ROGER MOORE, MONACO GRAND PRIX, THE SAINT, AND ME

Like many of my generation in America, my first exposure to Roger Moore came in the TV series Ivanhoe. This was shortly after Richard Greene had played Robin Hood on the small screen, and I'm sure it was an attempt to echo the success of that show. The two actors had much in common, particularly their spectacular good looks, and, absent Moore's later bonanza from Bond, their careers were similar in lots of ways, with action movies their main staple.

But it was when Moore appeared as the Saint that I was hooked. It was the first of a group of British shows that eventually made it over to the US, followed by Danger Man, The Avengers, The Prisoner; all of which seemed more inventive, stylish, and smarter than most of our own fare. Looking back at old episodes now, I can see the bare-bones nature of most of it, the crazy accents of English actors, and the formulaic nature, but imagine my thrill when I moved to London, and walking from our flat to Regent's Park walked by the block of flats where Templar's Volvo sports car would pull up when he came home.

Moore was excellent as the Saint, a role that has defeated most of the actors who've tried it (Louis Hayward and George Sanders really being the only exception. Moore's Simon Templar is pitched close to his James Bond, with a certain irony, and less tongue in cheek: there is also the occasional sense of a ruthless presence which Sean Connery brought to Bond, but Moore ditched for that role.

Before Bond, there's one Moore role of which I have only a vague recollection, except that it wasn't very good. He played in a TV movie called Sherlock Holmes in New York, with Patrick Mcnee as Watson, John Huston as Moriarty, and Charlotte Rampling as Irene Adler. You can see why I would have watched. I looked it up and the supporting cast included Gig Young (another I've seen mentioned as a proto-Bond), Leon Ames, Jackie Coogan and David Huddlestone. There is also Moore's son Geoffrey, billed as Scott Adler, which must have been his playing Irene Adler's son, by Holmes, but sadly I can't remember that either. Roger Moore certainly wasn't designed to be Sherlock Holmes.

The Saint to me was his defining role, but of course it was Bond who came to define him. I recall Moore's reply when asked if it was true Ian Fleming wanted him as Bond from the start (which was highly unlikely, as Dr No. predates The Saint). 'Fleming didn't know me from shit,' he laughed. 'He wanted Cary Grant or David Niven.' That was Fleming's image of Bond, although Connery actually captured more of the actual character Fleming wrote: especially the cruelty and the sado-masochism  behind the stories. Connery remains unquestionably the best Bond.

But Moore marked a turning point for the role, which was to take it totally tongue in cheek. Right down to his name, with its built-in double-entendre. Where Connery's Bond had been holding his own against the somewhat bumbling Yanks (Felix Leiter & Co), Moore's Bond was a celebration of Brittania well before Cameron and UKIP appropriated it. It made life impossible for those actors who followed, and, like Piers Brosnan, tried to walk the character back toward Connery. They surrendered, and in Daniel Craig created a new Bond, pure Little-Englander, a Nick Hornby character with muscles, playing Texas Hold Em, not Chemin der fer. Moore's grace and sense of irony was lost completely.

I encountered this once, when I met him while working for ABC Sports at the Monaco Grand Prix. This may have been the same year I met Joan Collins, but I don't think so. That's another story, anyway. My function was to sort out problems, of which there were many, with the organisers, so on the Saturday I was in the pits as we got ready to film Jackie Stewart's tour of the course: driving round it with a camera and sound man in the back seat. Why we did this every year was beyond me, since the course never changed, but every producer thought he would bring his own personal touch to it, or maybe get something new from Jackie, who was both a lovely guy and a consummate pro who had probably done it to death the very first time, but always added something about different cars or drivers or weather to try to make it new.

We were just about ready to go when Jackie spotted Roger Moore across the pit area, going into one of the hospitality areas. I know Roger, he told me, he'll do this with me. Can you go get him to do it?'. This was the best idea anyone on the show had had all week, so I went off to the tent, introduced myself to Mr. Moore, and explained. Of course, I'd love to, he said, and we walked back to the car. I may have mentioned The Saint and how much I'd liked it. More than once. Roger and Jackie were old friends, maybe from living in Switzerland (note, the photo above right is one I believe was taken years later). They greeted each other, Jackie explained again, and Roger said of of course again. Then, looking at me and giving just the sort of raised eyebrow I remembered from The Saint, he went straight over to the driver's seat and got in. Jackie got flustered, nearly apoplectic, as he tried to explain he was doing the driving, not Roger, that's what he was here for, he was the driver, and so on. There was a lot of snickering going on which didn't burst into full laughter until Moore got out of the front seat laughing away himself. I just wish we'd been taping it.

