Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige

Cops & Roburs

Tales Of The
Shadowmen 17
Noblesse Oblige
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier
& Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 97816493202478

Okay, it’s that time of the year again when I do a very small shout out of a review to what has now become my third Christmas reading ritual over the years, following the latest Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs novels (okay, don’t panic, I’ve not read the latest Reichs yet for various reasons but that review will hopefully be coming in a couple of months). That ritual is the devouring of the ‘second from latest’ Tales Of The Shadowmen collection from Black Coat Press... never quite up to date for a Christmas present because the latest one is never published until the middle of each December of the year.

So, December 2020’s collection is Volume 17 in the series, subtitled Noblesse Oblige and, like all the others before it, it contains a collection of short stories with the common thread of each writer taking two or more famous literary pulp or comic book characters and having them cross paths in a new tale. Because of the huge amount of different characters, many of them French, I don’t always get all of the references but, as in previous editions, there’s a handy guide to the origins of all the characters, objects and place names in a kind of index at the back for each story, which attributes these various appearances to the original writer who created them.

This volume has the usual interesting kinds of ‘mash ups’ (in the common, current parlance) and so you have characters like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty or Jules Verne’s Robur The Conqueror (you know, The Master Of The World) cropping up or at least mentioned in more than one of these tales. There are also, again as in previous volumes, the next story in ongoing arcs from various authors, acting as sequel segments to their stories in various editions of the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections. So, for example, The Revolution Begins Tonight by Nigel Malcom, which has people like Sexton Blake, The Nyctalope, Una Persson, Doctor Omega, Zenith and Judex fighting a corrupt government, transplanted into the future world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, is the fourth and final installment of this story arc.

And, while some of the combinations of characters are not as odd as they’ve sometimes been in the past... there are still some really nice homages to both the literary and certain cinematic variations of characters. For example, there’s a nice short tale called Only One... by Frank Schildiner about Boysie Oakes (aka The Liquidator, Rod Taylor played him in the movie version of the first book) being brought, by Elke Sommers’ character from the Bulldog Drummond movie Deadlier Than The Male, face to face with the Jean Marais 1960s cinematic incarnation of Fantômas. Or another in which ‘that woman’ from Sherlock Holmes, aka Irene Adler, brings about the downfall of the latest scheme by Robur... in a story called Master Of The Six Gun by Nathan Cabannis.

Perhaps my favourite stories this time around were the more involved and longer tales which spent a while building up the characters. For instance, John Peel’s The Child That Time Forgot, where the inhabitants of Verne’s travelling, mechanical island get caught on Skull Island in the late Nineteenth Century and one of those left behind ensures the survival of baby Kong. But I even enjoyed the ones where I really didn’t know the characters so well. Such as Randy Lofficier’s The Phantom Angel And The Dwarves Of Death, which has Sleeping Beauty, who is now living in the modern world with a fairyland community often hidden from human eyes, helping out a lady detective from a French police procedural TV series called Spiral, as they work to uncover the murderer of one of the seven dwarves.

Plus, as per usual, all kinds of appearances by the likes of Dr. Moreau, The Morlocks, The Liliputians, Dr. Fu Manchu, Rip Kirby, Maigret, Arsene Lupin and also, a brilliant little tale called Doctor’s Note by Matthew Dennion, in which Eric (aka The Phantom Of The Opera) seeks to have his deformity cured, seen first through the diary of Dr. Van Helsing and subsequently through the notes of Dr. Jekyll.

So, yeah, it’s all just delightful business as usual and, once again, I can do nothing else but recommend Tales Of The Shadowmen 17 - Noblesse Oblige to any readers who have a penchant for stories where old characters from different kinds of fiction and walks of life encounter each other. As always, these collections can be a bit hit and miss depending on your tastes, due to the wide variety of different writing styles and, I would say start from the first volume because there are often multi-part stories running through the various collections.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire

 

 

If I Were A Richleau

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Volume 16 - Voire Dire
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612279107

For this very short look at the sixteenth volume in the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections, Voire Dire, I am once again about 16 months late in reviewing it. This is because of the December publication dates which leave me a year behind on these (I like to read them over the Christmas season). And, like all of them, this latest selection of short tales of famous fictional characters teaming up or crossing paths with one another is a bit of a hit and miss affair. For me, this year, it’s rather more of a miss but, well... we all have our favourites.

Of the fourteen stories that make up this year’s anthology, I will single out a few of which I was somewhat entertained by. The Peculiar Cats Of The Sea Of Dreams by Mathew Baugh is something which I would have found dull had it not been for my re-reading of the complete fiction of H. P. Lovecraft last year (reviewed here). I was quite up for it now, though, as a variety of characters are assisted by Randolph Carter in the dream kingdom in which he is known to be found... along with yet another incident with those powerful, battling cats which often come to the aid of their friend.

It’s often the case that I am most entertained by the stories about characters I know nothing of and I don’t know who the main protagonists from at least three sources in Nathan Cabaniss’ story Rage Of Terror are... so perhaps that’s why I enjoyed that one so much. I was, of course, familiar with the main antagonist of that story, as Fantômas makes his first (but by no means his last) appearance in this volume. It was also nice to spot a very young Kojak as a background character rookie cop (given his first lollipop in one of his two throw away appearances here) and also how the tale turned into an alternative origin story for Batman.

