by Mark Edlitz
If George Lucas had succeeded in his attempt to make a Flash Gordon movie, Star Wars might not have been made. Lucas was inspired by the 1936 black-and-white, 13-episode serial version of the movie and its two sequels, which starred the dashing Buster Crabbe and was based on Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero. So after the success of American Graffiti, he set out to turn his childhood hero into a feature film. But when Lucas couldn’t come to terms with King Features Syndicate, the original distributor of the strip, he channeled his passion for rocket ships and ray guns into creating his own far, far away galaxy. Star Wars, of course, turned out to be a massive hit and the rights to Flash Gordon remained ripe for the taking.
Dino De Laurentiis, one of the last of the great film moguls, thought that he had a blockbuster in the making when he optioned the rights to the perennially popular character, and he assembled an impressive team of filmmakers. He hired Mike Hodges, who directed the taut and much-praised thriller Get Carter, to helm the film. Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who wrote Papillon, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford, was enlisted to pen the script. And two-time Oscar winner Danilo Donati, a frequent Federico Fellini collaborator, was tapped as the film’s production designer, set designer and costume designer.
De Laurentiis believed that if he could capture even half the magic of Star Wars, his science fiction fantasy would rake in the cash. Surely his creative team could be entrusted to create a popular entertainment, if not an obvious Star Wars knockoff. De Laurentiis, who had worked with Semple on King Kong, thought that the screenwriter would handle Flash Gordon with the same melodramatic solemnity that he brought to King Kong. Instead, as he did while writing the TV series Batman, Semple treated the material as farce.
One could make a case that the outlandish plot calls for a humorous touch. Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol) discovers that a sinister force is bent on destroying the Earth. In his effort to save the planet, Zarkov kidnaps Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones) and Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) to assist him. The trio crash-lands Zarkov’s space ship on Planet Mongo, where they are captured and held captive by the despot Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow). After escaping the ruler’s clutches Flash unites two warring tribes, falls in love, liberates the people of Mongo, defeats Ming and saves Earth.
Semple wrote some wonderful lines for the well-cast actors to play with. It takes a special kind of actor to deliver such delightfully over the top lines as “No one, but no one dies in the palace without a command from the Emperor.” When Flash is battling Prince Barin (a pre-Bond Timothy Dalton) Dale encourages him to vanquish his opponent quickly, “Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!” As Ming, Von Sydow delivers many delicious speeches including, “Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.”
While the script is decidedly pulpy, it’s no more absurd than much of the hyperbolic dialogue in Star Wars. Although the cast knew they were working on a larger than life canvas, neither they nor De Laurentiis initially thought they were entering the realm of camp. That all changed when the crew joined them for a screening of the dailies. Sam J. Jones recalled, “We played it straight, we couldn’t have played it any other way. When the crew watched the rushes and were laughing hysterically, Dino said, ‘Why are you laughing?’ And then they discovered they had a comedy.”
Unlike Lucas’s lived-in Star Wars universe, everything in Flash Gordon, which was released in 1980, looks brand new and sumptuous. The Flash Gordon super fan and comic book artist Alex Ross told me, “This was definitely the effect of the disco era. Everything looks like you had just walked into Studio 54. This was a planet that was out of Andy Warhol’s nightmares or dreams — whichever might be the case.” In fact, Warhol was also big fan of the film. Film critic Pauline Kael, one of the few mainstream defenders of the film, called Flash Gordon a “[F]airy tale set in a discothèque in the clouds…The images are flooded with the primary colors of comic strips — blue and, especially, red at its most blazing…the colors [are] so ripely intense that they’re near-psychedelic.”
Though some criticize the voluptuous look of the film, Ross defends it, “I know that approach doesn’t work for most people today. We have such a slender allowance for what you can allow science fiction [to] be today.” While the bright vivid colors of the sets and costumes would be wholly out of place in Lucas’ galaxy, the look of the film was true to Alex Raymond’s original drawings. Ross added, “They didn’t just make sets and costumes that fulfilled their own idiosyncrasies. They took the visual elements of the comics and turned them into physical approximations.”
Unlike John Williams’s timeless Star Wars score, Queen’s pounding soundtrack inexorably links the movie to the Seventies. For his part, Ross thinks Queen’s irrefutably stirring music is the pièce de résistance of the film. “When you’re hearing that driving drumbeat leading up to the chorus of Flash it still captives arenas full of people — where they play it to this day. The music excites. It engages like someone just placed a certain button on the back of your head. The music is the final cherry on top of a Sundae that frankly De Laurentiis didn’t intend to eat.”
For what’s ostensibly a family friendly film, there is a surprising amount of overt sexuality. In one scene Flash is stripped down and made to wear black leather underwear, and in another scene Ming’s daughter, Princess Aura, rubs her hands all over Flash’s near naked and (temporarily) dead body. Later in the film after Aura is tortured and whipped by another woman, one of Ming’s henchmen observes, “I think she found it rather enjoyable.” In addition to these scenes laced with sadomasochism there are references to incest, rape and necrophilia.
Ross observed, “Star Wars is completely sex abstinent. There is a complete androgyny in those films. In Flash there is subliminal sexuality. It’s edgy and seditious. It’s sexier and more sex defined than most straight films.” For Hodges, inserting sexuality into the film was a calculated decision, “I hoped I’d be able to run two parallel films — one for children, the other for their parents. When I talked to American male friends who had been brought up on Flash Gordon they all said a lot of their sexual fantasies had come from it. I capitalized on that.”
As a hero, Flash Gordon is cut from different cloth than Luke Skywalker who, over the course of three films, goes on a symbolic passage of self-discovery that Joseph Campbell termed the Hero’s Journey. Ross told me, “The hero in Flash Gordon has arrived fully formed. He doesn’t have to go through a metamorphosis or a change. He’s not broken. He shows up in a world that is broken that has need of a hero to help it.” Film critic Roger Ebert shared Ross’s assessment when he wrote, “It’s fun to see it done with energy and love and without the pseudo-meaningful apparatus of the Force and Trekkie Power.”
Flash Gordon has so many disparate elements — the pulpy dialogue, the lavish sets, the rock music sound — that the film doesn’t feel as if it’s serving a unified vision. Whereas most movies require a cohesive style to work, Flash Gordon is enjoyable despite, and perhaps in part because, it’s such a crazy quilt of different visions. Ross said, “I think there was a sense of chaos on set. You’ve got an Italian crew working in England with an English production. With an English director. With an American screenwriter. And a few American actors mixed in with English actors. [Along with the Swedish Von Sydow and a couple of Italian featured players.] The whole thing was a mess.”
When the film was released, audiences weren’t too sure what to make of this strange brew and, as a result, the box office results were middling; the domestic take was a little over $27 million. ($73 million when adjusted for inflation.) Audience response aside, the fact that such an eclectic big budget science fiction film was made is a fluke. Ross observes, “Normally you get one popular interpretation that leads to everything else. It’s an amazing little point in history. Flash was made before things were so affected by the vision of George Lucas. Filmmakers were still experimenting with how to make a Sci-Fi film.”
Flash Gordon is an action-packed, candy-colored space opera that can be a joy to behold. The key to enjoying the film is to appreciate and relish its eccentricities without judgment. As Ross laments, “Nowadays you wouldn’t make a film like Flash Gordon. It’s an accident of sorts. Which is a shame.”