The Saint in colour, part 2

A few selected episodes from the colour era of The Saint. I slightly prefer the black-and-white episodes but there was plenty of fun to be had in the colour seasons as well.

Locate and Destroy

Locate and Destroy (scripted by John Stanton and directed by Leslie Norman) went to air in December 1966.

Locate and Destroy begins with what seems to be an attempted hold-up in an art dealer’s shop in Lima, Peru. Simon Templar naturally just happens to be on hand and foils the robbery. Except that it wasn’t a robbery. This much is obvious to the Saint. He decides that he’d like to find out what was really going on. The fact that it’s none of his business is merely an added attraction. In fact what is really going on is a bit too obvious from the start, and the story relies on too many clumsy clichéd narrow escapes.

This one is a bit disappointing. It’s not terrible, it’s just very average.

The Better Mouse Trap

The Better Mouse Trap (scripted by Leigh Vance and directed by Gordon Flemyng) screened in November 1966.

The Saint is in Cannes and of course crime has followed him there, in the shape of a series of daring jewel robberies. Naturally the police assume Simon is the thief. They always do. 

And naturally this adventure involves a woman, a Canadian. The thieves are trying to cover their tracks by framing Simon.

As often happens in Simon’s adventures the woman is somewhat ambiguous. The viewer certainly has plenty of reason to suspect that she’s mixed up in the robberies.

This is very much a stock-standard Saint episode, enlivened by a comic turn by Ronnie Barker as a bumbling French policeman. There’s the usual stock footage to convince us we’re in the south of France.

Nothing special, but it’s executed competently.

Little Girl Lost

Little Girl Lost (scripted by Leigh Vance and directed by Roy Ward Baker) went to air in December 1966.

Simon is in Ireland where he rescues a young woman from a couple of thugs. The woman claims to be Hitler’s daughter! Simon is sure she’s either mad or lying but he likes a good story and she is pretty and it all sounds like it could be an amusing adventure.

There’s a millionaire mixed up in it and a couple of crooked private detectives, Simon and the girl get chased through the countryside and there’s young love thwarted and a matter of a hundred thousand pounds. And quite a bit of fisticuffs. 

Oh, and there’s a castle and a dungeon as well.

All in all this is a delightful light-hearted romp.

Paper Chase

Paper Chase (directed by Leslie Norman and written by Harry W. Junkin and Michael Cramoy) went to air in December 1966.

A chap named Redmond from the Foreign Office has defected to East Germany taking with him a vital file. Simon gets inveigled into working temporarily for British intelligence since he can identify the defector. But it’s not as simple as that. The East German spy who was Redmond’s contact wasn’t what he seemed to be. And Redmond finds he’s been conned.

There’s also a pretty girl (naturally). She’d like to go to London with Redmond. Or with Simon. Or with anybody who’ll take her.

This story gives Roger Moore a chance to do the James Bond thing which of course he does pretty well. There’s a lot more action than usual and some decent suspense.

All in all this is a pretty good spy thriller episode.

Flight Plan

Flight Plan (directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Alfred Shaughnessy) went to air in December 1966.

Diana Gregory (Fiona Lewis) arrives in London to meet her brother Mike but a phoney nun tries to kidnap her. Luckily when a damsel is in distress you can be sure that Simon Templar will be at hand to rescue her. But then there’s another mystery - her brother, an R.A.F. pilot, is nowhere to be found.

Mike had been one of the pilots testing the new top-secret British fighter the Osprey (which appears to be the supersonic version of the Harrier that was planned at one stage) and it doesn’t take Simon long to figure out that there’s some kind of plot afoot involving that aircraft. Mike turns out to be a bit of a loose cannon, being a drunkard who passes bad cheques. Just the sort of person who get mixed up in an espionage plot.

This is a decent spy thriller episode with the added bonus of aerial adventure (although the aerial stuff is of course almost entirely stock footage). William Gaunt (from The Champions) plays Mike.

Final Thoughts

Five episodes, two of them a bit on the routine side but three of them very good.

