Royal Flash (1975/DVD-Video)
Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Film: C+
Trying to
trade in on his phenomenal success with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Malcolm McDowell took on the more comic
and less cutting edge role of Captain Harry Flashman in Richard Lester’s Royal Flash (1975), which opens up with
a slow Kubrickian zoom pullout and turns into the kind of British comedy that
was wearing thin by the 1960s.
It too
takes place at least a century before, this time 19th Century
Europe, where Harry is trying to con his way to the top of aristocracy, but his
bravado allows him to get mixed up with the infamous Otto von Bismarck (Oliver
Reed) and is conned (or is that out-conned) by Bismarck to seduce and marry a
key duchess (Britt Ekland) for reasons of power and manipulation. He is discovered and that is just the
beginning of a long series of messes and disasters Harry finds himself in.
Of
course, this is also a comedy and as flighty as Lester’s mixed takes on The
Three Musketeers and veers closer to the disaster of his destruction of the
Christopher Reeve/Superman franchise.
McDowell and the cast also including Alan Bates, Joss Ackland,
Christopher Cazenove, Lionel Jeffries, Alastair Sim, Rula Lenska and an early
Bob Hoskins.
Of
course, the story sounds like another film that came out the same year,
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
follow-up Barry Lyndon, a masterpiece that does everything well that this often
misguided film falters at. They make for
a good comparison, but as compared to the Kubrick masterwork (and even without
such a comparison), Royal Flash
shows that Lester ran out of innovative ideas and was living on past
glory. It is an interesting curio and
not much more.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 (ish) image was made to be soft to recall the
past, but this transfer further softens the fine camerawork by the great
Geoffrey Unsworth, B.S.C., who was in peak form at the time with Kubrick’s 2001, Zardoz, and Sidney Lumet’s Murder
On The Orient Express. The Dolby Digital
2.0 Stereo and Mono are about the same, showing the age of this film in its
fidelity. The Ken Thorne score is
adequate, but nothing special. Extras
include stills, the original trailer, decent feature length audio commentary
with Malcolm McDowell and Film Historian Nick Redman and three featurettes: Inside Royal Flash, Meet Harry Flashman and soundtrack that isolated sound effects and
music.
- Nicholas Sheffo
