British writer Peter O’Donnell created the Modesty Blaise comic strip in 1963, in part out of a desire to see a female hero who is just as capable as any of the male heroes that led most popular fiction of the day. Teaming with artist Jim Holdaway, the strip was extremely popular in Europe and around the world—pretty much everywhere except the United States. It ran until 2001.
The character was popular enough to spawn spinoffs, including a movie in 1966, an attempt at a TV series, and a 2004 movie, not to mention a series of books. None of the screen versions quite hit the mark, though…
Blaise was inspired by O’Donnell’s experiences as a soldier in the Middle East, when he encountered an orphan girl, to whom he gave a tin of food. (That experience was re-created at the top of My Name is Modesty.) When he created Blaise’s backstory, he imagined that girl he encountered being mentored by an old professor named Lob, who taught her how to read and write. She later becomes a criminal, quickly working her way up to running an international crime organization called the Network.
All that is backstory. The actual strip takes place after she has retired from the criminal life, having married an Englishman (who later dies) and moving to London. Bored with the life of the idle rich, she takes odd jobs from Sir Gerald Tarrant of the British Secret Service. Partnered with Willie Garvin, a low-level criminal whom she takes under her wing, and who becomes her best friend (but never her lover), they have tons of adventures on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, with Garvin often using his proclivity for throwing knives, and Modesty using a mix of her sexuality and her hand-to-hand combat skills both with and without weapons. (One reason why the strip never caught on in the U.S. was its use of nudity, as one of Modesty’s signature moves was to take her top off to distract men. Ah, the 1960s…)
The strip was sufficiently popular that O’Donnell had no trouble selling the movie rights, especially to a movie industry in the UK that was eager for more spy thriller type stories in the wake of the huge popularity of the James Bond films. In an era that gave us, not only Bond, but Our Man Flint, Danger Man, The Saint, etc., Modesty Blaise seemed a perfect fit.
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Initially, there was to be a movie written by Sidney Gilliat, but it was never made. Later, O’Donnell wrote the first draft of a script that was filmed, but the rewrite by Evan Jones and various uncredited others (including playwright Harold Pinter) made several changes that took it farther from the comic character—most notably having Blaise and Garvin decide to become lovers (during a musical number, no less), which was one thing O’Donnell would never let happen in the strip, as he felt their platonic friendship was a cornerstone of the story.
Italian actor Monica Vitti played the title role, while Terence Stamp (previously seen in this rewatch as General Zod in the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films and as Stick in Elektra) played Garvin. Clive Revill has an entertaining dual role, playing both Gabriel’s cheapskate aide MacWhirter, and also playing Sheik Abu Tahir while wearing a ridiculous prosthetic nose. The film also stars Dirk Bogarde, Harry Andrews, Michael Craig, Alexander Knox, and Rossella Falk.
The 1966 film was not much of a hit, but it did prompt a new set of Modesty Blaise stories, as O’Donnell wrote a novelization of the film (based on his original script rather than any of the rewrites), and the book sold incredibly well. O’Donnell wound up writing a whole series of Modesty Blaise novels that were released alongside the comic strip from 1965 to 1985, plus there were two short story collections released in 1972 and 1996.
In 1982, ABC aired a one-hour pilot for a Modesty Blaise TV series that didn’t get picked up. It moved the action from London to Hollywood and re-cast both the Middle Eastern Blaise and the Cockney Garvin as Americans, played by Ann Turkel and Lewis Van Bergen, respectively. (Since this rewatch is limiting TV movies to ones that are feature-length, we’re not covering this pilot.)
Quentin Tarantino was always a big Modesty Blaise fan—John Travolta’s Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction can be seen reading one of O’Donnell’s Blaise books—and he served as executive producer for a direct-to-home-video movie entitled My Name is Modesty, which was intended to launch a series of Blaise films. This first film focused entirely on Blaise’s backstory, as it takes place before she became a freelance agent of H.M. Secret Service, instead taking place during her time working for Henri Louche, and flashing back to her childhood.
Alexandra Staden plays Blaise, and Jaime Lannister his own self, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Miklos, who matches wits with Blaise throughout the movie. Raymond Cruz plays Raphael Garcia, who’s pretty much Willie Garvin, except Latino.
Tarantino has been talking about directing a Blaise film for ages, and Neil Gaiman wrote a script treatment at one point, but nothing has come of it. The character’s lack of a pop-culture footprint in the U.S. is probably the biggest stumbling block.