The Saint in colour

In 1966 ITC decided it was time to switch to colour for the new season of The Saint. There were a couple of other minor changes as well, the most notable being that we now get a voiceover introduction to each episode rather than having Simon Templar break the fourth wall and address the audience directly.

Overall though it’s the formula as before. If you have a formula that works why change it?

So, some reviews of early fifth season episodes chosen at random.

The Queen’s Ransom

In The Queen’s Ransom (which aired in 1966) Simon finds himself involved, very indirectly, in a revolution after he saves the life of a deposed Middle Eastern king. The revolution is intended to restore King Fallouda to his throne. The Saint has mixed feelings about revolutions but in this case he feels that the restoration of the king really would a good idea. The problem is that the money to finance the revolution will have to come from the sale of Queen Adana’s jewels and they’re in a safety deposit box in Zurich. The Queen will have to fetch them and Simon’s job is to protect her and the jewels.

This episode then becomes a kind of Couple on the Run story as Simon and Queen Adana are chased about Europe by the king’s enemies who intend to get those jewels. It’s a typical Saintly adventure, with Adana and Simon at each other’s throats at first, much to Simon’s amusement.

There’s the usual Saintly mix of adventure with a dash of humour but with quite a bit more action compared to the earlier black-and-white seasons. And the action is noticeably more violent (although it’s still very restrained compared to the direction British television would take in the mid-70s).

The sparks really do fly between the Queen and the Saint. There’s no hint of romance (Queen Adana is very happily married to the King and is absolutely faithful to him). Queen Adana tries her best to be regal and mostly succeeds although at times she is reminded that before she was a queen she was the daughter of a London bus driver. Dawn Addams does a fine job of being queenly while giving us occasional subtle glimpses of her working-class background.

A very entertaining episode.

The Reluctant Revolution

The Reluctant Revolution takes place in the South American dictatorship of San Pablo. Simon runs across an attractive young woman named Diane (played by Jennie Linden) who has a gun in her purse. He fears she might be going to try to kill someone and that proves to be the case. She wants to kill the dictator’s right-hand man, and that gets both Diane and Simon mixed up in an attempted revolution.

The Saint isn’t altogether sure he approves of revolutions. They usually end with a lot of innocent people being killed. If only one could have a revolution without bloodshed. Perhaps it can be done, if Simon can make use of his skills as a confidence trickster.

An enjoyable episode.

Interlude in Venice

In Interlude in Venice Simon is seeing the sights when trouble finds him (as it always does) and he has to rescue an American girl from a too-insistent would-be Lothario. The American girl, Cathy, is about to get herself in more hot water (something she seems to have a talent for), this time with a sleazy prince. 

This one was perhaps a bit too ambitious, with lots of blue-screen stuff to convince us that Roger Moore is really zipping around the canals of Venice when quite obviously the entire episode was shot in the studio. At least the blue-screen stuff is fairly well done.

As you would expect it turns out that things are not quite what they seem. A pretty decent episode.

The House on Dragon’s Rock

The House on Dragon’s Rock, which was directed by Roger Moore, is a very untypical episode of The Saint. It’s more like a 1950s science fiction monster movie with a bit of Hammer-style gothic atmosphere thrown in. Simon arrives in a small Welsh village to find that strange and disturbing things have been happening. The latest mystery is the disappearance of a shepherd named Owen and when Owen is finally found the mystery remains as deep as ever.

The villagers are convinced that it has something to do with the scientific experiments being carried out in the big old house on Dragon’s Rock.

This is not just a monster movie story, it’s also a mad scientist story with Anthony Bate as Dr Charles Sardon making a pretty effective mad scientist. Dr Sardon has his own ideas about the future of the planet.

Much of this episode was actually shot in Wales, with mostly Welsh actors. To venture so far from the studio was highly unusual for 1960s British television. And there are special effects. OK, the special effects are roughly of the standard you’d expect in a 1960s Doctor Who episode but given the tone of the episode they work well enough.

There has to be a pretty girl in an episode of The Saint and in this case it’s Annette Andre (later to be better known from her regular role in Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased).

Roger Moore plays things pretty straight which, given the outlandish plot, was probably a very sound idea.