There’s a nice Rouletabbille tale by Martin Gately, which serves as a sequel/finale to some others which have appeared sporadically in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series and also a nice futuristic sequel story to one in another volume by Nigel Malcolm where, in a world modelled after Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, The Nyctalope and Sexton Blake hack wall street and offer an exit from under their foes for the Frankenstein monster and its wife, the replicant Rachel from the aforementioned film. There’s even a nice moment in this tale where we find out the sad, future fate of the source of Doc Savage’s gold.

Captain Nemo appears in two tales... one by Travis Hiltz opposite characters such as Captain Haddock (from the TinTin graphic albums) and the Dread Pirate Roberts (from The Princess Bride?) and another, much more interesting one which kind of breaks the rules of appearing in a volume of these specific collections in that it only features one set of characters. I’m guessing that they needed a story to make up the space for this volume because its also a tale which has been published before in a different collection. This one, by Jean-Pierre Laigle purports to be (and of course it’s not) a formerly unpublished chapter from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and it involves the good captain telling one of his new guests of the time that the Nautilus was teleported by accident out of the ruins of Atlantis and into deep space... and how the Captain managed to get himself, his crew and his vessel back to the safety of the waters of Earth.

There’s an interesting story by Joseph Gibson where The Falcon from the 1940s, set in the 1960s and fully aware of his ‘fictional’ on screen exploits, teams up with his brother, among others, to take on Fantômas but, I was somewhat confused by the whole affair because, though it was somewhat entertaining, it’s also a fact that The Falcon’s older brother met his death in one of the earliest movies and his brother took over. What the George Sanders version is doing still alive to seek the assistance of the Tom Conway version (who was also Sanders brother in real life) is anybody’s guess.

Two more I’ll mention... both somewhat problematic for different reasons.

One of these is the very short story The Replacement by Xavier Mauméjean. In it, Bruce Wayne goes to a meeting with Doc Savage and The Shadow to seek their blessing at the start of his crime fighting career. On the way out from his meeting in the Empire State Building, he bumps into Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and Kato, who then go up to the 86th Floor for, presumably, a similar meeting and, I have to say, I really didn’t understand the implications of some of the comments made at this meeting.

The last one I’ll specifically mention is The Stone of Solomon by David L. Vineyard. This is an exciting tale of John Silence teaming up with Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau character but, alas, the regular introduction to the story tips its hat that the version of Richleau present for the majority of the story is not who he seems. Since the reveal at the end of the short is very protracted and teased out, one wonders why the writer should have bothered when we know which character the story is supposed to be about in the tale and that, since he’s not mentoned once in the narrative until the end of the story, it’s obviously him masquerading as Richleau in this one.

And that’s about it for Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire. More characters abound and cross paths... some of whom I know very little such as Darkman and Gordon Gekko (I’ve not seen their respective movies) and others I am more familiar with such as Arsene Lupin or Anne Rice’s vampire character Lestat. There’s also a very entertaining and thorough version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Jane Greystoke (formerly Jane Porter before she married Tarzan) and even a couple of relatives of famous characters, such as the sons of Professor Challenger and Robur The Conquerer.

Actually, I guess I was about 50/50 with this volume which, I guess is not a bad batting average considering the number of writers and the considerable number of character appearances and references which are scattered among the tales. Once again, I’ll look forward to receiving what would have been the December 2020 edition this coming Christmas release and hopefully, fingers crossed, get around to sharing my thoughts with you on that one in about a year from now.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil

League Of Mental Men

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15
Trompe l'Oeil
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612278131

I previously reviewed the first 14 collections in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series here and explained about my annual ritual of receiving the next volume in the series either at Christmas or for my birthday a couple of weeks later. And, as I said before, since these things aren’t published until December each year I’m usually one year behind when I get to finally read these things. It’s a cycle I keep meaning to break (if I ever get time around all the other things I’ve got to read) but for now I will quickly... very quickly in this case... cover the December 2019 release which I read a little while ago, Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil.

As usual, the gallery of stories by different authors on offer, all utilising two or more heroes, villains or supporting characters from known literary (and other) works and then mixing them together in the same stories, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. As is sometimes the case, actually knowing the characters that are being continually referenced in these stories is part of the fun. This is not to deny that, when a really good writer gives these tales a go, even if you are not acquainted with the character of choice, they will be gripping reads. Usually these books are, once you get the first few volumes out of the way, more hit than miss but occasionally you get a volume where it’s maybe not quite as engaging as previous volumes and, I think that’s definitely the case here.

The book starts off fairly strongly following a short, dimension hopping tale called The Vertigo by Daniel Alhadeff. Like many of the characters in this particular volume, I hadn’t heard of the central protagonist and the brief intro to this tale gave him the hint of an atmosphere which didn’t seem to tally up with what I was actually reading. Frankly, the style it had been written in reminded me of an entirely different flavour, that of the Jerry Cornelius books by Michael Moorcock (I reviewed the movie version of one of them, The Final Programme, right here). So I was pleasantly surprised when a character from that series, Miss Brunner, turned up as one of the main characters a little later on... now it made sense as to why the writer was delving into this style.

Another stand out would be when the human-sized spider detective character, Spiridon, goes on a mission where the villain turns out to be another in a long line of Dr. Moreaus, who is also in this tale, responsible for the creation of the giant ants seen in the film THEM!

In other stories you will find the usual mash up of characters and ideas and, if you want to see what happens when Professor Challenger invents time travel, or when a very young Alfred Hitchcock gets involved in a plot involving Rouletabille and Harry Dickson, then this is a tome for you.