“Leave the figuring to me, Willie—you might hurt yourself”
Modesty Blaise
Written by Peter O’Donnell and Evan Jones
Directed by Joseph Losey
Produced by Joseph Janni
Release date: July 4, 1966
A shipment of diamonds is being sent to Sheik Abu Tahir. In order to maintain good relations with the sheik, the British Secret Service chief, Sir Gerald Tarrant, suggests having ex-criminal mastermind Modesty Blaise protect the shipment and find out who’s targeting it. The Minister is reluctant at first, but accedes, especially since the last agent they assigned to this was killed.
Gabriel, the head of a criminal empire who faked his own death, is also after the diamonds. From his compound in the Mediterranean, he is planning to steal the diamonds before they can reach the sheik. His chief enforcer, Mrs. Fothergill, is brutally training three of Gabriel’s thugs for the heist.
Blaise and her partner, Willie Garvin—whom she calls away from an assignation—travel to Amsterdam. An attempt is made on her life similar to the one that claimed the previous agent, but Garvin and Blaise manage to avoid injury.
Tarrant sets up a decoy plane to carry the diamonds, which Gabriel shoots down with a missile. Meanwhile, Blaise hooks up with a former lover named Paul Hagen, who used to be a secret agent, while Garvin hooks up with a former lover of his, Nicole. Nicole reveals that Gabriel is after the diamonds, and then is killed by Gabriel’s thugs. Blaise and Garvin take care of Nicole’s killers, then try to get Gabriel to capture them. Hagen and Blaise are captured by Gabriel’s men, also, but Garvin and Tarrant rescue them.
At one point, Tarrant has Blaise and Garvin kidnapped, as they’ve gone off book. (Blaise drugged Hagen and escaped from him, to Tarrant’s annoyance.) However, Blaise and Garvin use trick cigarette boxes to gas the cars they’re being taken in and leave.
One of Gabriel’s thieves doesn’t survive Mrs. Fothergill’s dive training, so Gabriel decides that he needs to replace him with Garvin. He kidnaps Blaise and Garvin, and forces Garvin to help steal the diamonds, or Blaise will be killed.
Tarrant’s people are watching Gabriel’s yacht, but Gabriel and the thieves are actually on a cargo ship, from which they launch a submersible and steal the diamonds. Once the heist is successful, Blaise and Garvin are brought to Gabriel’s Mediterranean redoubt and imprisoned. Gabriel offers to let Blaise go if she joins forces with him and kills Garvin—as a good-faith gesture, Gabriel offers to kill Mrs. Fothergill, also. Blaise refuses, and instead manages to escape on her own, mostly using feminine wiles. She frees Garvin, and then removes the false epidermis from his back, which contains a bunch of gadgets, most notably a radio that signals the sheik.
Blaise and Garvin fight their way to freedom, but it’s a hard road. They manage to kill Mrs. Fothergill, but the sight of her corpse galvanizes Gabriel, sending all his people after them. They’re surrounded—but then the sheik shows up and overruns the redoubt, taking Gabriel prisoner. The sheik promises Blaise anything she wants in exchange for getting the diamonds to him—and she asks for the diamonds themselves…
“You’re the boss”
My Name is Modesty
Written by Lee Batchler & Janet Scott Batchler
Directed by Scott Spiegel
Produced by Marcelo Anciano and Michael Berrow and Ted Nicolaou
Release date: September 28, 2004
We open in the Balkans, where three soldiers are in the midst of some ruined buildings. They see a little girl, and one of the soldiers gives her a can of food.
Fifteen years later, in Tangiers, that girl is grown up and calls herself Modesty Blaise. She works for Monsieur Louche at his casino. A high roller is winning big at the roulette table so Blaise takes over for the croupier and surreptitiously switches the balls. She uses her charm to convince the gambler to keep going and she manipulates the wheel so that he loses everything. He seems unconcerned about losing, wishing Blaise well.
After the casino closes, Louche instructs one of his subordinates, Garcia, regarding a drug deal the next day. Garcia then departs for a hot date. Louche leaves not long after, but his driver takes him to an alley where he is confronted by several men with guns. Louche manages to kill the driver and two other assailants, but the leader of the group, Miklos, shoots him, refusing Louche’s offer of money. Miklos shoots him four times and then a fifth after he falls dead to the ground, so this is obviously personal.
Miklos then goes to the casino with more armed thugs, shooting up the place and taking everyone hostage. He wants access to Louche’s vault, and he kills one of the employees—who insists he doesn’t know the vault’s combination—to make his point. Blaise stands up and says that the man Miklos just killed is the only one present who knew the combination. Miklos then informs Blaise that Louche is dead.
Blaise says that the combination is on Louche’s computer, but only Garcia knows the password to the computer, and he’s very far away on a date. Miklos is frustrated—of the people with access to the vault, he’s killed two, and the other is nowhere nearby. In his anger, he shoots and wounds a bartender.
