Saint Jack (film)

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Saint Jack
File:Saint Jack (film).jpg
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Produced by Roger Corman
Screenplay by Peter Bogdanovich
Howard Sackler
Paul Theroux
Based on Saint Jack
by Paul Theroux
Starring Ben Gazzara
Denholm Elliott
George Lazenby
Cinematography Robby Müller
Edited by William C. Carruth
Distributed by New World Pictures
Release dates
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  • April 27, 1979 (1979-04-27)
Running time
 112 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $2 million[1]

Saint Jack is a 1979 crime comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the 1973 novel Saint Jack. Ben Gazzara stars as Flowers in the film. The film also features Denholm Elliott and George Lazenby.

Plot

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Cast

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Film adaptation rights

Cybill Shepherd sued Playboy magazine after they published photos of her from The Last Picture Show. As part of the settlement, she got the rights to the novel Saint Jack, which she had wanted to make into a film ever since Orson Welles gave her a copy.[2]

Production

Saint Jack was shot entirely on location in various places in Singapore in May and June 1978. Places featured in the film include the former Empress Place hawker centre (now demolished) and Bugis Street. The local authorities knew about the book, hence the foreign production crew did not tell them that they were adapting it, fearing that they would not be permitted to shoot the film. Instead, they created a fake synopsis for a film called Jack of Hearts, (what the director called "a cross between Love Is a Many Splendored Thing and Pal Joey"[1]) and most of the Singaporeans involved in the production believed this was what they were making.

Release

The film was banned in Singapore and Malaysia on January 17, 1980. Singapore banned it "largely due to concerns that there would be excessive edits required to the scenes of nudity and some coarse language before it could be shown to a general audience", and lifted the ban only in March 2006.[3] It is now an M18-rated film.

Saint Jack was re-released in North America on DVD in 2001.

In an interview with The New York Times on 15 March 2006, Bogdanovich said "Saint Jack and They All Laughed were two of my best films but never received the kind of distribution they should have."[4]

Critical reception

Roger Ebert gave the film a four-star review. In praise of Gazzara's performance, he writes "sometimes a character in a movie inhabits his world so freely, so easily, that he creates it for us as well. Ben Gazzara does that in Saint Jack." He goes on to say "The film is by Peter Bogdanovich and what a revelation it is, coming after three expensive flops. But here everything is right again. Everything."[5] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic described Saint Jack as 'otiose and odious'.[6]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Ibid. (A search of The New York Times' archive on 29 March 2006 failed to find the text of the interview.)
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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