The Land That Time Forgot

The Lost Whirled

The Land That Time Forgot
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK/USA 1975
Amicus
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Ending spoilers.

The Land That Time Forgot is the first of two movies based on a trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, the two sequel books being The People That Time Forgot (also made into a movie) and Out Of Time’s Abyss.

One of the co-writers of the screenplay is Michael Moorcock, perhaps best known for his various multiverse novels about different aspects of The Eternal Champion, such as Elric Of Melnibone, Dorian Hawkmoon and Jerry Cornelius. Which perhaps comes as no surprise because, if memory serves, he was once an active member of the British Edgar Rice Burroughs Society. Of this film he has apparently gone on record in saying that the last 20 minutes of the film deviates wildly from the novel, due to interference by the studio.

The film stars Doug McClure as Burroughs’ hero Bowen Tyler and is set contemporaneously to when the book was written during the First World War (I believe). This one starts off when a German Submarine…  commanded by officers played by the likes of John McEnery and the future reincarnation of The Master in Doctor Who himself, Anthony Ainley… sinks a ship carrying Tyler, his love interest played by Susan Penhaligon, the ship’s Captain played by Keith Barron and a few other of a handful of survivors, who temporarily manage to take command of the U-Boat themselves for a short while.

Various shenanigans and power plays ensue until the two crews pitch up on an island populated by various dinosaurs and cavemen, representing different areas of the island in a strange set of boundaries representing, even on the life at a microbial level, different time periods in Earth’s history. At which point the two surviving sets of crew members start to work together to find a way out of the vicinity of the island as soon as possible.

I remember missing this film at the cinema when I was a kid so, when I saw the sequel a couple of years later, I was a bit confused when Doug McClure’s character suddenly turns up halfway through the film. I must have seen this film at some point in the 1980s but didn’t remember much about it when I finally got around to watching Imprint’s lovely new edition in a box set with three other similar films featuring McClure from this period. A quick shout out to anybody else who bought this Tales Of Adventure Collection 9 set within the first six months or so… the original disc of this film issued in this set has a bad VHS master of a truncated TV print which looks absolutely terrible. You will need to talk to Imprint who have now repressed the disc with the correct print and transfer on it.

Now, I was expecting the effects in this film to look absolutely appalling now but, Amicus were spending their biggest ever budget at this point and they had Derek Meddings on board as their secret weapon. So obviously the miniatures look terrific and the puppet dinosaurs look, mostly, pretty good. Now I’m not saying, as my mum did when we watched this one together, that the effects are better than Jurassic Park but, they’re not bad either and certainly not as bad as later films in this cycle. Although the first shot of the pterodactyls, three of them flying in a circle, did look a little bit like an infant’s mobile hanging above the bed.

That being said, I was genuinely impressed by the illusion created by the camera work and the editing to and from the dinosaurs and was especially impressed by the social commentary in the movie, such as when a dying styracosaurus is filmed in close up and a tear is seen falling from its eye.

And then we get to the ending of the film, which would have driven me mad if I’d seen it in the cinema when it opened. Almost the entire crew leaves in the sub, which gets destroyed in a, possibly sentient, volcano... killing them all. Only Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon are left surviving, stranded on the island in 1916, tossing the flask carrying the narration for the movie we’ve just seen inside of it.

So Amicus presumably had their eye on the sequel, at least. A sequel I remember as not being nearly as good as this movie. But, I have to say, I really enjoyed this one, The Land That Time Forgot, more than I have than at any other time I’ve watched it and I have to give credit to Australian label Imprint for being the only game in town to date where I can actually pick up a copy of this British/American co-production on blu ray. So well done to them.

Elric Of Melniboné - The Elric Saga Volume 1

Rune Messiah

Elric Of Melniboné
The Elric Saga Volume 1
by Michael Moorcock
Saga Press
ISBN: 9781534445680

And so I revisit one of my teenage writing heroes, the incomparable Michael Moorcock, in a series of hefty tomes published by Saga Press which, while not claiming to cover absolutely every story that Moorcock has included his Elric character in (that way lies madness), does its best to assemble, in chronological order, the bulk of the stories, revised at various points by Moorcock to get a greater continuity, since the first of the short stories, The Dreaming City was published in Science Fantasy Issue 47 in 1961. Now there’s a reader’s guide to the series in the back of the book which goes over the difficulty of attempting such a task, where the stories were written haphazardly and revisited, starting in this one with the prequel novel from which this first collection takes its title (which would, I concur, definitely be the place to start).

