Ben Gazzara

(On Cable TV, April 2022) In writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s filmography, Saint Jack is often regarded as his comeback picture: After a well-regarded run of three movies in the early 1970s, his mid-to-late 1970s accumulated three flops, and it’s only with Saint Jack that Bogdanovich regained his confidence and the appreciation of critics. (To say that the obstinate Bogdanovich had a roller-coaster of a career is understating it – you can even say that Saint Jack was the first of many comeback pictures.)  It was also a film notable for how it seemed to present a looser, earthier Bogdanovich – less formal, less gimmicky and more willing to embrace sex and nudity. Much of it has to do with the setting: Adapting a novel that takes place in Singapore but wasn’t warmly greeted by local authorities, Bogdanovich shot the film almost guerilla-style, hopping from varied locations around the city while misdirecting the government about the film he was shooting. It leads to what remains the film’s most enduring strength: the amazing, almost tactile atmosphere of late-1970s Shanghai, with the humidity, smells, ethnic intermingling and very specific landscapes all perceptible through the screen. Compared to its setting, the plot becomes dull and almost inconsequential – suffice to say that it’s about an American expatriate trying to navigate between various requests and entanglements, whether it’s from business partners, a romantic interest or what’s probably a CIA officer (played by Bogdanovich himself) trying to get him to take specific actions. Still, it’s the sense of place and time that remains most memorable, all the way to some very unusual local casting at a time when Hollywood was not that open to that kind of thing: Ben Gazzara (who doesn’t look like a movie star) is integral to the film working as well as it does, while the gorgeous Monika Subramaniam still looks and feels like a different kind of actress. (Indeed, she was a local with little professional experience, whose relationship with the writer-director led to the breakup of his second marriage with Cybil Shepherd– Look, Bogdanovich’s life was wild, all right? And I haven’t even delved into the way Saint Jack landed in his lap through Playboy magazine and a legal settlement between Shepherd and Hugh Hefner.)  Saint Jack was not exactly a big commercial or critical success when it was released, but it was good enough to convince Bogdanovich that he still had it, and critics that he was still worth paying attention after a humbling period. Today, it remains a time capsule of 1970s Singapore, a fading echo of the porno-chic era and one of Bogdanovich’s most distinctive efforts.