I particularly liked a tale by Travis Hiltz set around a time traveller marooned in Medieval France being assisted by the Wandering Jew to help rid the locals of Rotwang, from Metropolis, who was controlling not just Maria but the Volkites from the old Republic serial Undersea Kingdom. Another story has the Nyctalope and others trying to round up Edgar Allan Poe from 1940s America after he has been displaced by 'The Philadelphia Experiment'... a story in which a certain Ian Fleming spots James Bond’s name on a copy of the Field Guide To Birds Of The West Indies and notes how bland a sounding moniker it is (which parallels the real life creation of his famous character of course). They also refer to Edith Keeler in this story and how two other time travellers (which would be Kirk and Spock) allow her to die at her alloted time. You may remember this character played by Joan Collins in the Star Trek episode City On The Edge Of Forever, of course.

Other appearances of note might be the son of Bernard Quatermass, Indiana Jones, Doctor Omega, Liz Shaw, The Master and an interesting Carnacki tale where the Bachus is responsible, in a roundabout way, for the Whitechapel murders believed to have been committed by Jack The Ripper. Not to mention more than a few appearances in various stories for Les Vampires’ number one figurehead, Irma Vep. Another interesting story by Nigel Malcolm called Enemies Of The People is set in Paris in a future that is obviously an homage to the world created by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. In this, after a near fateful encounter with the being that may or may not be the original Fantomas, Judex joins forces with Michael Moorcock’s character Una Persson and the Nyctalope to try and survive the corrupt government that wants the ‘terrorist’ Judex dead.

Out of many of the Shadowmen collections, I wouldn’t say this particular one is a good jumping on point. Asides from taking on some tales originally written for an unpublished volume collecting stories about characters from the Hexagon Comics range (an imprint I’m not familiar with myself), there are also a lot of tales which are follow ups from various yarns told in other volumes... such as Brian Gallagher’s latest chapter in the ongoing history of Captain Vampire or the latest yarn in the continuing exploits of Felifax.

All in all, it’s not the best in the series but, honestly, some of these collections are so entertaining that they can afford to have a few misses every now and again. I’m not a hundred percent sure I was fully on board with the Madam Atomos, tale where it turns out she was responsible for the death of John Lennon... I dunno, it just felt a little in bad taste to me but that’s no excuse not to let any writer or artist do what they want so, yeah, no real complaints from me there.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil is not one of the best entries in the series but regular readers should get something out of this, I think... especially if they are enjoying the specific tales which, in some ways, could be seen as multi-parters. As I said, though, I wouldn’t jump into this one if you’re new to the series. Best to start off with one of the earlier collections if this is the case. Check out the full range of these and many other interesting curios at https://www.blackcoatpress.com if you want to peruse a publisher who has some very interesting volumes on the market.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? The Comic

Look Before You Sheep

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
The Comic - Boom Studios
24 issues 2009-2010
Art by Tony Parker, Adapted from Philip K. Dick

Wow. It’s not that often I get on board with comic book adaptations but this one is absolutely amazing in the ways it’s both faithful and unfaithful to the original source material. Hopefully when I elaborate on the various qualities of the comic, that comment will become clearer.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is probably my favourite novel. I read it maybe ten times over the decade after I first discovered it which was, I’m sure to nobody’s surprise, the week after the movie adaptation, Blade Runner (which is my favourite movie and which I reviewed here) was released in cinemas here in the UK, back in 1982. The first time I read it I had a hard time with it, in some ways (although I loved Dick’s way of expressing himself in words right off the bat). My biggest criticism of the film after first reading it was that it was nothing like the original novel. It wasn’t too long, however... and after a couple more read throughs... that I realised that, actually, the novel was only different in specific sequences of what is actually going on in a scene from moment to moment. There are literally, if you take adaptation as purely that, only two scenes from the novel translated in the movie.

However, by the time I’d finished my degree course in Graphic Design and wrote (and completed a year before deadline... I was that into it) my final major thesis on the specific ways in which the movie actually was, in spirit, a very faithful adaptation to many of the concepts inherent in the original novel, I was completely sold on both the film and the source and how well they complemented each other.

Of course, that still left me with the concept I found the hardest thing to fathom the very first time I read the book... Mercerism.

The empathic religious union which is one of the main concerns of the novel, where people grip the twin handles of their ‘empathy box’ and ‘merge with Mercer’... an old man who rises from the ‘tomb- world’ and tries to reach the top of a mountain while stones are lobbed at him... was nowhere to be found in the movie. Or was it? I think it could be argued that the Voight-Kampff test based on both empathy and the other driving force of the novel - the responsibility to look after the last surviving animals on the planet or, if you can’t afford one, then to pretend you have one by buying a cheap, electronic simulacrum of one so you don’t seem like an uncaring individual - is as much about the point of Mercerism as anything else.

I’m not going to get in to that argument here though because I’m not talking about the movie version... I’m talking about this comic book version which is, I have to say, pretty much on the nose in terms of capturing the spirit and style of the novel. Of course, half the battle is using a lot of the writer’s original words in both the speech bubbles and in the long stretches of narrative used in the comic but... this rendition really is the closest you can get to reading the original novel if, for some reason, you’ve never read it.