Miklos allows Blaise to call Garcia and she tells him to come down to the casino, not mentioning the armed thugs holding them hostage. However, after Garcia hangs up, he knows that Blaise is in trouble and the casino is under siege—she spoke to him in code. He leaves his (very pissed off) date behind and heads out.
Blaise informs Miklos that Garcia won’t arrive until 6am. Miklos suggests they play a game—it is a casino, after all. They go to the roulette wheel, and then they discuss stakes, since it’s not a real game of roulette if there are no stakes. Blaise points out that, while the people who play here use money, what they are actually playing for is their livelihood, their pride, their relationships, their personality, their arrogance, their lives—something precious to them. So there must be true stakes.
Miklos says that if he wins, Blaise has to tell him a story about herself. If she wins two in a row, Miklos will let a hostage go.
Blaise wins two in a row and asks that the bartender and one other person go so that he can receive medical attention—Miklos only agrees if the second hostage is an advance on her next victory, and she agrees.
When Miklos wins, Blaise tells the story of her life. She lived in a refugee camp in the Balkans, stealing food and struggling to survive. She has no memory of her parents, nor any idea where she was born or how old she is, and she didn’t even have a name.
She rescues an old man, being set upon by a bunch of other kids, who try to steal his bag. They escape the camp, stealing an Army jeep. His name is Professor Lob, and he mentors her, teaching her how to read and write, and also trains her in martial arts. They travel from town to town, Lob acting as an itinerant tutor to earn money. Their first night together, she undressed in front of him un-self-consciously, and from that point on, he refers to her as “Modesty.”
Eventually, they wind up in Algeria. They’ve earned enough to purchase papers so they can travel more openly, and he needs her to pick a last name. She chooses “Blaise,” which was the name of Merlin’s tutor in the King Arthur book that Lob used to teach her how to read.
Unfortunately, there’s a war on in Algeria, and Lob is killed. Blaise makes her way to Tangiers, and lives on the streets, picking pockets. Louche sees her there, impressed with her skill, and takes her in.
While Blaise and Miklos play roulette, one of the waitresses tries to make a run for it. She’s shot and wounded for her trouble. Miklos is furious and sick of playing games. It’s also past 6am and there’s no sign of Garcia. Blaise says that he obviously betrayed them and has left them for dead, at which point she admits that she knows the computer password, and can therefore get the vault combination. Miklos sees that now she’s scared, where she hadn’t been up until now, and he makes her say that he’s the boss.
She goes to Louche’s laptop and gets the combination. When they enter the vault, Miklos’s thugs are surprised to see a tunnel leading into the vault—and even more surprised to see Garcia with a bunch of armed thugs of his own. While Garcia takes out Miklos’s employees, Blaise herself takes down Miklos with her mad martial arts skillz, eventually subduing him and making him say that she’s the boss. Then she kicks him over a railing, and he falls on top of the roulette table, impaled on the wheel handle.
Blaise tells Garcia to clean up the mess—both the bodies and the physical damage—and to cancel the drug deal. She says to give the client $20,000 to placate them, but as of now they’re out of that business.
One of the bartenders asks how much of the story she told Miklos was true, and she smiles and says, “My name is Modesty.”
“Very sinister, Minister”
It’s funny, I’ve been telling people that I’m reviewing the two Modesty Blaise movies this week, and the reaction from most has been confusion, ignorance, and general bafflement. Blaise is one of those characters that just never hit over here to the same extent that she did across the ocean, and that’s made it hard for the character to get movie traction in the States.
The 1966 movie is a fun disaster, only partly capturing the comic strip. Visually, it’s very much a product of its time, with the bright colors, insane fashions, goofball sensibilities, and obsession with gadgets that characterized the era, particularly in this subgenre of films. (Not to mention things like Blaise and Garvin flying a plane with cigarettes dangling from their mouths and drinks in one hand while piloting with the other.) But the plot is only mildly comprehensible, and Dirk Bogarde is flaccid as Gabriel, the lack of a strong villain hurting the movie. Clive Revill as MacWhirter and especially the magnificent Rossella Falk as the psychotic Mrs. Fothergill are far stronger, but both need someone better to play off of.