So, and keeping in mind some of these collected ‘novels’ are made from different short stories originally published in a different order and retitled, this collection collects together Elric Of Melniboné, The Fortress And The Pearl, The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate and The Weird Of The White Wolf.

Now Elric was one of my favourite of Moorcock’s characters (along with Jerry Cornelius and Dorian Hawkmoon) but, of course (and this is where it gets extra complicated), Moorcock created a whole multiverse out of his stories and many, perhaps even all, of his characters are manifestations of each other in their specific plane of existence. So for example Elric, Erekosé, Dorian Hawkmoon and Corum Jhaelen Irsei are all manifestations, in different ‘phase shifts’, of Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion... but if they are then, so too are Jerry Cornelius, Jherek Carnelian and a whole bunch of others. Although nearly all of these characters are, puzzlingly, mostly out of print in this country for some reason or another at time of writing... which is a poor showing for one of the country’s greatest sci-fi and fantasy writers.

All this kind of makes it hard to recommend this series of Elric collections as a jumping on point but, I do have to really because I’ve never found myself able to find a true reading order through this author’s works. Let’s just say then, that the more of Moorcock’s characters you are familiar with, the more rich will be your appreciation of the novels when little overlaps or references to other realms of existence are made manifest in each heroes saga (as they do here). For example, one might want to make oneself familiar with the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme (my review of the excellent movie adaptation of the same name can be found here) before reading The Singing Citadel, which is collected here in the final book in this collection, as the first story in The Weird Of The White Wolf. Or maybe not... since each is as much a different reflection of the other, it has to be said.

Anyway, forget all that and just enjoy a great hero written as a counterpart (and possibly antidote) to the much loved Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Elric is an albino king of the dreaming city known as Imryyr, who questions the cruelty of his people and, due to some personal tragedy (and a really stupid decision on his part when he takes back the throne from his evil cousin), wanders the world seeking out the ways of the rest of the cultures which make up The Young Kingdoms (forged of chaos, as we find in what is slotted in as a kind of opening flashback in The Weird Of The White Wolf, in this particular tome).

When he is king of his land and being one of the last few beings who is a master of the sorcerous arts, he keeps his strength up through a regular intake of herbs but, due to the rocky path towards his ultimate destiny, he has now at his side, the black rune sword Stormbringer (brother of similar sword Mournblade), a weapon forged in chaos and which steals the souls of all it slays and feeds the energy back into the wielder, in this case Elric. However, the blade seems to have it’s own consciousness and, singing its way through battle, will also guide and control Elric’s hand, sometimes deliberately slaying people that Elric does not intend to kill... such as a very important character in Elric’s life (just as Jerry Cornelius similarly, accidentally killed, with his needle gun, the multidimensional manifestation of that character, his own sister, in The Final Programme... Catherine Cornelius, as played by Sarah Douglas in the movie version).

As all Moorcock’s fantasy fiction, the book is full of colourful scenarios, steeped in surrealism and laced with a bleak and ironic melancholy which are the chief traits of the doom laden Elric himself. In the final tome collected here, he meets his more regular companion Moonglum, after he abandons another friend and ally after he has more or less wiped Imrryr and its inhabitant from the face of the Earth, when the dregs of the survivors wake their dragons and slaughter the crews of the ships of his allies.

And Moorcock’s often quotable prose is irresistible and quite often addictive as you read through Elric’s adventures, with such marvellous lines as, “And there are times, Prince Elric, I’ll admit, when a decent piece of steel has a certain advantage over a neatly turned phrase!” And, of course, full of interesting ideas... Elric’s cruel race has a choir of slaves surgically altered so that each can sing only one note perfectly, for example.