Now the look of some of the characters is interesting here. Many of the those in the movie are not quite the same as in the novel but what the artist, Tony Parker, has done here is to give some (by no means all) equivalent characters a very similar look to what they had in the film. So, for example, even though Deckard is married and a slightly different kind of person in the story, he’s made him look very much like the Harrison Ford version in terms of his dress and hair style etc. Similarly, although genetic designer J. F. Sebastian was originally J. R. Isidore, the low IQ ‘chickenhead’ character and humble employee of the maintenance team who service the electric animals under the disguise of a veterinarian hospital... he looks quite similar here to his movie counterpart. Other characters like Roy Batty look considerably less like those in the film but the artist has definitely gone out of his way to cross pollinate the two worlds - the world of the novel and the world of the film - as much as he possibly can, at least in terms of the visual look of the piece.

And the text is really faithful (just basically taking Dick’s words) with layouts that are simply brilliant. The way vast numbers of narrative panels will butt up against each other and also overlap with speech bubbles is ingenious and he uses the shapes created by these overlapping elements as a way of giving the reader a visual pathway to the order in which to read and decode the page, so to speak. Despite some quite cluttered and beautifully artwork which is quite complex in itself, you never really find yourself getting confused in the narrative space of the thing, even in the specific sections dealing with Mercerism.

In fact, the Mercerism stuff as the artist has chosen to render it here is, if anything, even clearer in terms of how the fusion works because you can see it happening as characters are superimposed or half drawn as Wilbur Mercer in those sequences. And this is what I mean when I say that even where the artist has been unfaithful to the concept, it still ends up retaining the spiritual levity of the original. For example, when I first read the novel back in 1982, the empathy box I visualised was some kind of large cabinet and, to be fair, there were only so many ways to imagine it in those days. In this comic book, Parker has used a TV screen to project the image of Mercer and... a stroke of genius this... where the characters go to ‘grip the twin handles’ of the empathy box, here he’s reimagined it as a kind of modern gaming controller like something you’d find connected to a Playstation console... with the twin handles being the two obvious bits you grip on those controllers. This isn’t something Dick in his time (nor I when I first read it) would have been able to predict or confidentally guess (they didn’t even have the first computer or arcade games when this was written) but it really updates the concept visually so it’s easier for audiences to buy into it. This is complementary, visual storytelling done right.

Similarly, there’s a lot of imagination in the way the worlds, characters and situations are rendered. For example, when the androids in the book are talking about the thriving, black market trade, off-world for pre-colonial fiction, you could only really guess at the kind of thing this could be. Here though, it’s lovingly rendered in allusions to science fiction tales across a range of media from our own past in close parodies showing, for instance, the stratosled rockets from the Flash Gordon serials, a scene from the movie version of The Day The Earth Stood Still and a typical pin-up illustration inspired by Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars novels. Which is a really nice touch and the whole comic is full of these lovely little shout outs.

The artist also comes to a certain kind of compromise as to the make up of the androids. They are kind of a cross between the flesh and blood of the movie versions of the replicants but, again, cross-pollinated with the hard, synthetically wired mechanical Andys of the novel. At first I was a little annoyed about this but then I realised that, while Dick was talking about some quite specific machines here... he was also talking about having to give them bone marrow tests as an alternative way to tell if they were androids so, if anything, the artist has tried to clarify Dick’s thoughts into one, stylistic vision. So, in reflection, I don’t really have a problem with it here.

All in all, then, an absolutely brilliant comic book adaptation and a reading experience which was, almost, as moving as the original novel. Okay, so the other bounty hunter from the completely unknown police department, Phil Resch, was envisaged much harder nosed than I recall him from the book but that’s fine... the points he makes and the ideas that he or Deckard or both may actually be androids (something which is definitively disproven in the novel and this comic because, after all it’s about empathising with them, not becoming them) are all here and the androids, unlike the film, never ultimately come off as superior in their ability to empathise with other beings (or rather, their inability). Arguably, this is one of the elements that makes the film great, the fact that the replicants seem to be morally superior to the majority of the humans that populate the movie but Dick’s original intent... the 'absence of appropriate affect' which he was inspired to write about as this novel after reading an excerpt of a journal of a Nazi prison officer complaining that the noisy screams of the people in his concentration camp were keeping him up nights... is equally as powerful and it’s been faithfully adhered to here.

If you like the original novel, you won’t be disappointed with the comic book version of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? If you’ve never read it and are only familiar with the movie version, I think you’ll find this is a fascinating read which will probably make you want to explore the concept further in the book. Either way, this is an excellent attempt at depicting the world of a novel with some pretty hard to adapt sections. Give it a go if you have some time.

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off

Deeley Mouthed Reporter

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off -
My Life In Cult Movies
by Michael Deeley with Matthew Field
The History Press
ISBN: 978-0750985925

This is another great book which was a Christmas present and, I have to say that, of the many non-fiction books about the film industry I’ve read in the last 10 years or so, this one has got the least amount of factual errors in it that I’ve seen. I couldn’t find a one in here which, frankly, make’s a change for the modern market of people writing about the movies. Admittedly, the book is a little bit of a blur of projects in places and doesn’t really take the time and stop for all the little details you might like (what book on a similar subject does?) but two big thumbs up to Mr. Deeley for being a straight talking guy with his words here.