Plus, the movie decides to have Garvin and Blaise become a romantic couple, which is as big a misstep as Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd taking his helmet off. In fact, it’s a bigger one, since at least Dredd’s helmet removal is explainable in context (not hiding Stallone’s famous face, plus it almost works with the Dredd-is-disgraced plot). Here, there’s no reason for Garvin and Blaise to hook up; it adds nothing to the story. In fact, the moment when they decide to get horizontal is portrayed as a musical number—in a movie that hasn’t had the characters burst into song at any other point—and then it’s never followed up on. The last shot of the movie is Blaise cuddling with the sheik…
On top of that, the pacing is abysmal. The movie is only two hours long, but I felt like it went on for several ice ages. Having said that, Terence Stamp is a delight as Garvin, and Monica Vitti has an impressive physicality in the role—she slinks across the screen magnificently. And eventually, she even gets to be competent. Another of the biggest issues with this interpretation of Blaise is that—until the breakout from Gabriel’s redoubt in the climax—Blaise doesn’t really do very much. Garvin saves her from the explosive on the boat, Garvin and Tarrant save her from being captured by Gabriel’s thugs, Mrs. Fothergill gets the drop on her far too easily, and just in general she is remarkably ineffectual—until the end, anyhow, but by then it’s too late. In the strip, her sexuality was a tool in her work—in this movie, the sexuality is all there is for three-quarters of the running time.
The 2004 film suffers from a much more fundamental problem: this isn’t a Modesty Blaise movie. Yes, it provides her backstory, but that’s not what’s on the tin, as it were. Blaise stories are tales of a former criminal who has capers on behalf of the British government. My Name is Modesty is about a clever young woman who plays Scheherazade to the guy who took her boss’s casino hostage. This is useful information to have at some point—and I do like that the movie opens with a re-creation of Peter O’Donnell’s inspiration—but it’s not what you want to lead with, as that’s not what a series of Blaise films is going to be about. Her time as a criminal is part of the texture of her character and what makes her into the protagonist she is in the stories. It’s a fairly common mistake in twenty-first-century popular fiction, the obsession with backstory to the detriment of frontstory. (As an example, Star Trek: Discovery made this same mistake, as the story actually started in the third episode, with the information in the first two stuff that we didn’t need right away, but was backstory that we could get later.)
At least it gives us a good lead. Alexandra Staden is a strong, smart, capable Blaise, clever in her manipulations of Miklos, and also able to kick ass when it’s called for. I’d love to see her do the role as it’s meant to be played. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is smarmily evil as Miklos, and Fred Pearson and Raymond Cruz do very well as Blaise’s mentor and mentee, respectively. The script has some gems—I particularly like Blaise’s colloquy on stakes when she convinces Miklos to play roulette for something—but it’s too bad that the movie pretty much feels like a movie made on the cheap over eighteen days in Eastern Europe. This is mostly because it was made on the cheap over eighteen days in Eastern Europe. This also damages the film’s attempt to be a Modesty Blaise film—whatever its (many) failures, the 1966 film looked like a big, bold Blaise adventure. My Name is Modesty is too claustrophobic.
Blaise was a strong female hero at a time when the pop-culture landscape wasn’t exactly bursting with them. There are aspects of her character that absolutely have not aged well, but it’s too bad she hasn’t gotten the film adaptation she deserves. Maybe some day…
Next week, we go from 1960s pulp to 1990s pulp, as Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez team up to adapt Sin City.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is at MegaCon in Orlando, Florida this weekend. He’ll be at Bard’s Tower, Booth 6049, for most of the convention, selling and signing books alongside fellow authors Sherrilyn Kenyon, Brian Lee Durfee, T. Allen Diaz, Owl Goingback, and Cody Martin. He’ll also be doing a panel on writing in your own and other people’s universes on Saturday at noon with Kenyon and Karen Chance. Come by and say hi!
I can confirm the lack of pop-culture footprint in the US. I have never heard of this character.
So this was a comic strip? Does that mean you are covering Garfield?
It was a comic strip, and it was also a graphic novel adaptation by DC comics. I think Dick Giordano was the artist. That’s probably the book seen in Pulp Fiction.
The novels are astounding. I enjoy the comic strip, but the stories are necessarily very compressed. The reprints of the latter, from Titan, are worth a read, especially for O’Donnell’s forewords. It was one of them where he revealed that his visual inspiration for Willie Garvin was a little-known actor just at the beginning of his career: Michael Caine.
Titan Books reprinted the entire run of the original newspaper strip in 30 graphic novel editions from 2004 to 2017, mostly still available, and the BBC did a some radio adaptations of the stories in recent years, last one in 2017.
I love the novels and they are well worth picking up. The friendship between Willie and Modesty is much better than any love affair.
Peter O’Donnell also wrote a batch of romances in the ’70’s under the name Madeleine Brent. Unusually for the time they always featured innocent, competent young women in wonderfully exotic settings like a tenting circus in Victorian Germany or the Boxer Rebellion in China.
I would dearly love to see a Modesty Blaise movie by the same folks who did such a fabulous job recreating both the era and the genre with the Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie a couple of years ago.