Plus the odd surprise such as, when attacked by a hideous demon thing, it’s one sorrowful utterance of “Frank.”, which means nothing to Elric, is a signal to readers that this was a multiversal manifestation of Jerry Cornelius’ brother Frank, in this plane. Another welcome surprise being in the first story in the collected tome, The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate, when Elric, Erekosë, Hawkmoon and Corum team up (quite literally in one sequence, where their bodies metamorphosise into a combined, black demonic entity) to stop the multiverse from ending. And of course, the wrangling of that encounter... since this is the second time Elric and Corum have met from Corum’s point of view but, not from Elric’s, who counts this as his first meeting (not that he can remember this adventure when it’s done, anyway)... is as deftly handled as it could be.

So for all it’s complexities and references, I would still heartily recommend the Saga Press edition of Elric Of Melniboné - The Elric Saga Volume 1 as a great place to start off and familiarise yourself with Moorcock’s mercurial multiverse, for sure. I now have four books of their ‘trilogy’ by Saga Press (see how complicated it’s become again already, four out of three, due to Moorcock releasing a new Elric tome just last year) and so I will report back on those when I get back to them.

Michael Moorcock's Legends of the Multiverse

Soul Duggery

Michael Moorcock's
Legends of the Multiverse
Edited by J. M. Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612272726

For a book with such a title as Michael Moorcock’s Legends of the Multiverse, it’s surprising how little of it is actually written by Michael Moorcock...

But that wasn’t exactly unexpected and it does kind of uphold a certain tradition in terms of where this particular writer sits with his phenomenally successful characters. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

I first discovered Moorcock in the early to mid 1980s. I managed to somehow see a rare television screening of the excellent screen adaptation of the first of his full length Jerry Cornelius novels, The Final Programme... which I reviewed here a number of years ago. Now, Moorcock reportedly hates this movie but, I have to say, if I’d not seen it then, in all likelihood, I wouldn’t have ended up reading about 60 of his novels over the next few years, picked up along with many other writers’ works from various second hand bookshops at between 10p to 30p a shot. Some of his ones I even bought brand new... which is saying something for those days (in actual fact, what it’s saying is that I couldn’t find a cheaper way to read some of these things).

I soon discovered two of my other favourite Moorcock characters too. There was Elric Of Melnibone, the albino king and last of his people who travels The Young Kingdoms calling upon Arioch, The God of Chaos, to help him in times of trouble and carrying the black rune sword Stormbringer... which drinks the souls of Elric’s enemies and, sometimes, friends and lovers, in it’s insatiable thirst for more souls, some of which it channels back to it’s current owner to keep strength in the albino’s weakened limbs.

And my other favourite was Dorian Hawkmoon, who had a black rune stone planted as a third eye in his skull to feed back pictures of his deeds to his enemies, so they could keep tabs on him... and his quest to be rid of this curse and destroy those who would harm him and his friends. I’m sorry if that’s vague but... it’s quite a number of decades since I read these but I would very much like to read them again. I remember the Hawkmoon tales were the first time I’d come upon the concept of an ornithopter.

Of course, I also read others of Moorcock’s heroes such as The Chronicles of Corum, The Dancers At The End Of Time and Erekose and, after a while, you start to realise that there’s a common thread to these tales. For example, some of the events of the first Jerry Cornelius novel and various Elric adventures are echoed in both dialogue (“What’s the hour?” VS “What time is it?” etc.) and events such as the inadvertent death of each one’s sister by their own hand - a needle gun dart through the heart for Catherine Cornelius and a run in with Stormbringer for Elric’s sister. That being said, especially in terms of the Cornelius chronicles, nobody stays dead for very long but then again, it’s really hard to tell just what the heck is going on in the Cornelius books from moment to moment anyway and, perhaps, that’s a big part of their appeal to me (after merging with Miss Brunner as a hermaphroditic creature leading mankind to its own death at the end of The Final Programme, Cornelius turns up alive and well as a negative impression of himself with black flesh and white hair in the next story... but he’s back to his normal look in the third novel, The English Assassin... although he does spend pretty much all of that novel inside a coffin... but that’s another story).

