It can seem easy to construct an arc around a director’s filmography, as if this slab of completed work was itself explainable or understandable in narrative terms, a larger outgrowth of the movies themselves. It’s this tendency that makes it tempting to imagine a somber tone creeping steadily into Peter Bogdanovich’s oeuvre as it progresses into the 1980s, even if that condition isn’t necessarily borne out by the films themselves. The real-world rigors are there, ranging from the once-precocious auteur’s struggles with the studios, his repeated romantic disasters, the brutal murder of his girlfriend, and a long fallow period marked by elevated hackwork and manically effervescent comedies. Yet even during the director’s darkest years, he was still mining a vein of optimistic humanism that located deep pockets of goodness in the desperate machinations of hucksters and bullshitters, affording the potential for improvement to characters that others might write off as hopeless. Still, it feels less than coincidental that his most melancholy movie sits stationed at the tail end of his first – and still most celebrated – period of success, and also that the film itself represented the latest in a string of commercial failures, as well as another mixed critical response.
Yet for all of Saint Jack’s pessimistic qualities, it didn’t emerge as a spontaneous effusion of the director’s increasingly tortured psyche. Instead, the production was far more circuitous, stemming from then-partner Cybill Shepherd’s successful lawsuit against Playboy, which dislodged the rights and put them into the hands of Bogdanovich, who intended to then pass them on to Orson Welles, a fan of the book who had first recommended it to the couple. The unproduced Welles version, which was to star Jack Nicholson, is another alluring “what might have been” scenario for a creative genius with a career full of them, but Bogdanovich’s eventual adaptation is well worth it, even if it resulted in a prolonged falling out between the two.
One of his most emotionally complex efforts, Saint Jack represents an evident shift from a string of films about Hollywood itself, culminating with Nickelodeon, a breezy silent-era chronicle constructed from interviews with golden-age masters like Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh. Symbolically leaving his usual influences behind (including Welles, who faked his way through the Macao-set The Immortal Story in and around his Spanish estate), the director decamped for Singapore to capture the story of a small-time hustler struggling to make good. In one of his best performances, Ben Gazzara plays Jack Flowers, born Giovanni Fiori, a harried American expat who manages to keep up a consistent air of bonhomie, despite the grinding struggle of his existence. Operating as a small-time pimp, Jack repeatedly tries and fails to strike out on his own, his less-than-noble efforts quashed by a corrupt, repressive government, a violent local mob, and his own seedy clientele.
Shooting halfway around the world, Bogdanovich manages to reinvent his style in a minor key, while retaining the love of sparkling dialogue, gag work, and interpretive pastiche that defined his career. Haggard but unbent, with a drink always in hand, Jack is a Bogart-esque figure, bearing more than a few traces of Rick Blaine’s DNA, albeit one who can’t even secure his own place of business, let alone find a cause worth dragging him out of exile. In a sharp, sensitive move, Bogdanovich creates a character that seems at least partially based on his own life, while also casting himself as the film’s main adversary, a slimeball US government spook named Eddie Schuman, who tries to entangle Jack in a sordid scheme to entrap a visiting American politician.
The double-sided nature embodies an interesting bit of self-critique for a famously classicist director, who had by this point fused his own persona with the history of the industry he so loved, and who found himself equivalently disgusted with its overwhelming strictures and demands. In this sense, Saint Jack is still a movie about Hollywood at heart, even if it stands about as far from mythmaking as he would get. This balance is achieved by shifting the focus only slightly, with the metaphoric trappings adjusted to emphasize the commercial side of the industry, in what stands out as one of the least exoticizing depictions of an oft-glamorized location. The story’s setting is perfect, with Singapore depicted as a place where everything is for sale, a historic trading hub defined less by a specific native culture than the market-minded melding of several disparate ones. It’s also one with strict rules on social and personal expression, as demonstrated by the fact that the film had to be shot under a fake name and description, so local authorities wouldn’t associate it with Paul Theroux’s already-banned source novel.
At the center of all this is Gazzara’s marvelously layered title character, a guy who can’t catch a break, but who nevertheless will never reveal his inner turmoil for anything more than an instant. The character is endlessly effusive yet roiled by an undertone of desperation that seeps out only in fleeting gestures and looks. His ability to buoy himself up is contrasted with the sad tale of William Leigh, the visiting accountant brilliantly portrayed by Denholm Elliott. The film digressive structure is anchored by this dyed-in-the-wool, out-of-his-element English accountant, who arrives for a weekend each year to straighten up the books for the extravagantly corrupt importing business that provides Jack with legal employment. Marking the passage of time, these regular appearances also chart the man’s sad downfall, his progressively poor health exacerbated by the heat, humidity, and dissolute lifestyle of the expat community. Jack, on the other hand, perseveres. He continues pressing the flesh, cutting deals that will eventually lead to another unsurpassable obstacle, his persistence questioned by a film that’s also in awe of his endurance.
This all eventually serves as leadup to a final test, assuring that when it comes, it’s difficult to predict whether Jack will keep forging ahead or take the moral high road. The climactic challenge involves the aforementioned blackmail plot, in which Schuman hopes to hire Jack to set up a honey pot and snap illicit photos as the foundation for a manufactured sex scandal. Instead, he finds out the politician is hiding a different kind of secret, and in the end chooses to protect it. This fits with the character’s personality, and likely what Bogdanovich also envisioned of himself, even after years of struggling for directorial success. A survivor is one thing, a mercenary weasel is another, and so when it comes time for the character to sell out, he just won’t do it. Yet, what’s ultimately important here is the way this self-justification serves as the basis for a perfectly constructed piece of downbeat entertainment, real-life feelings converted into something that makes those emotions accessible to any viewer, the true standard of quality for any great film.
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