I picked up a book in the series in the late 80’s and went on to tear through the whole series. Great books and, IMHO, far superior to the comic strips. Much more character development. And the relationship between Modesty and Willie was one of the best I’d read in pop culture. Amazing that he didn’t even get to make an appearance in “My Name is Modesty”. The movies are probably best forgotten, but the article does bring back some fond memories of a great series. Such a shame she’s largely been forgotten in the modern era.
I’m not familiar with the character either, beyond having heard the name from time to time, no idea where. It’s impressive that O’Donnell not only created a series with a female lead, but a nonwhite one too — although I guess white culture has always considered “exotic” Middle Eastern women fair game from a sexual standpoint (e.g. belly dancers and the like). Naturally, though, both movies and the TV pilot cast white actresses. (Although for me, the idea of Ann Turkel in her ’80s prime starring as a seductive secret agent seems like very, very good casting.)
We’ve come pretty far afield from “superhero movies” at this point, though I guess Modesty Blaise falls into the same general category as Black Widow, Elektra, Silver Sable, and Talia al Ghul. Although it doesn’t seem as if she ever had a trademark costume — perhaps a trademark lack of costume, it sounds like, though my Googling for images suggests that the cheesecake was not graphic in the strips themselves, just in the odd bit of pinup art — so not quite as racy as the infamous Jane comic strip from the Daily Mirror in the 30s-50s.
Since the great comic rewatch has gone this route, will you be reviewing Mario Bava’s wonderful 60’s Euro – comic (fumetti) adaptation Danger: Diabolik? It’s probably the best of that crop of Pop Art comic movies such Modesty Blaise and Barbarella.
Wow, I’ve never even heard of My Name is Modesty. No idea there was another movie. I ought to read the original comic and the novels sometime; I’ve heard of them but never made an effort to look into them.
Interesting — I’ve heard her name at various points over the years, but was never clear if she was actually a 60s-era character, or somebody who had been created decades later “in the style of”.
S.M. Stirling lards his stories with characters created by his favorite writers. The protagonist of The Peshawar Lancers is Athelstan King. A mysterious mystic, and King’s love interest, is Yasmini. Light-fingered Stirling acquired them from Talbot Mundy’s King of the Khyber Rifles.
In Dies the Fire, the first of his Emberverse series, Sterling steals characters from Conan Doyle’s The White Company. The first to show up is an archer named Sam Aylward. (Sir Nigel arrives in a later book.) Aylward talks about one old guy named Willie, who owned a pub called The Treadmill. (In the books, The Treadmill is Wile Garvin retirement project.) Aylward reminisces about Willie, who reminisced about this amazing woman he used to work for. Charismatic, resourceful, born leader, deadly, taught Willie everything he knew—except fighting and knife throwing. Life hadn’t been the same since she died.
On a different note, whoever cast that blond as Modesty should be keel-hauled in effigy.
Hey, since you’re doing European comics, does that mean one day you’ll review Valerian and the city of a thousand planets? And The Adventures of Tintin (2011)?
I was somewhat surprised at her obscurity, since Modesty Blaise ran in the Detroit Free Press when I was growing up and so I assumed that like most of the strips there it was all over the place. Apparently not. (And apparently it was censored there, though I didn’t know it at the time. Like any US paper the Free Press wasn’t going to include nudity anywhere, let alone the page kids would make a beeline to.)
I’d have guessed she was roughly as famous as, say, Brenda Starr, rather than producing a comprehensive “Who?”
As a side note, 1984’s “American Dreamer” is a spoof of Modesty Blaise, with Jobeth William’s as a housewife who wakes up after a traffic accident thinking she is the European adventures ‘Rebecca Ryan’, a character who is Modedty in all but name. — even down to having a platonic sidekick played by Tom Conti. The movie was not a success in the USA, probably in part because American audiences weren’t familiar with who exactly was being parodied.
Count me as a fan of the books. The Modesty/Garvin relationship and fights are what i love.
Modesty is so cool.
@9/Andre: Danger: Diabolik was the movie featured in the series finale of the original Mystery Science Theater 3000. If that was the best movie of that genre, I shudder to contemplate the average.
@13/Ryamano: This series is specifically about movies based on superhero comics, not comics in general. It’s stretched to include some non-superhero action characters like Dick Tracy and Modesty Blaise, but I think Tintin would be stretching it a bit too far.
@8:”It’s impressive that O’Donnell not only created a series with a female lead, but a nonwhite one too — although I guess white culture has always considered “exotic” Middle Eastern women fair game from a sexual standpoint (e.g. belly dancers and the like). Naturally, though, both movies and the TV pilot cast white actresses. “
In the stories she’s* European; Modesty is specifically described as escaping from a DP camp in Greece as a child before wandering through the Middle East.