Anyway, there’s a point you get to with Moorcock, when heroes start converging on a place called Tanelorn, in whichever book from whichever series you are reading, that you realise that all his characters are manifestations of the same character, The Eternal Champion, in different incarnations in a vast ‘multiverse’. And when Elric blows a mythical horn and brings an end to all the different dimensional worlds in one fell stroke, there is nothing left of any of these characters or their universes. But, of course, Moorcock being Moorcock, this doesn’t really phase any of them for that long, it seems to me.

So here I am right where I came in, with a timely reminder that Michael Moorcock’s Legends of the Multiverse doesn’t have that much of Moorcock himself in it. I didn’t realise it until it was in my hands but this tome is an imprint of Black Coat Press, who bring out some unbelievably cool short story collections by various genre writers mixing up various heroes and villains from every walk of literature, cinema and TV and kind of scramble them up in unusual combinations, calling it Tales Of The Shadowmen. So you have things like young Bruce Wayne meeting The Shadow or Judex... Fantomas, Arsene Lupin  and Diabolik all sharing a story. Or Barbarella kidnapping Captain Kirk. Or something unusual going on with Babar the elephant. I read one of these annually  produced collections every year (pretty much every Christmas) but I’m always a year behind so I never quite get around to reviewing them for this website. Maybe next year will be the year I catch up and write that review.

Anyway, the two tales from Moorcock which turn up in this volume are actually reprints of previous Tales Of The Shadowmen collections (Kim Newman’s Angels Of Music also started life in the pages of these editions, for those of you who are interested in such things)... so I’d already read those. A lot of the other stories are from a proposed French edition of new Elric stories which never came to fruition. About half of those stories only made it into this volume because... and I don’t know why this was... the remaining writers didn’t want their stories translated into the English language, apparently. Which is curious, to say the least.

I personally have no worries about other writers handling Moorcock’s characters and, apparently, nor does Moorcock. Which kinda makes sense because, when Jerry Cornelius was a star character in the Moorcock edited anthologies of new science fiction writing in the 1960s called New Worlds, he made a present of his Jerry Cornelius character to a number of writers who kinda did their own thing with him. So, in a certain way, this book is almost harkening back to tradition with the way it’s been put together.

It would be fair to say that the book is pretty Elric-centric and you would kind of expect that given the origins of most of the tales here but it doesn’t get too wearing. There are a few Cornelius tales and even a, fairly strange, Hawkmoon story set both before and after (depending on which character you are talking about within the story), the events that transpired at Tanelorn.

And most of the tales are actually quite good and, surprisingly, a fair few of them are pretty much in the style of Moorcock himself. The Elric stories are a bit of a cliché most of the time... you can figure out, for instance, that a character who he goes out of his way to protect in one story is going to become a victim to his savage rune sword before the story is done. Tragedy, death and ambivalence continue to follow Elric and his faithful companion Moonglum through story after story and... yeah... most of these are pretty cool.

There were, however, three stories which I found especially impressive...

The first of these was by Matthew Baugh and it’s called The Garden Of Everything. This one is an additional tale to the chronicles of Corum, who was a character who I never really liked as much as some of the other incarnations of The Eternal Champion but Baugh weaves a quite moving and interesting story of innocence, love, fatherhood and loss which takes place all over the space of just a few days. The writing is sensitive and definitely kept me guessing all the way through.

The next one I’d highlight would be Paul DiFillippo’s Elric tale, The Stealer Of Marketshare (after Moorcock’s own The Stealer Of Souls). This is a curious metaphorical story which takes the hero of The Young Kingdoms and sets up a satire about Amazon.com and the way it conflicts and swallows small businesses. If that sounds silly, well... yeah it is but, somehow, the writer manages to make this thing work and, it has to be experienced to be appreciated, I think.

My last ‘one to write home about’ story in this collection would be Johan Heliot’s The Music Of Souls. This has the main protagonist, a music reporter for a small newspaper in the 1950s and, in particular, in Liverpool, a few years before the emergence of The Beatles. It’s a fascinating look at the music scene of the time and the main protagonist spends his time following a version of Elric who is a session musician working with numerous new bands at places like the famous Cavern Club. Except the albino rocker carries with him his black rune guitar with which, after a while, he tends to slaughter his fellow band members and absorb their souls as he might when Stormbringer was a sword and not a musical instrument. It’s a really great piece as we learn how Elric uses the main protagonist as a kind of Moonglum figure, to chronicle his misdeeds while he is in our dimension. Really interesting stuff.

