The Light’s On At Signpost. George MacDonald Fraser
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let D’Artagnan hide him under a cloak and use him as a foot-rest while the polishing continues, the pursuer is foiled, and D’Artagnan and the concealed Planchet can exchange their chat in peace. It worked, I typed it up, and spent the rest of the day talking with Christopher Lee on the battlements of the castle where the daring escape of the Duc de Somewhere-which-escapes-me was taking place.
Christopher was in full seventeenth-century fig, rapier, eye-patch, and all, and in no time a crowd of tourists, and sightseers who had come to watch the shooting, were clustering around to stare at him. It struck me then (and still does) that this man was the ultimate film star; he must have made more pictures than John Wayne, even, and the whole world knows him. Beauties and matinee idols may come and go unrecognised, but Christopher Lee is familiar from Indian village to Eskimo igloo, an instant magnet to admiring fans, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer man. When a Spanish lady approached and asked timidly if she might have a picture taken with him, he consented at once, and was immediately surrounded by her family, all beaming for the camera, with Christopher towering over them.
“I never know quite what to do on occasions like this,” he said, while the lady sidled closer, preening. Tactful Fraser suggested he bite her on the neck, at which he sighed heavily and said: “Don’t you start – I gave that up long ago.” Which was true. The camera clicked, he swept the delighted senora a bow, and off they all went, fans for life.
Guy Hamilton told me a story which illustrates the kind of admiration which Christopher attracts. Guy was directing him in the Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun, and the set was visited by Muhammad Ali, professing himself a devoted Lee fan, and requesting an audience. They were introduced, Ali assuring Christopher that he was his favourite movie star, and then he had added: “And I’m gonna dedicate my next fight to you, too!”
This was taken as an extravagant compliment, no more – but sure enough, when Ali won his next fight (I’ve an idea it was the Rumble in the Jungle) and the ring was awash with fans, handlers, and journalists, the champion fought his way to the nearest TV camera and roared into the lens: “I won that fight for Christopher Lee!” Which, as Guy remarked, was not only a tribute to Christopher, but proved Ali a man of his word.
I didn’t stay in Spain, since my job was done, and despite the professionalism with which everyone carried on, you could feel the cloud over the proceedings. My next contact with the film was a press screening in Salford for French journalists (so help me, it’s true), and then there was the London premiere, attended by the Duke and Duchess of York, and the reviews, which were pretty unanimously unfavourable.
I wasn’t surprised. Roy’s death had overshadowed the making of the picture, and the aftermath of recrimination and litigation was no encouragement to the viewing public. But there were other reasons why the film wasn’t a success. Dick had fallen seriously ill before shooting began, and while he made an excellent recovery, the pre-production had been affected, not least because he and I had not been able to go over the script as meticulously as we’d done with the earlier films, and I’m sure the picture suffered in consequence; we never got our usual happy ping-pong of ideas. Talking it over years later we agreed that we could have done better – with hindsight, I should have strengthened Christopher Lee’s part and put more venom into his father – daughter relationship with Kim Cattrall; that would have worked well. And there were other areas I could have improved, too.
Yet I wonder if the concept itself wasn’t the chief flaw. Do people want to see heroes grown old? One can be sentimental about comebacks, but they’re seldom joyous affairs; the contrast with the youthful zest of the past is all too evident, and it could not be said of the third movie, as it was of the M3 and the M4, that they were “one for all, and all for fun.”
Well, you can’t win ’em all, and it’s enough to have done what I believe we did, and make the definitive version of Dumas’s story with the first two pictures. I’m probably biased, but they seem to me to be the last of the swashbucklers in the old Fairbanks – Flynn tradition, and I’d sooner have my credit on them than on Citizen Kane.
* Inevitably there was a third reaction, but not until much later, when I found myself wondering if the scene in which Roy had been killed (a link in which he and the Musketeers had to ride through an archway) had been strictly necessary. Could I have omitted it from the script, or done it a different way? Yes, probably; on the other hand, it had been a perfectly proper scene to write, and the script called for it. Heart-searchings of the “if only” kind are pointless – which doesn’t stop them from crossing your mind, of course.
THE ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER on September 11 was a hideous atrocity, but once the first stunned horror had receded, I confess I was puzzled, dismayed, and at last appalled by some of the reactions to it. These have been discussed and analysed ad nauseam over the past months, and many of the points I made and the questions I raised in a public address before the Fourth Afghan War had been declared, somewhat rashly, by Mr Bush, have since come to be taken for granted, although they were far from being accepted at the time. My views may still be out of step with majority opinion, but since I’m writing for a personal record I don’t hesitate to repeat them, somewhat at random, as they struck me at the time, and still do.
Was I alone, shortly after the tragedy, in finding something tasteless about a three-minute silence which seemed to imply that the victims of a mere terrorist crime, however horrific, were worth more respect and mourning than the dead of two world wars? A trivial point, no doubt, yet it offended me almost as much as the hypocrisy of Bush and Blair in their refusal to explain why the Taliban, for shielding Bin Laden, could be treated as an enemy and targeted with the utmost ferocity, while the Irish Republic, which has given refuge and sympathy to the IRA, could not. We know why, of course: Bush presumably wants to get re-elected some day, and Blair wouldn’t dream of disturbing his ill-named peace process, but the fact remains that the intent of those maniacs who flew the aircraft into the twin towers was no more evil than the intent of the heroes who planted the bombs at Enniskillen and Omagh and tried to butcher the British Government at Brighton. Only the scale of atrocity was different, and scale matters nothing to the dead.
I am not suggesting that Dublin should have been treated like Kabul, merely noting the double standard, which has its roots partly in naked racism – just like the dropping on Japan of the atomic bombs, weapons which by no stretch of the imagination could have been used on Berlin or Vienna.
I was certainly not alone in noting that while a generation of terrorism in Britain (a terrorism largely financed from the United States which expected our help last September), and other terrorisms in Spain and Ceylon and elsewhere, barely merited a mention in the American press, it was a very different story when the US was hit by terrorism – suddenly it was an attack on the whole world, on freedom, on “demaahcracy”, etc., etc., and everyone was expected to fall in loyally behind American leadership.
It was not, of course, an attack on the world, or on anyone except America, and whatever the wisdom of Mr Bush’s war, Britain should have had no part in it. It was simply no affair of ours; we had not been attacked, nor was there any likelihood of an attack until Blair, with extraordinary impudence and stupidity, thrust us willy-nilly into the firing-line, with the patently irrational claim that action was less dangerous than inaction. The propaganda that it was everyone’s fight, trumpeted in Washington and echoed in London, was a necessary lie to coerce Europeans, especially the British, into America’s quarrel – and to give Blair the chance to strut the world stage in a parody of statesmanship, bask in ludicrous comparisons with Churchill while acting as Bush’s gofer, and distract attention from the mess New Labour had