Flashman and the movies: The little-known Hollywood adventures of George MacDonald Fraser

Telegraph

2 days ago

'I like film people, and their crazy trade,' George MacDonald Fraser wrote in his memoir after his screenwriting career had finished.
On the evidence of his work, it is not hard to see why. Although his list of film credits is far from prolific, the author worked on some of the most purely enjoyable adventure pictures made in the 1970s and 1980s. The combination of wit, swashbuckling and licentious boisterousness made for a very satisfying combination indeed.
Fraser first came to prominence after having a brilliant idea following his military service: what happened to Flashman, the notorious bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays, after he was expelled from Rugby School? The answer came in the shape of 12 bestselling novels focusing on the character published between 1969 and 2005, and allowing him to interact, Zelig -like, with many of the real-life figures from the Victorian period. They have regrettably fallen out of vogue today for their perceived un-PC qualities, but for those unbothered by that and more interested in a well-told, ripping yarn, they remain favourites.
His career in cinema is less celebrated. He brought fun and wit to his scripts – not least when he put Bond in a gorilla suit – but many of the projects on which he worked became mired in difficulty.
This month sees the release of Red Sonja, a long-delayed remake of one of Fraser's less memorable screenplays, a swords-and-sorcery B-movie originally starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen. Despite the presence of the ever-dependable British character actors Trevor Eve and Tim McMullan, it's doubtful anyone will flock to see it. Still, it serves as a reminder of the distinctive voice behind its source material, whose career proved to be rich, eventful and surprisingly influential. Here are his finest films – some of which actually made it to the screen.
Flashman (unmade)
After Fraser published his first Flashman novel in 1969, which purported to be a true account of the adventures of the Victorian rogue that Fraser had found by chance, it soon proved to be an enormous bestseller. As sure as day follows night, the film rights were sold to the director Richard Lester, who was best known for having directed the Beatles films A Hard Day's Night and Help!. Lester began to develop the film with Fraser, but eventually tired of it, later claiming that he felt that he had essentially already made it in his head after a lengthy pre-production process.
The first – and many would say best – Flashman novel therefore remains unfilmed, although there have been rumours as to its making it to the screen. Over the years, leading actors have been suggested (including Daniel Day-Lewis). In 2015, none other than Ridley Scott bought the rights to the book with a view to producing an adaptation of it. Around the same time, that well-known roisterer Dominic West threw his hat into the ring, calling the 'spectacularly politically incorrect' Flashman 'a perfectly preserved gem that's just waiting for a good revival'. Should a bold, risk-taking director wish to return to Fraser's original adaptation of his novel, the results could be spectacular.
The Three Musketeers (1973), The Four Musketeers (1974)
Flashman may never have happened, but it began a good working relationship between Fraser and Lester. When Fraser met the director near his home on the Isle of Man, and knowing his reputation for making broad comedies, he tentatively asked 'How d'you want the Musketeers – straight, or sent up?' Lester's answer was simple: 'I want it written by the man who wrote Flashman.'
Once Lester's initial idea of casting his old collaborators the Beatles was stymied by their break-up, production went smoothly. By the time that Fraser was shown the rough cut of the picture, now starring Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay and Michael York, Lester was able to say, proudly, that 'it's 85-90 per cent you': something that the film's assured mixture of swashbuckling action and witty badinage lived up to. Without this film, it's doubtful we'd have the likes of the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
But it was also a swift lesson in Hollywood chicanery. Fraser had written a long script, which he had intended a single epic picture to include an interval, but the producers simply cut it in half and released it as two pictures, called The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. This came as a surprise to the cast, who were only informed at the Paris premiere that they would be watching half the film they had made.
Royal Flash (1975)
Fraser reunited with Lester to adapt the second of the Flashman novels, and ended up with a limp reprise of the Musketeers panache starring the likes of Bob Hoskins, Joss Ackland, David Jason and a splendidly caddish and self-regarding Malcolm McDowell.
Lester later ruefully called Royal Flash 'a poor choice of mine'. He was right, but Fraser had by then moved on to another project, the similarly ill-fated Prince and the Pauper, based on the Mark Twain novel. Despite a starry cast with several Musketeers veterans (Reed, Raquel Welch and Charlton Heston), it was not a success. 'My first reaction is one of disappointment,' Fraser said upon seeing it. But it did strengthen his bond with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who had also backed the Musketeers films, and would go on to make Superman the following year.
Superman (1978), Superman II (1980)