And that’s me done on Michael Moorcock’s Legends Of The Multiverse, I think. A great little read and, if anything, it’s reminded me what I’ve been missing over the years so I think a Moorcock re-read may well be in the cards sometime over the next few years... once I can get the book backlog under a little more control. Definitely recommended for fans of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, for sure but probably not a good jumping on point for those unfamiliar with his work... but I guess that’s the nature of the beast... or perhaps the nature of the catastrophe. My watch has stopped.

Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles

Terra in the Philes

Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles

by Michael Moorcock

Publisher: BBC Books

Language English

ISBN: 9781846079832

I’ve been "umming" and "ahhing" about what to write about this novel since before I finished reading it. This is a tough one for me and I feel really split. Here’s why...

When I was a kid I read those brilliant old Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories (starting with Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowman) that were on sale literally everywhere books could be bought.I literally had around 60 of them at one point... many of them put together from an old second hand book shop and some of the rest bought brand new, probably from W. H. Smith’s at Liverpool Street Station... they were always a rich source of good books back in the early to mid-seventies. Shops weren’t as bereft of interesting stock back then like they are nowadays. And this was, of course, at a time when I was not quite yet old enough to recognise the “evils of the novelisation” that were embedded in the unwary general public’s consciousness... or as Woody Allen referred to tie-in novelisations in one of his true masterpieces, Manhattan, “an American phenomenon that is truly moronic”.

I stopped reading these things in the mid-80s and “put away childish things” as the biblical reference sometimes goes, depending on translation... well okay, I still am quite, um, childlike in my approach to life to be honest but... whatever... the practical upshot is that I stopped reading Doctor Who novels back in the 80s sometime. Okay, my first point hopefully made.

Part of what replaced these novels for me, along with the works of my favourite writer Philip K. Dick, were the works of one of my all time favourite writing heroes Michael Moorcock. His Jerry Cornelius and Elric and Hawkmoon tales were completely captivating and rivetting to me in those days (and probably still would be if I had time to read them all again these days). Anyone who has read my review of the movie version of Michael Moorcock’s first Jerry Cornelius novel The Final Programme (right here) will know how much I revere the man... so when I heard at a Q&A session with Moorcock after that particular screening in London that he’d just written a Doctor Who novel... well it was a no brainer for me to put it on my Christmas list, that’s for sure.

Santa came along bearing various gifts including an abundance of reading materials and, since I don’t get time to read these days (no more long train journeys for me at present) it’s pretty much taken me this long to get to it. But get to it I did and, although I can’t say that I didn’t exactly enjoy it, it was certainly less than the novel I’d been expecting (especially after I’d heard that a certain “Captain Cornelius” would be appearing in it.

Now then... I couldn’t absolutely put my finger on how to express my feeling as to why this novel fails in some ways, until I read one of Hypnogoria’s reviews of a Doctor Who episode some weeks back (Hypnogoria’s site can be found here) in which, when talking about the great Neil Gaiman, who incidentally is quoted giving a positive review on the front cover of the UK hardback edition of Mr. Moorcock’s book, he said

“And as much as I admire the the man’s works, I was also worried whether he could actually produce something that felt like ‘proper’ Doctor Who. After all, many name authors have written pieces for universes other than their own and, sad to say, have come a cropper (names withheld to protect the guilty).”

I think the pertinent part of that little chunk is the phrase “ written pieces for universes other than their own" because, what I think Mr. Moorcock has given us with his novel is, in fact, fine as a stand-alone novel... just not a very good fit with the franchise/universe he’s been asked to write about. And that’s not necessarily his fault either.

Ok, so allow me to elaborate just a little on this.