Now, I don’t know too much about Michael Deeley (still don’t, in a way, his personal life barely comes up in this account) and neither do I know too much about the art of producing movies (although I learned some good stuff from this book). However, since he’s responsible for being the main producer of my favourite film ever (Blade Runner) I thought it was about time I found out what I could about the craft of what is, basically, putting together deals and creating the environment for a specific motion picture project to flourish while enabling the director to be able to do what’s required in any way you can. And it seems Deeley is the person to listen to here because he’s produced some of the best of them... although it’s interesting to note that many of them were less than big successes when they first opened.

Perhaps this is why Mr. Deeley has chosen to use the horrible term ‘cult movies’ in his title, although it’s quite honestly clear in a certain passage in his text that he really knows the uselessness, changeability and ultimate redundancy of the term when applied to cinema... I suspect he just threw it into the title due to the fact that it’s mere utterance can produce an almost orgasmic reaction from the more naive of film fans and thus increase sales. That being said, many of the films he has on his books such as The Italian Job, Don’t Look Now, The Wicker Man, The Man Who Fell To Earth and, of course, Blade Runner, do have a very loyal following of admirers, although nowadays in much higher numbers than could ever justify anyone calling them cult films, it has to be said.

Deeley seems, from the way he writes, to be a fairly pleasant man with a lot of stories to tell which, I suspect, didn’t all make it into the book for various reasons. He speaks well of most people he’s worked with but always says things straight... so you won’t read much of a good word for his experiences wrangling Sam Pekinpah on his production of Convoy, for instance. And as for Michael Cimino and his time producing the spiralling production of what eventually became The Deer Hunter... well lets just say that he goes to great length, in the most pleasant manner possible, to point out what a terrible human being that director is... repeatedly and at length, whether he’s meant to be talking about him or not. So that says something about the kind of man he is, I think. I don’t know this but I got the feeling that he was being legally pulled back on saying much of what he wanted to say about certain people but still managed to find a way of getting it out there anyway... which is to his credit, I think. He also has a word or two to say about Julia Ormond as a presence on set but... yeah... you need to read this book yourself if you want to find this stuff out.

As can be expected, the book is full of stories from his times on films with the likes of Michael Caine and Ridley Scott and... also people who were partnered up with him to produce movies, notably Stanley Baker. He tells of the way their producing relationship finished and the tragedy of how Baker actually died, somewhat prematurely. As well as, throughout the book, little stories about other less than fortunate people in the business... such as the stuntman who damaged his leg on a shoot and, when taken to hospital, had the misfortune of having the wrong leg accidentally amputated.

The book has a good lead in and starts off with Mr. Deeley describing both the sheer boredom and tension inherent in having to go to an Oscar ceremony because you have been nominated for something. From there on the book takes a mostly chronological path from his early, post army days to his first jobs within the film industry and beyond. And on the way he drops various names and anecdotes of his adventures in the film trade, from refusing to give in to Warren Beatty’s requests to remove Julie Christie’s sex scene from Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now to defending his cuts to The Wicker Man with the, frankly very reasonable explanation, that if he hadn’t cut it like that to the demands of the people who were distributing it, then the film would never had found its way on to screens at all. In fact, nobody would distribute it in the US at all until Roger Corman allowed it to screen as a double bill with Don’t Look Now (when similar cuts were required to The Wicker Man to secure the deal).

Perhaps my favourite anecdote is of a disasterous private screening in the 1960s or early 1970s of a new film by Joseph Losey. I’m not going to tell you what happened here because that would spoil it but... Michael Caine certainly saved the day on that one. And, of course, I was ravenous for any more information I could find on Blade Runner and, although I knew much of this stuff before when it comes to this movie, it’s interesting to read of how it developed and just which concepts were there and, well, which were not there during the production of the film. It’s clear Deeley also knows how important this film is (and I think he calls it his favourite project at one point) because he takes a few chapters to talk about it which is, roughly, two and a half chapters more than he takes to talk about any of the other productions, it seemed to me.

I also like that he taylored his writing to that movie by the end of the novel too. In his last section, which I believe must be a new addition to this hardback edition because he’s talking about things from 2016, including his thoughts on Ridley Scott's Alien sequel and the, then, upcoming Blade Runner sequel, he uses a few adapted key phrases including the lovely paraphrase... “I don’t know how many years celluloid has left? Who does?” Actually, come to think of it, if you don’t know the original cut of Blade Runner which was released back in cinemas in 1982, before the advent of the various, so called director’s cuts of the movie, then the average modern reader might not pick up on some of those little writing flourishes either. Which is a shame because he’s shown a lot of love for the project here.

And that’s me done on the great Micheal Deeley’s Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off... one of the most British of movie books I’ve read but also one of the most enlightening. Definitely check this one out if you are interested in any of the directors or movies mentioned here... Michael has a story about most of them.

Blade Runner

Errors In Replication

Blade Runner
1982 USA/China
Directed by Ridley Scott
Warner Brothers Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: I doubt if anyone reading this has not seen this masterpiece... but I’m putting this here spoiler warning on, just in case. Also... fair warning, if you’re unfamiliar with the film you may be a bit left out in this article. I’m not going to provide a synopsis... this article is going to be long enough as it is. See one of the cuts of the movie first, then please revisit and read this article again if you have the time.

“They don’t advertise for killers in a newspaper...”

I remember hearing those words for the first time in a cinema in Enfield back in 1982.

