Modesty Blaise

Following the success of the Bond franchise, spy films were highly popular in the sixties, and Peter O'Donnell's popular comic strip "Modesty Blaise", which featured the adventures of a glamorous female secret agent, must have seemed like a natural subject for cinematic treatment. This film was the result. The basic plot is a simple one; Modesty is recruited by British Intelligence to foil a plan by gang of jewel thieves to intercept a shipment of diamonds to a Middle Eastern sheikh.

The heroine is played by the Italian actress Monica Vitti in her first English-speaking role- something I have always regarded as an uninspired piece of casting because Vitti's spoken English was not particularly fluent, although she certainly had the looks for the part. O'Donnell's Modesty was always a brunette, but Vitti mostly plays her as a blonde, although her looks, costume hairstyle and hair colour seem to change at random. Male viewers might be disappointed to note that Vitti only spends a short time dressed in the skin-tight leather catsuit which is the hallmark of the Modesty Blaise of the strip cartoon.

Some spy films of the era, such as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", took a serious look at intelligence work, but the majority aimed to emulate the relatively light-hearted tone of the Bonds. Indeed, many aimed to go even further in this direction and treated their subject-matter in a comedic way. "Modesty Blaise" falls firmly into this category. Although the plot involves what in real life would be serious crimes, notably robbery and murder, the scriptwriter Evan Jones and the director Joseph Losey refuse to treat the story with any seriousness, instead aiming for something light, camp and at times verging on the surreal. Jones's script was, officially, based upon a story by O'Donnell, but he departed from it so radically that O'Donnell virtually disowned the movie.

I felt that making the film in this way was a mistake. The Bond films, at their best, have always relied upon striking the right balance between tension and humour. This balance has occasionally been upset; some of the Roger Moore Bonds were too jokey and light-hearted, and the Timothy Dalton ones from the eighties tended to be too heavy-handed, but in the Sean Connery era of the sixties the film-makers generally got it right. The makers of "Modesty Blaise" get it very wrong indeed. There is no tension, and we never care about what happens to any of the characters. Moreover, "comedic" does not always equate to "humorous"; the script is supposed to be light-hearted but never produces any actual laughs.

The result is a film which is supposed to be a comedy-thriller, but which might more accurately be regarded as a thriller which does not thrill and a comedy which fails to amuse. There are some well-known stars involved, such as Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde, but their talents just seem wasted. It is no surprise that "Modesty Blaise", unlike some of the Bond copycat franchises, such as the "Man from UNCLE" series, did not give rise to a single sequel. 3/10

There were some prodigiously talented people involved in this film: director Joseph Losey (responsible for the brilliant Mr. Klein, The Servant, etc), Monica Vitti (of Antonioni's best films), Dirk Bogarde (one of the best actors of the era), Terrence Stamp.

So why does the film fall so flat? Somehow the tone is consistently off. The highlights are Dirk Bogarde's campy Bond villain, Monica Vitti's effortless glamour, the outrageous pop-art set design and costumes. Yet, the comedic bits aren't very funny, the story progresses awkwardly, and nothing engages or pleases the viewer very much.

My admiration for Losey, Bogarde, and Vitti kept me going to the end. Without that angle, I think a viewer would have a tough time with this film.

Camp is hard to do properly. It needs to be excessive, audacious, driven by real feeling. In the end, "Modesty Blaise" is only modestly camp...which is to say, a failure at being camp.

I've never read the Modesty Blaise comics. What inspired me to rent this DVD was a love of 60's kitsch fashions, and an immense respect for Monica Vitti. And while I was baffled by the events in the film -- it didn't seem to make a DAMN bit of sense the first time around -- I still found myself loving it. And on repeated viewings I love it even more.

What's to love? Primarily, the quirkiness of EVERYTHING in the film: the direction is off-kilter (so many things happen in parts of the screen that you're not looking at, and the pacing is bizarre to say the least: a constant string of anticlimaxes that I found refreshing), the acting is deadpan and weird (Bogarde's shifty, psychopathic, and slightly flaky villain...Stamp's disgruntled but cheerful anti-hero...Rosella Falk's twitchy, wide-eyed, barely-restrained violence -- she is a stand-out highlight in the movie...and Monica Vitti, expressing herself mostly through strangely-timed gestures and facial expressions...just check out her "How do you get this off?" routine), the sets are gorgeously dressed (Gabriel's atmospheric island, and the fantastic cell with the spiral staircase), and the plotting is all over the place. Who's double-crossing who? Why are they doing that? WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON? On first impression, I felt the film was just "winging it," making it up as it went along. But far from it...it's elaborately plotted, just strangely presented.

Really, I love this film, and I'm so glad it's seen re-release. It's sloppy, crazy, irreverent, and fun. If you view it as a weird little film -- not as a spoof, or an adaptation of the comic, or a reflection of the times, or as an attempt to be hip or strange -- I think you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

And yes, the clothes ARE fantastic.

A delicious phantasmagoria of feathers, frolics, fashion, false eyelashes, frivolity, fol-de-rol, foppish frothiness and all that was mod and mad in that giddy year, nineteen-sixty-six. Monica Vitti is nothing like the comic book character created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway--the original stories have been reprinted and are worth checking out. In his memoirs Terence Stamp recalled that Vitti was so clumsy it was hard for her to get through even simple stunts. The film is in reality a paean to style and to the triumph of presentation over substance which was a lot of what Sixties fashions were about. Vitti's wigs pretty much steal the show--Dirk Bogarde, in blond toupee as evil mastermind Gabriel, and Rosella Falk as Mrs Fothergill (a sort of sadistic Emma Peel) clean up on what's left. The music is a lot of fun--indeed fun is the operative word here. Serious squares can keep their dull movie critic vibes out!

Fox pinned hopes on 'Modesty' becoming a franchise to rival Bond, but these were cruelly dashed as Joseph Losey's film played to mostly empty theatres in the U.K. and U.S.A. ( it did rather better on the Continent ). Taken on its own terms, its not too bad. Jack Shampan's production design is superb, as is John Dankworth's music, there are a couple of decent performances ( Clive Revill, Harry Andrews, and a wonderfully camp turn from Dirk Bogarde ) and some good moments such as Modesty finding herself trapped in an op art cell. But as an adaptation of Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's comic-strip, its a non-starter. Monica Vitti fails to project warmth and charm as Modesty, while Terence Stamp sounds like Michael Caine on an off-day. The scene where they sing a romantic duet whilst under fire is just painful. Losey was clearly not the right director for this project. Fox made a rather more successful 'girl power' Bond thriller a year later - 'Fathom', starring Raquel Welch.