Bear in mind I’ve not exactly had any experience at all of this, so my guesses at the process and effect of writing fiction here may be best taken with a pinch of salt. When you’re writing for a long established character you can probably get away with being a little off and making slight errors of judgement because I suspect the reader’s familiarity with the characters is enough to smooth things over and allow the words coming out of those characters mouths and the actions and mannerisms of those characters to kind of adapt themselves in the reader’s brain and fill in unconsciously over any slight discrepancies in their words and deeds. However, there needs to be at least a good sense of the characters inner and outer workings there in order to kick start this imaginary process in the reader... the author has to meet them at least 50% of the way I’d imagine. But in The Coming of the Terraphiles... things just felt wrong. The Doctor was doing and saying, it seemed to me, most unDoctor like things... and Amy Pond wasn’t a whole lot better either. I realised as I was reading this that The Doctor isn’t as much of a blank cypher as I’d imagined he would be because, it has to be said, this is all set in a very Moorcock universe.

Moorcock’s multiverse is a concept which The Doctor has much familiarity with in this novel and it kinda grates against what you know of The Doctor from TV. Since the multiverse seems to play such an important role in the lives of all beings in the galaxy, one almost wonders why you’ve not heard him speaking of it before in the TV show... seeing as it’s pretty much all that’s talked about here. Also, the sense of whimsy and love of the ridiculous, while all good Doctor traits, are just way over the top on what we’d get out of the character on TV. But... and this is where it gets interesting... I think I know why this is all a little out of kilter.

When I saw Mr. Moorcock doing Q and A after a screening of The Final Programme at the NFT last year, he explained that he’d written The Coming of the Terraphiles before the Matt Smith and Amy Pond episodes had even been aired (and possibly before they’d been shot) and that all he had to go on were detailed descriptions of the characters etc. Well that’s a pretty big burden placed on the writer right there if you ask me... I’m sure Mr. Moorcock felt no incongruity between what he was writing and what would eventually become the Matt Smith incarnation of The Eleventh Doctor because, frankly, he had no idea really of how they should be written.

As such then... I’m surprised he did as well as he did. It’s still not great Doctor Who, however.

What it is though, if you forget about the clash between the characterisation in this novel as opposed to what eventually became the on-screen counterpart, is a very entertaining Michael Moorcock novel. The story of a hidden object suspected of being the prize in an intergalactic games competition which claims The Doctor as one of the team players (he's particularly good, it seems, and more superior than the two Judoon competitors he goes up against, in the difficult sport of cracking nuts with a sledge-hammer) in what is pretty much a multiversal road movie style plot (or is that spaceway plot?) is not going to fail to bring a smile to the face of even the most jaded reader, with its sly literary references peppered constantly throughout... including hefty references to the legend of Robin Hood (especially the Errol Flynn version) and also some welcome references to Barsoom (which I guess you could expect from Mr. Moorcock, given his associations with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs).

So even though I didn’t enjoy my return to reading the good Doctor’s adventures in print, I did at least get a smashing Michael Moorcock novel out of it (which wouldn’t look too out of place with the style of his Dancers At The End Of Time series I suspect, from what I remember of them nearly three decades since reading them). Definitely a big thumbs up if you’re a fan of Moorcock but not such a big thumbs up if you’re a fan of Doctor Who.

Hopefully they’ll give him another crack at the character soon, is my hope.

The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius

The Final Programme 1973 UK

Directed by Robert Fuest

Last night I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for a rare cinema screening of one of my all-time favourite films... Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme. The film showed as part of the British Film Institute’s “flipside” strand of screenings and was attended by the writer of the source novel, the one and only Michael Moorcock... a science-fiction and fantasy legend for many of his readers (this one included). I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the BFI http://www.bfi.org.uk for giving the general public at large this rare screening.

The Final Programme is a very special film to me... it is a film which was responsible for changing the way I think about things... that is to say, it changed the way I see life and the attitude through which I try to negotiate the challenges of surviving in the “modern” world. Hmmm... enough of that for a moment... let’s get to the film...

The Final Programme is a fairly low budget affair but it really does look like dynamite due to Fuest’s “design” of the film. Based on the first novel in Moorcock’s sequence of Jerry Cornelius stories (another incarnation of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion) it is actually, in my very humble opinion, not that far removed from the tone of the book. Mr. Moorcock was on hand to once again tell the audience how much he hates the movie but I’m still surprised that his attitude to this hasn’t mellowed over the years because I think this film really isn’t THAT far removed from the original novel. Certainly the scenes left out are real humdingers but you’d need a much larger budget to be able to bring some of that stuff to life and I’m really not sure a cinema audience would have been any more appreciative.