Every obituary I saw remarked how much he enjoyed life and with how little seriousness he took himself and his career. It could not have been made more clear in that one sunny Saturday in Monaco.

THE OTHER FALCON: DEVIL'S CARGO

Just by chance the other night, thanks to TV Void, I wound up watching Devil's Cargo, a 1948 Falcon movie I'd never before come across. It's one of three made with the famous magician John Calvert as the Falcon, and because the poverty-row studio that released it, Film Classics, wasn't long for this world, it's now in the public domain.

The curious thing was that in this film the Falcon is called 'Michael Watling', not Gay Lawrence, as he was in the RKO series. This was not a case of early-onset homophobia, but the change must have been made at a late date in filming, because throughout the movie, when characters (including the Falcon himself) use the name Watling, it has been redubbed, and redubbed badly, apparently by one man who simply recorded the word 'Watling' each time without any thought for dropping it into sequence with volume, tone, or pace.

This appears to suggest the change from the Michael Arlen character was a case of running into some trouble somewhere, which is strange because the Calvert films are supposedly based on a radio series that ran concurrently with the the RKO film series, and their Falcon was also called Watling, though he wasn't a magician. This requires some explanation.

The Falcon most of us remember, as played by George Sanders and then by his brother Tom Conway, was basically put on film by RKO to replace the Saint series, in which Sanders played Simon Templar. This appears to have been largely because Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint, was such a pain in the studio backside. So when his contract was up, RKO bought the rights to a short story by Michael Arlen, called 'The Gay Falcon', written in 1940, and simply continued producing stories enough like the Saint for Charteris to sue them. You can link to my article about The Falcon Takes Over, a surprisingly good reworking of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, here.

Arlen was a nice name to attach to the product, bringing both class and a touch of daring. His big claim to fame was his novel The Green Hat, published in 1924 and considered hot stuff in the Roaring Twenties. The 1928 Greta Garbo-John Gilbert film Woman Of Affairs is a considerably bowdlerised version of the story, and the talkie version, Outcast Lady, with Constance Bennett, wasn't much franker.

But Arlen was as slippery a character as the Falcon. He was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, a Bulgarian of Armenian parentage, and despite his status as an enemy alien during the Great War began to make inroads into London literary, and other, society. After the war he changed his name to Michael Arlen, became a best-seller, had a famous affair with Nancy Cunard, and was supposedly the model for Michaelis in DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which makes the choice of the Falcon's name even more interesting. He also wrote the short story 'When A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square', from which the song got its title. What's interesting too is that as his novels grew less popular, he turned to science fiction, publishing a novel Man's Morality (1933) which was generally seen to have borrowed heavily from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published the previous year. Since he might be said to have borrowed Nancy Cunard from Huxley too, this may have been a low blow.

But it lends some credence to the idea that Arlen wrote his Falcon story somewhat influenced by Drexel Drake, who published The Falcon's Prey, the first of three Falcon novels (and one short story), in 1936. His Falcon was called Malcolm Wingate, and seems patterned on the Saint, although with a more hard-boiled style, and an ex-cop sidekick called Sarge. There was also a criminal called Goldy in that first novel, and you may remember Allen Jenkins playing Goldy as the Falcon's sidekick in the Sanders films.

Drake's Falcon, as I mentioned, was on the radio, starting in 1943, while RKO were making their films, but here the character is called Michael Waring, and he works as an insurance investigator. Someone may have read Double Indemnity. I wonder if the Calvert films called him Wingate, and then decided to cash in on the radio series, or whether there was some other name, like Lawrence, involved.

Devil's Cargo is all over the place as a film—Calvert has to do magic tricks and sleight of hand almost constantly, and in fact the movie has a scene, where it's pointed out he has two identical portraits of himself, and one, he says, isn't him but John Calvert. This might be looked at as an early venture into Being John Malkovich territory. He's also driving a Studebaker two-door, which seems almost as unlikely as the Roger Moore Saint's Volvo, which it resembles somewhat, although it looks more like a streamlined version of Commando Cody's helmet.

The film does have its interesting bits, especially Roscoe Karns, looking somewhat under the weather, as a friendly police lieutenant, Lyle Talbot somewhat miscast as a smooth gangster, and Rochelle Hudson doing a very nice job as the femme fatale. Her erstwhile husband is supposedly a Mexican, as played by Paul Marion he seems to be putting everyone on. Theodore Van Eltz isn't bad as the lawyer revealed to be the worst of a larcenous lot.

