British Comics Go to the Movies (Part 1 of 3), James Chapman

Before he became a film-maker, Lindsay Anderson wrote: ‘As, geographically, Britain is poised between continents, not quite Europe, and very far from America, so from certain points of view, the British cinema seems to hover between the opposite poles of Frances and Hollywood. Our directors and producers never or rarely have the courage to tackle, in an adult manner, the completely adult subject; yet they lack also the flair for popular showmanship that is characteristic of the American cinema.’

The same has often been held to be true of British comics, which are deemed to possess neither the cultural kudos of the French bande dessinée nor the wide appeal and popular mythology of American comics, especially the superhero tradition.

In my book British Comics: A Cultural History, I argued that British comics were worth taking seriously in their own right and should certainly not be written off as pale imitations of their American or Continental counterparts. Britain can claim talent to match the world’s best. I would maintain that Frank Hampson deserves a place in any pantheon of great comic-strip artists, and there is probably no more acclaimed comic writer in the world than Northampton’s foremost citizen Alan Moore. For British comic enthusiasts, it is a matter of pride that Dandy and Beano came before Detective Comics and Action Comics. And Britain made its own distinctive contribution to genre comics through such titles as Commando, Warlord, Battle, Roy of the Rovers and, of course, 2000AD

However, one area where we Brits have lagged behind our French and American friends is that so few British comics have made the transition to film – and even fewer have done so successfully. Indeed I am hard pressed to name a single film adapted from a British comic strip or comic book that is any good, though there are some that are very bad.

Why is this?

One reason might be that the adventure strip – the source of many of the comic book movie blockbusters since Superman (1978) – emerged later in Britain than it did in the United States. Until the Second World War most British comic strips were ‘funnies’: there were no real equivalents of Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy – both of whom made their celluloid debuts in Hollywood movie serials in the 1930s – let alone British counterparts of Superman or Batman. Britain’s own space hero, ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’, who made his debut in the Eagle in 1950, has never made it to the big screen, though there were abortive attempts to do so by the aforementioned Lindsay Anderson in the late 1950s and by entrepreneur Paul De Savery in the mid-1970s, who wanted to cast James Bond star Roger Moore. A deservedly forgotten CGI’d television series is the only screen Dan Dare.

Another reason might be that British cinema has historically had a smaller domestic market than Hollywood: insufficient to return the expense of a high-concept special effects picture. Alexander Salkind’s production of Superman and Dino de Laurentiis’ Flash Gordon (1980) were both technically British films on account of being shot in British studios and employing British technicians to qualify for the production subsidy offered by the Eady levy, but there was little or nothing culturally British about them. Superman’s Britishness derived not from its source material, its writers (Mario Puzo, David and Leslie Newman), its director (Richard Donner) or its mostly American cast, but from the fact that it was shot at Pinewood and Shepperton studios with a largely British technical crew by the British-registered subsidiary of a Swiss-registered subsidiary of Salkind’s Panama-based finance corporation. When it drew over £1 million of Eady money - a fund raised through a levy on ticket sales that was repaid to producers of ‘British’ films in proportion to their box-office revenues – it prompted the government to rethink the operation of the levy, which had been set up to assist struggling British producers and not to line the pockets of Hollywood mercenaries.

Most British comic-strip movies have tended to be low-budget affairs. The Adventures of Jane (1949), based on the famous strip cartoon heroine of the Daily Mirror and which by my reckoning was the first British comic-into-film adaptation, is case in point. Filmed around the seaside resort of Brighton during the off-season for low-budget specialist Keystone New World Productions, it is a dreary film in every respect: cheap production values, lacklustre scripting, flat direction and wooden performances. It exists now as little more than a historical curiosity, the only starring vehicle for original ‘Jane’ model Chrystabel Leighton-Porter whose acting ability sadly did not match the shapeliness of her legs.

‘Jane’ was very much a product of her time: the height of her popularity coincided with the Second World War when she represented an idealized girlfriend whose goodness and virtue provided reassurance for servicemen separated for the duration (despite her propensity to accidentally shed her clothes, Jane remains chaste and is unswervingly loyal to her boyfriend Georgie Porgy). Producer Harry Robertson maintained the wartime setting, sending Jane (Kristen Hughes) to Africa on a mission for the British government in Jane and the Lost City (1987). This film is surely a contender for the mantle of worst British picture ever made. It’s a sort of sub-Carry On version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Jasper Carrott camping it up as a German villain obviously modelled on Ronald Lacey’s sinister Toht who is so inept that he makes Herr Flick of the Gestapo (‘Allo ‘Allo) seem positively menacing in comparison. The production values are non-existent, the acting pitched at the level of a Comic Relief skit (though the film is not very comic and brings precious little relief) and the   crude ’foreign’ stereotypes make the Carry On films seem enlightened in comparison. It was picked up was picked by New World Pictures, a specialist in low-budget genre films that usually handled the films the major distributors did not want to touch, and disappeared without trace at the box office.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of British Comics: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2011) as well as several books on British cinema, including Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 2nd edn 2007) and Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is currently writing Comics at the Movies, a history of comic book film adaptations from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to the contemporary Marvel and DC superhero cycles.