It’s been years since I read the novels and I love that in The Final Programme, for example, Jerry Cornelius can throw a party and it lasts for a year or two before everyone goes home... but trying to do that on screen would need an especially deft hand at the wheel. And I think a lot of the more overt sexual ambiguities would possibly have turned the audience off more, in some ways. The Hindu Professor Hira turns up in the film a few times in flashback, for example, but it is not made clear that Jerry Cornelius is also sharing his bed with him. And Jerry’s incestuous sexual relationship with his sister Catherine is only hinted at a few times in the movie, and then the references can be easily missed unless the audience is paying particular attention.

Certainly, there’s a lot to distract the attention of any audience to this particular film. The shot designs and general mise-en-scene is absolutely exquisite. There’s a long breathtaking tracking shot in an aircraft hanger as four people walk towards the camera, stop, start walking again and then turn with the camera still tracking them (over a space of several minutes) and I always wonder how they managed to keep the thing in focus quite so easily. Lots of low angle shots, shots through foreground shapes, psychedelic washes... The Final Programme has it all and in many ways the way it is shot reminds me of Sydney J. Furies excellent work on The IPCRESS File - a film which, at the time, was accused of being “over-directed”. Mr. Moorcock, who it has to be said was quite witty and entertaining in his marvellous Q and A session at the end of last nights screening, does not share my praise of the director... taking a lot of opportunity to run both him and the film into the ground, it has to be said. I can understand his attitude to some extent... after all, if something you worked hard on is “borrowed” by somebody else and then had things changed and bits chipped off it you're bound to get depressed... but you know what... if it wasn’t for this movie I wouldn’t have discovered the joys of Michael Moorcock's great literary legacy. After I first saw this film on TV in the early eighties, I spent the next year and a half scouring second-hand bookshops and putting together a selection of about sixty of the great man’s novels which I read back-to-back... eating and sleeping Moorcock while the rest of the world slipped out of my sphere of interest. So maybe he shouldn’t be so harsh on the movie... I’m sure I’m not the only fan he made off of the back of it.

The acting in this film is absolutely magnificent too. Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius, with his frock-coat, frilly shirt and black painted fingernails, is absolutely brilliant. As is the fabulous Jenny Runacre as Miss. Brunner... a dominatrix in sheeps clothing if ever there was one. And with short turns by people like Sterling Hayden, Hugh Griffith, Ronald Lacey and Sandra Dickinson in there... you really can’t go wrong. The film also features genre-queen Sarah Douglas (Superman, Superman 2, V) in a very early role as Catherine Cornelius... although she doesn’t get any opportunity to shine in this one.

The film is full, too, of epic, quotable lines... “Well it’s got to be a brain washing machine” and “Well, for a start, I'm going to sit here and get smashed out of my mind. And I also have it on very good authority that the world is coming to an end... so I thought I'd go home and watch it on television.” And it’s a cold audience indeed who can’t crack a smile at some of the novelties on display in this little piece of celluloid heaven.

It also has an absolutely gorgeous musical score by Paul Beaver and Bernard Krause which has never seen the light of day in any commercial format. This is a crime against all lovers of good music and a CD should be made available immediately. It even has saxophone solos performed by jazz legend Gerry Mulligan... I would have thought the jazz brigade would have at least ensured a release of this by now. I know the master tapes must still exist because crystal clear excerpts from the score turn up on the menus on the beautiful Region 1 Anchor Bay DVD of the movie... now sadly deleted but worth every penny if you can still find a copy. The commentary track between Robert Fuest and Jenny Runacre makes for fascinating listening.

So there you have it. My hero Michael Moorcock absolutely hates this film... but I think it’s fantastic and, still, way ahead of it’s time and without it I probably never would have discovered Moorcock in the first place. If you get a chance to see this quirky, underrated movie you should definitely take the opportunity... I watch this movie every year and never get tired of it. And thanks to the BFI, this year’s viewing was on a big screen with the author in attendance... it doesn’t get much better than that!