*corrected a typo
” re-cast both the Middle Eastern Blaise”
In the origin that I read, she’s described as a refugee from a Greek DP camp; is there some later story where she is described as being from the Middle East?
For that matter, O’Donnell does not specify the origins of the girl that he based Modesty on:
“So I went back to 1942, when I was a young sargent in the army, in charge
of a mobile radio detachment in the north of Persia, up near the Caucasus
Mountains, because the germans were expected to try to take the oilfields,
and there were lots of refugees, many had been on the move for years
through the Balkans, trying to evade the German army.
We were camped by a stream, having our evening meal, which was stew,and
suddenly this child appeared. “
Given the reference to the Balkans, I would assume that the girl was probably Eastern European.
Is the summary at the beginning of this article taken from the comics or the 1966 movie? Because there are some big differences to the novels.
I came across an old library copy of one of the novels in the 80s and loved it. In the last few years, I have collected old paperback editions of the novels for reading. The plot is always similar, but they are still fun. Same as the Madeleine Brent novels.
Here are the panels depicting Modesty’s origin:
Seems that my memory failed me on one point. The camp in Greece in these panels is described as a “prison camp,” not a DP camp. At any rate, there’s no mention of her being from the Middle East. That’s simply the region that she travels through after leaving Europe.
The 1966 movie is not objectively good, but it’s an interesting sort of bad, where you can see moments and elements that showed if things had clicked a little differently how it could have been an amazing movie of the era. The bald tattoed henchman is a menacing minor character, Terence Stamp’s charisma is so smouldering sexy in this he practically burns up the screen, and the Monia Vitti’s fashions and the film’s overall visual style is fantastic.(The psychedelic wallpaper in the villain’s layer! The oversized martinis with goldfish in them!) But it helps if you like that sort of thing.
It also, unfortunately, has the flaws mentioned above: A meandering pace, a self -indulgent gratuitous musical number, the finale veering towards that widescreen slapstick chaos that lot of the “wacky” films of the 1960s liked to indulge in.
I think the major problem is that director Joseph Losey seemed to find the material contemptible. He’s a talented director who can make great films when the material engages him such as his adaptation of Harold Pinter’s THE SERVANT with Dirk Bogarde, but I think the movie deserved a director much more willing to engage with the pulpiness of it on its terms. From that era, John Boorman strikes me a better choice.
Still, I have quite the soft spot for it.
@17: Danger: Diabolik is a tighter better version of that pop-art spy-fi silliness than what the film version of Modesty Blaise, is going for but either you enjoy that sort of thing or you don’t, and I can certainly understand why this sort of style can leave people cold.
It’s fascinating to me how similar this rewatch is to that of the two Judge Dredd movies, the first a wrong-headed 20th-century adaptation that got some things right but overall missed the point entirely, the second a 21st-century adaptation that was more faithful to the source material, but done in by a low budget.
Ryamano: Valerian yes, Tintin no. I’m stretching the definition of superhero as it is, but I don’t think Herge’s stuff qualifies….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Um, there are some problems with the end of the “My Name is Modesty” summary . I’ll bold them for corrections.
While Garcia takes out Blaise’s employees, Blaise herself takes down Miklos with her mad martial arts skillz, eventually subduing him and making him say that she’s the boss. Then she kicks him over a railing, and he falls on top of the route the table, impaled on the wheel handle.
I’m assuming Garcia takes out Miklos’ employees, not his coworkers. And I feel the pain of correctly spelled wrong words, I once typed up a report detailing how psychiatric drugs could help clam patients lol.
Does the order of the Modesty Blaise books matter?
@14: I discovered Modesty in the Detroit Free Press in the mid 70s. Apparently it was one of the few US papers to carry it, right to the end.
In fact, the end of the strip was carried by only 4 papers worldwide.
Loved the novels.
Talk about your strong female protagonists!!
@@@@@ 26, IBookwyrme
Does the order of the Modesty Blaise books matter?
Each book works as a standalone.
But there are friendly and villainous characters introduced in one book, whom you meet again later. Without the backstories, it’s more confusing.
That doesn’t stop any of them from being fun reads.
I have a depraved love for the 60s movie; I love that era’s silly psychedelic spoof-action movies (has anyone else seen The Assassination Club, starring Diana Rigg and Oliver Reed? It’s a hoot. And I’ll defend the original Casino Royale any time; how can you hate a movie that ends with every single James Bond including Woody Allen blown to pieces? And it has a spoof of German Expressionist movies in!)
But it’s not Modesty Blaise.