There’s an obvious attempt to get away from the flat lighting so characteristic of 1960s television and achieve a more atmospheric effect.

The House on Dragon’s Rock is a great deal of fun.

The Man Who Liked Lions

A journalist, a friend of Simon’s, is murdered in broad daylight in Rome. Needless to say Simon makes it his business to find out why. The trail leads him first to artist Claudia Molinelli but what Simon really wants is to find the Man Who Likes Lions. Eventually he finds him. He is Tiberio Magadino (Peter Wyngarde) and apart from being obsessed with lions he is obsessed by Ancient Rome. He dreams of recapturing the glory of Ancient Rome but it’s the way he earns his living that interests Simon.

The plot isn’t all that special but it’s the outrageous execution that makes this a memorable episode.

This is one of several memorable TV guest roles that Peter Wyngarde did in the 60s before finding fame in Department S and Jason King. His most notorious guest role of course was in the A Touch of Brimstone episode of The Avengers (the one with Mrs Peel as the Queen of Sin).

The Saint - The Angel’s Eye (1966)

When I did my recent post comparing the stories in Leslie Charteris’s 1953 collection The Saint in Europe with the 1960s television adaptation I mentioned that I had been unable to find a copy of the TV version of one of the stories, The Angel’s Eye. That problem has now been rectified, my boxed set from Network containing all the colour episodes having now arrived. So I can now offer my comparison of this story and the TV version (which went to air in 1966 as part of the first colour season of The Saint).

This story begins with a man named Upwater and his wife asking Simon’s help in regard to a very valuable diamond. Upwater works for a jeweller and has taken the stone to Amsterdam to be recut but the diamond cutter not only refuses to return it, he denies having ever seen it. Which of course interests the Saint. In fact he is not only interested, he is enchanted. This promises to be a rather artistic swindle and Simon is a connoisseur of swindles.

The Saint is not the only one to have taken an interest in the case, which enchants Simon even more.

The twist in this tale is really not one of Charteris’s more dazzling efforts but it’s clever and enjoyable enough and a swindle involving an immensely valuable diamond gives it the characteristic flavour of later-period Saint adventures. And the swindle is, as Simon had hoped, artistic and devious. There are also some clues scattered through the story but they won’t help you unless you know a lot about diamonds.

Harry W. Junkin wrote the television adaptation. Junkin was also the script supervisor for the series. Junkin and Charteris did not always see eye-to-eye when it came to adaptations of Saint stories, and that’s putting it mildly. 

The TV version opens in England and immediately introduces us to half a dozen key characters who were not in the original story so we know that this is not exactly going to be a faithful adaptation (and we can also therefore guess that it’s probably going to be one of the episodes that irritated Leslie Charteris).

In the TV version the diamond belongs to Lord Cranmore but he’s broke and needs to sell it. This enrages his snobbish nephew Jeremy. There are a couple of very suspicious characters hanging about who look like they might be jewel thieves. Upwater in this version is Lord Cranmore’s estate manager and he his daughter are sent to Amsterdam to have the stone recut. Replacing the middle-aged Upwater’s middle-aged wife with his daughter of course allowed the script to include an attractive young lady in the cast, and attractive young ladies were always an essential element in the TV series. 

To be fair to Junkin he has kept the core of the plot intact. All he’s really done is to add a bit of extra misdirection which actually works reasonably well. There’s still the diamond cutter who mysteriously denies any knowledge of the Angel’s Eye and Simon’s involvement still follows the same course. Perhaps Junkin has added some complications that weren’t strictly necessary but on the other hand he’s also made it a bit more of a challenge for the viewer to figure out the solution. The only weakness is that the TV version doesn’t include Simon’s explanation of the clues that allowed him to solve the problem.

Overall both the story and the TV adaptation are quite entertaining. I certainly enjoyed both.

The Saint in Europe, and on TV

The Saint - The Covetous Headsman

This is another instalment in my project of comparing episodes of classic 1950s-1970s TV series with their literary sources. In this case I’m going to look at the stories from the 1953 Leslie Charteris collection The Saint in Europe.