Watching the original cut of Blade Runner now, 30 years on, those words still bring a special thrill to me and maybe it’s why the movie in the majority of its subsequent recuts and remixes doesn’t really fill me with the same enthusiasm as this initial version did.. although I’m not at all sure, to be honest, the US theatrical release was the one I actually saw in the cinema that day... my memory tells a slightly different story. But I’ll get to that soon.

I guess it’s hard for people to understand the effect that Blade Runner had on the general population of the movie going planet when it first came out that year, if they weren’t around to see it for themselves... especially now that the movie has become enshrined and recognised as the major artistic work it always was. Some people seemed stunned when you tell them just how badly it was received... or to be more precise... just how indifferently.

Here’s what happened back in 1982...

I was at school (school is something you should never subject children to, for the record) and I used to buy, whenever I could find them, two magazines which kept me fairly up to date with what was my version of the news... the British magazine called Starburst, which I’d been buying on and off (mostly off, as I never had any money) since its first issue, and the classier and slightly bulkier American equivalent of this magazine which had been going for a lot longer, known as Starlog. Now Starlog always used to get the inside dope on movies long before they ever arrived in Great Britain, and sometimes you were left in the cold waiting forever for a film to come out that you read about in Starlog but which, it turned out years later, never got any kind of general release in this country at all (and such was the fate, and why I’ve never seen, a movie I was looking forward to at the time called Heartbeeps... but that’s another story). So for months I was waiting for Blade Runner... but another kid got enthused when his Cinefex magazine arrived and covered the movie, so at least I had someone to talk to about it... although I don’t believe he actually got to see it on its initial release in the end. It didn’t actually stay at the cinema for very long, as far as I can remember.

So anyway, the movie gets quickly released and I go and see it with my parents after school one evening and I really enjoy it. It doesn’t stay for long, as I said, and that’s pretty much the last I hear of it until it comes out on the early VHS sell-through market, a few years later. That’s when I rediscover it again and it really hits me, the second time, just how special it was and why I’d loved it so much the first time around... although one of the things I notice about the VHS version is that it isn’t as violent as when I saw it at the cinema. The scene where Roy Batty squashes Dr. Eldon Tyrell’s eyes back into their sockets seems to cut away (quite poetically, I might add) to an owl looking away from the scene... and another sequence where Deckard “retires” Pris seems to be much less “in your face” too... I remembered a lot more thrashing around and shooting than on that early VHS release and, a few years later, when I get an NTSC US cassette edition of the Criterion edition of the movie, with reinstated violence (this movie had a lot of trouble with the US censors at the time, along with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan), I realised that this version, known as the international cut, is the one I saw back at the cinema when it first came out. Now I don’t know how that happened because, I’m guessing, the UK would have supposed to have been showing the US theatrical cut... but I’m pretty sure my cinema was somehow showing this slightly longer version... I don’t know how that could have been, it’s just what I remember (it wouldn’t have been the first time my local cinema at the time had been sent the wrong print of a film though, to be sure).

So anyway, from about 1986 onwards, there was a time when me and one of my best mates went a bit Blade Runner crazy. I’d watched and rewatched the old PAL VHS version to death and knew the film and dialogue by heart by that point... but what you have to remember is that in those days, a commercial release of a movie in it’s correct theatrical aspect ratio was the exception rather than the rule... and the initial releases of Blade Runner on tape were, well, no exception. I finally figured out I needed to be seeing the thing in its full 2.35:1 aspect ratio again and I noticed one day in my local paper, that a cinema in Barnet was showing a midnight screening of the film. So me and my friend went and we got hooked all over again. I started scouring the local papers for one-off showings, when they really were one-off showings, and lots more screenings followed. Many of them didn’t finish until 2am in the morning but that was okay, we were pretty dedicated to this movie.

After a while, we realised that a small following of people, many of the same ones, were turning up to these screenings and that it was becoming quite popular as a film in a way in which it never was on it’s actual theatrical release all those years ago (this, of course, contradicts the use of the term cult when used in conjunction with film... popularity rules that clichéd notion right out). I even went to a screening at Hampstead where it screened as the second half of a double bill with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, with Rutger Haur in attendance (he was nice enough to sign my storyboard illustrated screenplay for me, which was good of him).

And then something happened in the USA which put Blade Runner back on the map for the bigwigs in the studio marketing departments who can make a difference... and things changed. The midnight movie and repertory screenings of Blade Runner, which had been quite popular for a few years in the UK, had started to happen in the USA and, quite by accident, an LA theatre accidentally showed Ridley Scott’s original workprint, which he’d used to test screen the movies on audiences prior to recutting and releasing the movie in 1982. It was a big hit... it’s a very “different” Blade Runner experience with vast differences to the original release prints and, in some ways, almost like watching a different movie. My understanding is that, when it caught on that this was a different version of the movie playing, all the fans came out of the woodwork for it and it played to packed theatres for weeks, if not months. The film that was a huge flop on its initial release suddenly seemed to have grown some potent, biomechanically engineered legs for the audience of that particular theatre.

Warner Brothers saw dollar signs and got Ridley Scott to put a directors cut out but, sensing the timing was a “now” thing, the deadline was very tight. All Ridley really had time to do, in my understanding of events, is take off the voice over, add a dopey memory flashback of a unicorn (culled from outtakes of his later film Legend, most likely) and remove the entire original ending coda (half assembled from outtakes of the opening of Stanley Kubrik’s opening sequence for The Shining, as it turns out) and that was that. None of the extra footage and shot alterations etc from the workprint edition made it into this new 1991 “director’s cut”, which Warners managed to turn into a win anyway because, as it happens, the film was really well loved by people after all. A lot of fans of the original cut, myself included, were left a little disappointed, though. Here are the five main reasons why:

1. We liked the voice over... which we do understand was added post-preview, much against Harrison  Ford’s wishes but, whatever you think of it, it does give the original cut a certain hard-boiled film noir quality which really helps it along.