I quite like My Name Is… but I don’t like how it changes the relationship between Modesty and Lob by having him teach her martial arts – I like the original relationship where he teaches her and she protects him by being a terrifying tiny self-taught killer. I can see why they did it to streamline the movie, but it still irritates me. There’s a lot of difference between “being taught to fight” and “going up against adults for survival with nothing but a nail in a stick and the pure essence of chutzpah”.
laura118b: Thank you for catching those screwups. They’ve been fixed. Yay edit function!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
IBookwyrme@26
Probably best to read the first one, Modesty Blaise, first as it explains the backstory in more detail than the others, and the last one, Cobra Trap (short stories), last. Otherwise Fernhunter@28 is spot on.
Charles Stross seems to have imported very much of Modesty Blaise’s backstory into his wonderful creation of Persephone Hazard, a free agent spy working for a supernatural/occult intelligence agency in the Laundry books.
Confession time: yes, I shamelessly wrote a homage to Modesty Blaise into The Laundry Files, and yes, it’s Persephone Hazard, who first shows up in “The Apocalypse Codex”. It’s a total Modesty Blaise pastiche, with added Lovecraftian revisionist horror (and creepy preacher dude with a hotline to something that isn’t the Jesus he thinks he’s got on speed dial).
One warning, though—if you’re thinking to read the originals, be warned that they’re of their time and suffers badly in 20/20 hindsight from: male gaze issues, orientalism, ableism, rape (if not wholesale women-in-refrigerators syndrome) and any number of other triggery issues that may annoy (or horrify) modern readers.
Xenobathite: I think you’re thinking of “The Assassination Bureau” (1969, starred Dianna Rigg and Oliver Reed)—based on the unfinished novel by Jack London (published in 1963 with an ending written by Robert Fish, the historian who rediscovered the manuscript).
The rediscovery/republication was late enough that Peter O’Donnell had already invented Modesty Blaise by the time it showed up.
I’ve read a few Madeleine Brent books a long time ago in the early 90’s and enjoyed them. I didn’t know it was a pen name I may give the Modesty books a try if I can find some at the library. I love secret agent stories, but I’ve never heard of either of these movies.
Charles: Thanks for checking in!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
PS: Wrenn says hi to Feoraig….
As I recall Modesty was a complete misnomer.
@24: What about Flash Gordon?
Matthew: Yup. Both the 1980 movie and the 2007 pilot.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I originally advocated for a Modesty Blaize rewatch back in the Dick Tracy reboot comments. Didn’t think I’d convinced anyone, so it was a delight to read this, and a new spur to track down the novel series. Thanks Keith!
@38 FLASH! uh huh! How much of my love for the 1980 movie is due to that fantastic soundtrack?
@38 FLASH! uh huh! How much of my love for the 1980 movie is due to that fantastic soundtrack?
Holy cow! There are Modesty Blaise movies? How have I never heard of this before now? I remember reading the comics back when i was in collage. I think I need to find that 60’s one as soon as possible.
@39: It’s a shame you’re not including animated movies in this rewatch, because I much prefer the Filmation version of Flash Gordon to the live-action movie.
@43/Matthew: You and me both. I’ve always resented the DeLaurentiis version for apparently preventing the far superior Filmation Flash Gordon movie from getting more than a single belated airing in the US and no home video release.
I want a Modesty Blaise adaptation starring Sofia Boutella as Modesty and Charlize Theron as Mrs. Fothergill. Not sure who would make a good Willie.
@43 if animated movies were included this would take almost twice as long. Maybe a separate rewatch could be done for them
David L. Ingersoll: maybe Marc Warren could play Willie?
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0912938/?ref_=m_tt_cl_t5
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@43/44 — FWIW, that Filmation Flash Gordon movie is up on YouTube. I’d still rather have a legitimate version, but …
@48/hoopmanjh: Yes, thank goodness. And yes, it deserves a US video release.
@46: I wouldn’t mind that at all. :)
@45: Sofia Boutella is an inspired choice.
@49: At least there’s a DVD available on Amazon containing (most of) the first season of the animated series, which incorporated most of the “footage” from the feature-length version.
@51/Matthew: Yeah, but the footage in the TV-series version leaves out the more interestingly adult elements of the movie, like the opening WWII sequence and the revelation that Ming was working with Hitler. It opens awkwardly in medias res with Flash, Dale, and Zarkov already in space above Mongo. Also the animation was redrawn so that the characters were in their final Mongo attire the whole time, losing the increased fraying of Flash and Dale’s clothes (although Aura’s bikini remained just as small). Not to mention that nearly all the voices were recast and doubled up to save money on the series, with only Flash, Dale, and Aura remaining the same.
