‘Flash Gordon’ or — The Persistence of Memory?
My dad and I were blasted back in our seats by the sheer force of the multi-coloured visuals as Brian May’s electric guitar kicked us in the chest with the force of a sonic boom. I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing ‘Flash Gordon’ (1980) for the first time, Glasgow ABC cinema circa 1980, when I was ten years old.
Except what do you say about ‘Flash Gordon’ that hasn’t been said already before other than “It’s really good!”? We all know the story — Flash and Dale take a trip with Dr Hans Zarkov in his spaceship to the planet Mongo where Flash becomes the catalyst for bringing the warring kingdoms of Mongo together and inspiring them to stand up to and defeat the tyrannical Emperor Ming the Merciless. It’s bright, campy fun.
Yet my desire for revisiting ‘Flash Gordon’ was as part of my own mini Mike Hodges retrospective and this film was the touchstone for doing so as I’d been restlessly baffled as to how the same guy who directed this also directed the nihilistic and brutal ‘Get Carter’. Was Hodges a serious filmmaker who took the occasional foray into humour or a humorous director who could sometimes get serious? Turns out it’s a perfect blending of both.
The comedy in ‘Flash Gordon’ is knowing, smart and fun. This shouldn’t be a surprise as the script was by Lorenzo Semple Jr., a giant of a scriptwriter and responsible for the original 60’s Batman. It’s this style of keenly written, yet loving, escapism Semple Jr. excelled at. His script is also insanely economical with all the fat burned away allowing the narrative propulsion to zip along. Indeed, it wasn’t until re-watching ‘Flash’ this week I realised it’s almost two hours long; it always felt 90 mins… max!
Not only that but legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis was prepared to put a lot of money into this project, his original choice of director being Federico Fellini. Fellini dropped out but his regular costume and production designer, multiple Oscar winner Danilo Donati, remained. If you’ve ever wondered why ‘Flash’ has such a striking, phantasmagorical look it’s pretty much down to Donati.
This wouldn’t count for much if the ‘Flash’s story didn’t hook us but it does. Hodges knows, wisely, that ‘Flash Gordon’ is a ticking-clock adventure which immediately keeps the tension bubbling away — it’s about saving the Earth and saving the Earth means stopping Ming which means teamwork. Combine that with the humour, fantasy, sexual overtones (of which there’s a lot), a pounding rock score and it’s a heady mix to pull together but Hodges, somehow, manages to bring ‘Flash’ into landing with tip-of-a-spaceship-through-the-chest accuracy. He should be lauded for making ‘Flash Gordon’ comprehensible let alone wildly entertaining.
Sure, there are some very forgivable flaws, notably the acting of the two leads but Sam Jones isn’t irredeemably wooden and, besides, he just needs to be dumb and good-looking. Plus, it’s the supporting characters who get all the, well, character and each of them have the time of their lives with the material they’re given: Brian Blessed is all roaring laughter and hairy chest as Vultan; Dalton is dashing as Prince Barin and playing it so straight you feel he’s still performing Shakespeare; Ornella Mutti is almost illegally sexy as Princess Aura (and delivers not a bad performance either when she’s being tortured. It’s a committed part even when she has to shout out “Not the bore-worms!”); Max von Sydow is maybe having TOO much fun as Emperor Ming, Peter Wyngarde even MORE so as Kyltus, although my favourite is Topol as Dr Hans Zarkov (I adore the quick look he gives Klytus, worried that they have rumbled that the brainwashing hasn’t worked when he gives his name as Hans, not Agent, Zarkov).
The film is packed with wonderful moments of which here’s just a few — the flight into space, “This Ming’s a psycho”, the football fight (“Are your men on the right pills?”), the execution of Flash, Aura flying Flash to Barin (have clouds ever looked more beautiful?), the Arborian initiation, Zakov having his brain cleaned-out, the fight on Vultan’s wobbly-spike thingy (“Pass me the remote control”), war rocket Ajax emerging through the clouds (my favourite shot in the film), the death of Klytus, Ming’s wedding vows (I always forget how funny they are), the climatic attack of the Hawkmen and, finally, the entire ending and everything about the whole movie.
Enhancing all this, as if all this wasn’t enough, is a soundtrack by Queen and Howard Blake that’s so over-the-top, so high in energy it’s over powering. They’d never really been a soundtrack like this before. There’d been rock scores but nothing quite like this. Not that it’s all full-on rock with most of the soundtrack’s best moments being the quieter ones such as the gorgeous ‘In The Space Capsule’ followed by its reprise as a love theme in ‘In The Cell’. It’s gorgeous. This keeps Queen’s usual bombast down to a surprising minimum with Howard Blake doing great job incorporating their material into his work on the soundtrack as a whole.
But when Queen do kick off they kick off big time and blow you back in your seat. Has Brian May’s guitar ever sounded better, so phenomenally punchy, then during the attack of the Hawkmen on war rocket Ajax? It’s an incredible music cue which lifts all the insanity already happening on screen — the laser blasts, the hallucinogenic cloudscapes, Vultan shouting “Dive!”, the spaceships etc — to a level that leaves you giddy with the rush of it all. As I said, they’d never really been a soundtrack before quite like this and, what’s better, Hodges never once let’s any of it feel like a glorified music video (I’m looking at YOU ‘Highlander’).
‘Flash Gordon’ is just great and because it doesn’t use CGI the effects, and the entire look of the film, have aged beautifully. It’s a movie that knows what it is and what it is is escapist fun. Watching it in the context of Mike Hodges other films has also been illuminating as the guy’s obviously a director with skill, a highly tuned cinematic eye and a very strong, sly sense of humour and all these come together in ‘Flash Gordon’ perfectly. It’s a movie that the world, and my memories, would be poorer without. It’s a memory I cherish.