Although the screenplay for the first Superman film was credited to The Godfather's Mario Puzo, David and Leslie Newman and Robert Benton, Fraser suggested that Puzo's contribution was nominal. Puzo, he said, was brought on board to beef up the part of Jor-El, Superman's father (eventually played by Marlon Brando, at the then-exorbitant fee of $3m).
When his usual collaborator Lester was hired to replace Richard Donner, who directed the first picture and a substantial part of what would become Superman II, Fraser contributed significant material to both films, uncredited. As he later reflected, 'there is no such credit as 'script fixer' or 'plot cobbler'.' (He was also privy to some of the more unlikely casting discussions for Superman before they fixed on Christopher Reeve – the boxer Muhammad Ali was at one point half-seriously mentioned.) One of his ideas, in which Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor steals Kryptonite from a museum by simply smashing one of the exhibits' cases with a brick, never made it to screen: a shame, as it could have been very amusing.
Force Ten From Navarone (1978)
Fraser relished working with major stars during his career, and one of the biggest was Harrison Ford, who worked on the ill-fated Guns of Navarone sequel Force Ten From Navarone, which Fraser went uncredited for. The writer relished how, when Ford was offered a local delicacy – dog meat with cheese – in the expensive Yugoslav hotel in which he was staying, he reacted with 'horrified disbelief'. But otherwise Ford was 'quite the gentlest of the cast, soft-spoken and quietly courteous, and not the one you'd expect to be first as an action man'.
It was, however, a miserable business working on the film with its supposed lead, Robert Shaw, who a friend of Fraser's drily described as 'competent when sober'. Shaw hated making the picture and thought the script was appalling, complaining to a journalist on set: 'I'm seriously thinking that this might be my last film. I no longer have anything real to say. I'm appalled at some of the lines. I'm not at ease in film. I can't remember the last film I enjoyed making.'
Still, when he was on set, he took delight in discussing his latest play with Fraser, complaining about the expense of the golf course he was having constructed at his Irish estate, or remarking on the price of fatherhood. The actor, who had 10 children, died of a heart attack before the film was released.
Octopussy (1983)
Fraser's produced scripts were less noteworthy during the 1980s, with only his work on the James Bond film Octopussy being seen by wide audiences. He attempted to bring a sense of fun and surprise to the character, much to the series producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli's disdain. The idea of dressing Bond up as a clown was bad enough, but another form of disguise was just unacceptable.
As Fraser wrote in his memoir, 'I can still hear his cry of outraged disbelief: 'You want to put Bond in a gorilla suit?' This scene, and many other wacky moments, made it into the finished film, although the screenwriter was left in no doubt as to how insignificant his contribution would be to a strictly generic 007 romp. When his appointment was announced, Roger Moore simply called out 'Commiserations!'
Red Sonja (1985)
The 1985 sword-and-sorcery would-be epic was hardly a classic, being a tame rip-off of the more successful Conan the Barbarian and featuring a reluctant Schwarzenegger being crowbarred into more and more scenes in a vain attempt to give the film some box office clout, alongside the untested Nielsen. This stratagem failed, and the picture was a notorious critical and commercial flop. Yet it does have one feature of interest, and that is that most of the scenes involving Arnie as Lord Kalidor, which were added during production, were written by Fraser.
He wrote that he was recruited by uber-producer Dino de Laurentiis to write the screenplay for a remake of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, to be directed by none other than Federico Fellini after Richard Lester turned down the project. It soon transpired that de Laurentiis had (perhaps deliberately) overstated Fellini's potential interest in the project. The film might be made as a musical, it was suggested – with silent underwater explosions. Fraser remained on the payroll in Rome to act as a well-paid script doctor on Red Sonja instead.
'Schwarzenegger himself was impressive,' Fraser would write, 'not only by reason of his extraordinary physique, but because he was a great deal cleverer than a Mr Universe has any right to be.'
When the film finally opened, he was blasé about its reception. 'Barry Norman was kind enough to say that the other writer [the prolific British screenwriter Clive Exton] and I had been unlucky in that mice must have got at the script, but in fact it was all our untampered work.'
The Return of the Musketeers (1989)
It was death that sped Fraser's career as a Hollywood screenwriter to its end, although not his own. His final credit came on his reunion with Lester and the Musketeers cast in the ill-fated 1989 sequel The Return of the Musketeers, based on Dumas' sequel Twenty Years After.
During filming, Roy Kinnear fell off his horse and died of his resulting internal injuries, which not only destroyed the mood on set but also led to significant rewriting and the necessity of hiring a voice-over artist to replace Kinnear; Fraser suggests that the impressionist Rory Bremner was one of those mooted.
When the film came out, the reviews, no doubt influenced by the production problems, were damning. As Fraser observed: 'The aftermath of recrimination and litigation was no encouragement to the viewing public.'