After the three Calvert movies, the Falcon would make one more return, this time in a syndicated TV series, Adventures Of The Falcon, with Charles McGraw playing him as an international agent, when he would have been better suited to be an insurance investigator. And with that the Falcon was grounded, seemingly, forever. The one thing the McGraw finally got rid of was the strange nature of the Falcon's appeal to women: he is portrayed as both irresistible and strangely childish in dealing with the charms of the women who find him so—and this runs through the character no matter who plays him or which writer he is ostensibly based on. A strange bird indeed.

Note: I'm indebted to the Thrilling Detective website for information about the Falcon and Drexel Drake. You can link to it here.

THE FALCON TAKES OVER, REVISITED

Thanks to the magic of BBC IPlayer, I had managed to catch up with a few of the old Saint movies just before and during the Olympics—a little light relief, as it were. I recommended them on twitter (@carlsonsports, if you're interested) and one follower asked if I could recommend the Falcon films as well. I suggested he try The Falcon's Brother, in which George Sanders' brother Tom Conway replaces him as the lead character, and The Falcon Takes Over, which famously is based on Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. Then I realised I probably hadn't watched the latter in twenty or more years, and I gave it another viewing. It was made in 1942, and it holds up well for a series B-picture.

Transforming a complicated Chandler story into a light-hearted romp could not have been easy, but it is amazing just how much of Chandler's plot remains. The most interesting thing is Ward Bond's (uncredited) performance as Moose Malloy (the Chandler characters retain their names) – not as sympathetic as Mike Mazurki and obviously pumped up by a padded suit, Bond plays it almost like a horror movie villain, a better-looking Rondo Hatton. And it's revealing yet again to be reminded of just how cold and evil Bond could be when a part required it. Helen Gilbert makes a compelling Velma, too: she's attractive in a vampy way (helped by a Veronica Lake hairdo) rather than beautiful, and you can see her allure to Moose as well as to other gangsters. It is something of a giveaway as far as the plot goes, but Gilbert makes the best of it. And she is tiny; Sanders towers over her, and by rights they should have been able to get one shot of her and Moose standing to establish the beauty and the beast nature of their relationship.

Gilbert is an interesting story. Originally a cellist, her entry into films seems to have been via the MGM orchestra and a short-lived marriage (as most of her seven marriages were) from 1936-39 to the much older Mischa Bakaleinikoff, a musical director at Columbia, whose brother Constantin was a musical director at RKO, and indeed is credited as such on The Falcon Takes Over, though the score was actually done, uncredited, by Roy Webb. Her most interesting marriage was to Johnny Stompanato, the Mickey Cohen strongman more famous for being murdered by Lana Turner's daughter, or so the story goes. If you want a good comparison in actual Chandler movies it would be to Martha Vickers, from The Big Sleep—she projects the same sense of raw and dangerous sexuality. Like Vickers she never escaped to bigger roles, and like Vickers her career was over by the 1950s, even though in Vickers' case her performance in The Burglar should have reinvigorated it.

It's also a pleasure to see (unbilled, of course) two favourites in small but crucial parts: Turhan Bay as Ampthor and Hans Conreid as Marriott, where I'd argue he's at least as good, if not better, than Douglas Walton or John O'Leary, from the two straight-forward adaptations. What is interesting is the way that, in this film, you can see much more clearly the way the stories which Chandler grafted together to make his novel don't actually mesh perfectly—particularly the 'Mandarin's Jade' section.

Of course the big problem is the need to make this a Falcon movie. It's no surprise Leslie Charteris sued Michael Arlen for stealing his Saint—the films are almost indistinguishable from the Saint, particularly the Sanders ones, except that the humour is a bit broader (Alan Jenkins in the comic sidekick role and James Gleason as O'Hara, the cop are both great, but the play between O'Hara and his bozo underlings tires quickly). Seriously, how can you hate a picture where Gleason growls at Jenkins 'Awright Goldy, for the last time, why'd you knock off those swamis?' Sanders seems already bored with the role, and his fatal power over women—one kiss makes them faint, literally—belies his character's name, which is Gay Lawrence. There is something unconvincing about the charm of Arlen's Gay Falcon, and Sanders appears to enjoy making him a bit of a helpless buffoon in the face of femininity. That's why Lynn Bari, as Anne Riordan, whose role grows from the original novel, and is far bigger than in the movies which followed, is so refreshing. There's an element of His Girl Friday, which was released the previous year, about her wisecracking character, and the way she treats the Falcon as an equal, more or less. It's something Chandler wouldn't have done, and something which made the Bogart/Bacall combo work so well in The Big Sleep, so much so that Howard Hawks went back and made Vickers' role smaller and played up that chemistry of equals. It's only on a small scale, but this RKO programmer is the better for it.

I'm recovered from the Olympics, but the Falcon made a diverting evening anyway—I should take my own advice more often.