Still, it’s impressive that they worked in as much movie footage as they did, even including shots of Hawkmen being vaporized in battle, which was a bit intense for Saturday morning. And the feature-quality animation was much more fluid than Filmation’s usual TV-budget work, even if they recycled it heavily. It’s interesting how season 1 works as an expanded, serialized version of the movie’s story, with more sidebar adventures padding out the middle. It evoked the Buster Crabbe serials that it was inspired by (while also being faithful to the original comics).
I was a big fan of the 1966 movie and especially Stamp’s Willie Garvin. I use “Willie Garvin” for any cool, sexy second banana – Like The Girl from U.N.C.L.E‘s Mark Slate (Noel Harrison). Since that came out in 1967, I have to assume that Modesty Blaise was an inspiration (along with The Avengers), which is why they picked a Brit for her Willie Garvin.
In the afterglow of seeing Dr. No in NYC 1st run, I binge read every espionage book I could get my mitts on. One of them was Modesty Blaise (the same edition that John Travolta is reading). I loved it and was really looking forward to the movie. When that came out, I was furious – more than anything else at the romance you cite between Modesty and Willie. Not. Gonna. Happen. In the intervening decades, I’ve come to realize that the Losey movie isn’t that bad as a movie, it’s just dreadful as a Modesty Blaise adaptation. This is in contrast to the Matt Helm movies (of which I only suffered through the 1st two) which were not only terrible and disrespectful adaptations of Donald Hamiltons terrific novels, they weren’t even good movies. I was much happier with My Name is Modesty. Yeah, it would have been nice to see an origin story with her later criminal background, but after the Losey movie I was happy for anything that demonstrated respect for the source material. I’d read all of the Peter O’Donnell novels as they were released, but living in the US only sporadically saw the comic strips in publications like The Menomonee Falls Gazette & Comic Strip Weekly until Titan started their compilations. Modesty remains one of the great espionage characters of modern fiction, but I don’t hold out hope for another movie. That space is being occupied by Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow, despite the poor critical reaction and worse box office for the latter. It’s a shame, but O’Donnell’s work really should be better known on this side of the pond.
I’ve never read of the Modesty Blaise stories, but I like the fact that she was created because someone saw the appeal in having a capable female action protagonist, and the fact that there was never any romance between her and Willie. Too bad they screwed up that last part in the movies.
@45 – David: Sofía Boutella seems like a good casting choice.
I’m a life-long (well, almost) fan of Modesty Blaise, and I agree with just about everything in the above movie reviews. My only real quibble is that a big problem with My Name is Modesty is that it is not only pre-retirement from crime, but also pre-recruitment of Willie Garvin, who is a very important part of all Modesty stories.
I don’t know what the policy is here regarding self-promotion, but I’m hoping it’s OK for me to tell that my love of Modesty has resulted in my writing two books, with a third one on the way, featuring a strong female lead character. My heroine is, strangely enough, a Modesty fan herself, and in my first book she tells of meeting Peter O’Donnell and talks about the Modesty books and movies. And in the second book she quotes Willie Garvin, and there is a reference to a beautiful passage in Dragon’s Claw:
Modesty: “We didn’t come after you to mete out justice. We don’t have that kind of arrogance. We don’t have the stomach to give people like you what you deserve. We came to kill you, that’s all.”
https://www.amazon.com/Rennie-Petersen/e/B07QMS66RL
renniepet: Like I said in the intro, Raymond Cruz’s Raphael Garcia is pretty much Willie Garvin in all but name.
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad: Thanks for the reply. But to me Garcia simply can’t be (pretty much) Willie, because in several flashbacks in the books Garcia and Willie appear together and interact with each other.
Incidentally, when I first saw My Name is Modesty (and this was long before Game of Thrones) the thought struck me that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, back then practically unknown, would make a good Willie Garvin.
Hey guys! If anyone ever reads this again, serious question… do you know if Miramax keeps having the Modesty Blaise’s film rights? I would love to know that, it’s been more than 10 years without using the property. Thank you in advance!
Alan: Not really sure. Peter O’Donnell himself desired that there be no more attempts at a film adaptation after the disappointment of My Name is Modesty. He died in 2010, so now it’s a question of whether or not his estate will continue to follow his wishes — and if anyone is interested in doing a movie version of a property that never really caught on in the U.S. and which has already failed on the screen three times.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Quentine Tarantino is a frequent Miramax collaborator right? Just think of the Modesty Blaise movie he would make…
@62/vinsentient: As stated in the article, Tarantino was the executive producer of the second movie reviewed here.
Oops, too many months since I first read this article :P
Blaise and Garvin are a great and sometimes humorous team that being platonic, close, and intuitive when it comes to each other would have been nice to read more.Cobra Trap was a good ending considering their history.
Too bad BBC or someone hasn’t picked up on them.