2. It’s been widely reported that the revelation that the Rachel replicant has no built-in four year life span in the end sequence was contradictory to everything we’ve known about the replicants up to that point... not true, actually. This flimsy connection only works if you interpret Harrison Ford’s reluctance to tell Rachel about her files as the knowledge that she will only live for four years... but that’s really not acknowledged. What we do know, from the rest of the dialogue in the film regarding Rachel’s origins, is that she’s a special version, possibly pre-Nexus Six or at least an early version, and quite possibly the first to have false memory implants. The main replicants in the film cannot be fixed because the four year life span engineered into them by the Tyrell Corporation is already in place... to quote Tyrell himself, it “cannot be altered in any way”... nobody says anything about not being able to make them last longer from scratch if they wanted to. In fact, the very necessity of them actually having to be rebuilt with a four year life span implies that they already have done so and then seen the need to add that feature in to iron out certain problems. And so on... I could go on all day (and will if you let me).

3. The awful, awful, badly dubbed and completely out of synch sequence where Deckard interrogates the artifical snake manufacturer wasn’t cleaned up in the slightest.

4. We all love the scene where Deckard shoots Zhora in the back a few times and she smashes through all those windows to her death. Especially when the voice-overs are present. It makes you realise just how human (yeah, human, I said it) Deckard is and helps give you a moral viewpoint of the character in much the same way that the “man with a sack” sequence in Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria gives the character of Cabiria a massive insight into herself. But the thing is, even in this version, that darned stuntwoman who looks nothing like actress Joanne Cassidy, appears to be totally ridiculous and mismatched... especially in that dodgy wig! A hard thing to fix (back then) and we certainly wouldn’t have expected him to be able to fix that one post-release... but then again, who does?

5. Reason number five is the dumb unicorn...

A lot of people who compare the movie to Philip K. Dick’s original source novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? say that the movie is nothing like the book. Well... yes and no. Although the “mission brief” is virtually identical, as is at least one scene, the movie goes its own way and lots of stuff is changed. Deckard is no longer living with his wife, and his motivation for hunting down the andies (short for androids) in the book is because he needs the money to be able to afford to replace his electric sheep with a real, live sheep. Animals are scarce in the future and expensive. It’s a social embarrassment not to be owning a real one though... that would be bad. But most people can’t afford to own a real animal so there’s a thriving trade in fake electric animals which look like the real thing. This is what Deckard desires and it is this kinda stuff which drives humanity. That and their bizarre “religious coupling” with a shared vision of a figure called Mercer, who is about to be debunked on the Buster Friendly vid show any day now. This is the background milieu of the novel... and it’s very potent (if a little hard to grasp, first read around, when it comes to the concept of Mercer) and you can’t fail to be moved by the novel... like a lot of Dick’s writing. The bit where Deckard has finally earned enough money to buy/save a sheep only to have it thrown off the rooftop of his building by one of the androids is absolutely soul crushing and brilliant.

For the movie, Scott loses all the references to Mercerism (which are pretty important in the book) and most of the stuff about the animals. What he retains, however, is the empathy and moral values of the novel... and the importance of the animals The animals are all over the film in the form of references to artificial animals... and I’ve had so many people ask me why all these animal references are in the film. There’s no context to this stuff if you’re an audience unfamiliar with the original novel, you see. You have no way of knowing just how important these things are to the main characters... and so it kinda gets lost in translation... but it’s still there, etched into the celluloid in a way that would be very difficult to eradicate, even if one chose to do so.

The book also has a sequence where Deckard is forced to confront the issue of whether he is an android or not. This is a plot by the androids themselves and, it turns out, Deckard definitely isn’t... as he wasn’t in the original cut of the movie. I believe that the idea that Deckard is a replicant in the movie was never supposed to have been in the final version of the film (contrary to what Scott says about it now) and here’s why:

a. If Deckard was a much earlier model of replicant, he wouldn’t have fake memories and, although he wouldn’t be a match for a Nexus 6, he certainly would be a stronger character against the other humans (none of whom are in any way as human as the artificial replicants in the movie... who are pretty much morally superior when compared against all the “real” people in this movie). And you wouldn’t send out an inferior model of replicant to hunt down Nexus 6 models anyway, would you? Logically.

b. Getting back to the “Rachel is an experimental version” notion, the origami unicorn that gaff leaves at the end of the movie makes perfect sense. He’s basically telling Deckard that he should enjoy his time together with Rachel, because she’s a mythical creature, a soulless machine with the overt appearance of a warm-blooded human. If Deckard believes he can have a life with her, then he’s living a fairy tale... and so he’s welcome to it. That’s Gaff’s take on it anyway and hence, the origami symbolism of the unicorn. A mythical, fairytale creature.

