformation as he witnesses the destruction and wholesale death left in the wake of battle. After a career of studio assignments, largely satirical comedies and melodramas, this passion project from Ichikawa made an impression on critics in Japan and became his first film to be seen outside the country, picking up a prize at the Venice Film Festival and securing distribution in the U.S. and Europe.

Fires on the Plain made three years later, stands in stark contrast, stark being the operative word. Based on the novel by Shohei Ooka (who drew from his personal experiences as a soldier and POW) and scripted by Ichikawa’s wife and collaborator, Natto Wada, it too takes the form of soldier’s journey through the battlefields of World War II, this time an island in the Philippines in 1945 as the Americans drive the Japanese out. The striking photography and imagery is the unmistakable work of the same creative artist, but otherwise Ichikawa takes a very different path. Where the serenity amidst death of The Burmese Harp is about the healing of wounds caused by the war, Fires on the Plain is a grim and gruesome and at times macabre autopsy of its (selectively Japanese) victims. Read more »

I just learned that screenwriter and novelist George MacDonald Fraser, author of the “Flashman” ribald historical romps and screenwriter of Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (not mention Lester’s screen version of Frasier’s Flashman novel Royal Flash), died Wednesday at the age of 82.

His major claim to fame is a dozen comic novels featuring Sir Harry Flashman, accidental hero and rotter of the first order whose instinct for self-preservation was matched only by his blind lust and sexual adventures. the character, appropriated from “Tom Brown’s School Days” (he was the school bully who tormented hero Tom), winds up at the center of major historical events in each novel, such as the Charge of the Light Brigade in “Flashman at the Charge.” He brought that same sensibility and penchant for deflating heroic postures and aristocratic dignity to his collaborations with Richard Lester.

But in addition to these (and other) cheeky historical satires, he wrote serious memoirs (such as “Quartered Safe Out Here,” about his experience as soldier in Burma in World War II) and even a book on Hollywood’s historical epics (“The Hollywood History of the World“) that arrived at the almost contrarian conclusion that, for all of the liberties that studio costume dramas have taken with history, they got it right more than they got it wrong. Considering how much Fraser loved and respected history, his argument demands some attention at the very least.

Obituary in the Telegraph:

The fag-roasting bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes’s 1857 tribute to Dr Arnold’s Rugby, was last seen being expelled for drunkenness. Age had not improved him. Fraser’s appropriation in 1969, Flashman, joyously confirmed him as a thoroughgoing rotter and cad of the first water.

The book and its 11 sequels purported to be the memoirs of General Sir Harry Flashman, VC, discovered in a saleroom at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and entrusted to Fraser for editing.

This device allowed Fraser to pilot Flashman through a picaresque series of encounters with some of the choicest episodes of Victorian history. Thus, the first novel took as its background the First Afghan War – for Flashman an odyssey of self-preservation justified by his being the sole survivor of the Retreat from Kabul.

(…)

George MacDonald Fraser was born at Carlisle on April 2 1925. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse. George was educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy, where his performance as Laertes was distinguished by his unscripted defeat of Hamlet in the pair’s duel.

In 1943 he joined the Border Regiment and served as an infantryman in North Africa and with the “Forgotten” Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was eventually commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders.

Some of his finest writing is contained in his graphic recollections of his Burma service, Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), in which the affectionate portrait of his Cumbrian comrades demonstrated his keen eye for character and acute ear for dialogue. John Keegan, in The Sunday Telegraph, justly called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”.

Read the complete obituary here. Also, obituaries in The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Washington Post.

For more background and information, check out The Flashman Society, and the GMF biography therein.

Thanks for the heads up on this, Nick!