When Ridley Scott adds the “memory” of an actual unicorn to Deckard’s dreams in the later cuts, then this kinda makes those elements I’ve mentioned above look ridiculous, flawed and, basically, as poorly thought out as anything in Scott’s Prometheus. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ridley Scott’s artistic sensibilities and Blade Runner is my favourite movie, but I think the notion that this frail, human being who even, in my favourite moment, drops his apartment key card because Rachel accidentally frightened him in the elevator, is actually a replicant is... more flawed in concept than a poor, genetically hobbled Nexus 6 model’s lifespan. If this is Scott’s choice now, well, all I can say is... Morphology? Longevity? Incept Dates? He don’t know such stuff!*

And then, for the movies 25th year anniversary, five years ago, we have the big box set in variant versions with five cuts in it, including a new, 2007 Final Cut, which is (or was, apparently) his last word on it.

There’s some extra footage in it but, to be honest, not a heck of a lot. The good things about the new cut are that he’s finally fixed the interrogation dialogue with the snake manufacturer and he’s also got Joanne Cassidy back for reshoots which he somehow manages to blend in seamlessly to replace the dodgy wigged stunt girl of all the previous versions. However, as far as the bad stuff goes, all the other complaints I had about the 1991 directors cut asides from these two fixes, still stands. This may be Ridley’s latest Blade Runner... but it’s not mine.

So onto the film itself then... if you really have never seen it and you’ve made it this far into this review, well you need to see it quick. It’s astonishing. The world Scott and his crew of artists and effects teams create is absolutely beautiful. It’s a real, lived in city of the future which, although harkening back to the Fritz Lang classic Metropolis, along with the comic-book art of Meobius, is itself a dazzling achievement and there’s no way that films like The Fifth Element and a whole plethora of science fiction movies right up to the present day would have happened in quite the same way without the influence of this amazing film.

The lighting and design of the shots and the placement of both people and elements within those shots are amazing. The vulnerability of Deckard, the very man sent to take out these super-human beings called replicants, is absolutely an untypical, of the time, character and did a lot, I believe, to relax Hollywood ideas about how emotionally and physically imperfect the main protagonist of your movie is allowed to be.

Vangelis’ score, shamefully unreleased in a proper version (and there have been numerous attempts, believe me), is absolutely sublime and weaves in and out of your mind like an earworm 20 plus years before the term was even invented. The grime and sleaze of the streets and the dregs of humanity who are still living on earth and not in one of the “off world colonies” are all given a poetic and somewhat epic feel by the mise-en-scene in general and it’s lifted to a point where it often feels like you are watching a moving version of a precious painting which should be hung in an art gallery. The poetry of the images matched note by note by the beauty of the scoring and sound design. It’s the film where the term “designer grime” originated.

There are things you’ll notice, too, if you are a fan of movie history. The “Environ Purge” screen that Ridley included in the destruction of “Mother” in Alien is recycled here, as is the Sydney Greenstreet character of The Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon, in the toys in the character, J. F. Sebastian’s apartment (Ridley loves recycling stuff... he even recycles future moments of dialogue from later on in the movie and puts it in as a sound sample in Deckard and Rachel’s Voight-Kampff scene). Loads of little details, some intentional, some not expecting to be caught years later by obsessive watchers of the movie... all of it forms a potent cocktail that will have you reaching to the back of your mouth to rid yourself of the little maggot that was lurking at the bottom of the grimy, cinematic bottle. There aren't many movies since this one which have had all their elements, perfect and imperfect, come together to create such a brilliant and awe inspiring artistic blend as this one.

The new Blu Ray edition has a replica spinner which is a lot different from the version which was released with the American briefcase edition from 5 years ago, but the digital content of the Blu Ray seems to me to be exactly the same. You have the five most important cuts: the Final Cut, the Original Theatrical Cut (which is the one which was regularly shown on its UK midnight movie revival), The International Cut (which is the old Criterion version and the one I believe I actually saw at the cinema in 1982), the Director’s Cut from 1991 (now rendered redundant for so many reasons, as far as I’m concerned) and the original preview Work Print, which is the one that caused all the fuss when it was shown by accident and which is, to say the least, a very valuable edition, featuring longer and alternate versions of some of the scenes and some of the original musical temp tracks, most of which seem to come from Jerry Goldsmith scores such as Planet Of The Apes and Alien. You also have some quite exhaustive documentaries, still galleries, trailers and deleted scenes (which one day make the cut in a “beyond final cut” I would guess). All this stuff is valuable to fans of the film and, even though it’s just a duplicate set, by and large, to what we had five years ago, it’s still something which should be applauded and rewarded with high sales. At least when Ridley Scott revises his films, some may say for the worse, he makes available all his previous stabs so you can experience the version of the film that you want to be seeing at any given time... something that a certain Mr. George Lucas might learn from, is my opinion on that one.

There’s so much stuff I could say about this movie that I could literally go on forever. How about I break the film down into 5 minute sections and write a chapter or two on each? This review is already way too long though so if there’s anything you want to know further to what I’ve written here, please leave a comment/question and I’ll try to get back to you.

One thing I will say, though, is that if you’ve never experienced this movie at a cinema, or even a massive screen, and especially if you’ve never experienced it at all... then I urge you to do so. It’s one of the greatest artistic achievements of 20th Century film art. That comes with the caveat, of course, that you try and see one of the original 1982 cuts first... my understanding of people who have just seen the "director’s cut" blind without having seen the original version are that their experience is far less rewarding without those “dreaded” (to some) voice-over narratives. Whatever you do though... go see it. Every sequence is a learning experience on the art of film.

*With thanks to Chew, as played by James Hong in the movie.