Charteris’s Saint stories fall into several distinct phases with Simon Templar evolving by stages from the incredibly brash cocky hero of the 1930s to the more thoughtful, slightly wiser and just so ever so slightly sadder but more sophisticated Templar of the 1950s. So these stories all feature that final version of the Saint.

While the Saint might be older and wiser he still has a very flexible attitude towards the law. Stealing is of course wrong and the Saint would never do such a thing. But stealing from other thieves - that’s not really stealing is it? And he continues to derive a great deal of harmless amusement from causing annoyance to policemen.

Unfortunately the Saint’s larcenous tendencies had to be erased for the TV series, which makes the character slightly less interesting. That’s especially so in a couple of the stories  I’ll be discussing here - it takes away just a tiny bit of the zest from them.

The Covetous Headsman takes place in Paris. Quite by accident Simon hears of a gruesome but fascinating murder. The victim was decapitated but the head was found beside the body so it wasn’t an attempt to disguise the victim’s identity. So why cut off his head? Maybe it was the act of a madman, but Simon has to consider the possibility that there was a very good reason for it. Of course it’s none of his business but the victim’s sister is a young pretty American girl named Valerie North and pretty girls are always Simon’s business.

Discovering the identity of the murderer is not too difficult but that’s not the main problem. It’s the motive that matters. Valerie’s life may depend on the answer to that question. And the answer may lie in the past.

The Saint - The Latin Touch

The Covetous Headsman was adapted as the fourth episode of the first season of ITC’s The Saint TV series, going to air in late 1962. The source was a short story it was necessary to expand it a little to fit a one-hour time slot but apart from that the plot follows Charteris’s story remarkable faithfully. Since Charteris’s plot is pretty good, it works. Having the wonderful Barbara Shelley as Valerie also helps (in the TV version she is English rather than American).

The title caused a bit of a problem. It doesn’t mean the same thing in the TV version that it meant in the short story but I guess they thought it was too good a title to change.

The Latin Touch takes Simon Templar to Rome where gets to do something he always enjoys - saving a damsel in distress. If the damsel is young and pretty so much the better. The damsel is the daughter of a high-ranking US State Department official. She’s been kidnapped and the ransom terms cannot possibly be met. Simon doesn’t have a clue where the girl is being held but he uses his ignorance to his advantage in a very clever manner.

It’s a situation in which Simon must depend entirely on his wits - he has no objection to fisticuffs or gunplay but they’re just not going to be of any use this time. Fortunately he did pay attention to his Latin lessons at school.

It’s a neat little story.

The TV adaptation was the second episode of the first season of The Saint. There are some minor changes. The girl’s father is now the Governor of an American state rather than being with the State Department. Several minor characters are added including a comic relief Italian taxi driver (played with hammy relish by Warren Mitchell). But despite the TV version manages to retain Charteris’s core plot in its entirety. Even more so than in The Covetous Headsman every single one of Charteris’s clever plot twists is preserved. Even the Latin touch which gave the story its title is there.

The Saint - The Loaded Tourist

Which must have pleased Leslie Charteris quite a bit - he liked faithful adaptations of his stories.

These two adaptations are not just faithful, they’re delightfully entertaining.

The Loaded Tourist takes place in Switzerland. In Lucerne, to be precise. Simon witnesses a robbery. The object of the robbery was a briefcase. The briefcase is now nowhere to be found, or at least that’s the assumption of the police. The Saint however knows where it might be found, and finds it. The contents of the briefcase are none of his business but that’s never stopped him before and it doesn’t stop him mow. The contents are most intriguing and rather puzzling.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to arouse Simon Templar’s interest it’s someone telling him obvious lies and that’s what happens here. He simply has to get to the bottom of such a mystery.

This is a pretty lightweight story, not quite as clever as The Covetous Headsman or The Latin Touch, but it’s enjoyable enough.

The adaptation of The Loaded Tourist was the fifth first season episode of The Saint.

A few changes were made and a couple of additional characters added. The robbery victim now has a teenage son as well as a wife and his junior business partner now plays a key rôle. The basic plot is however mostly intact. If there’s a slight weakness in the TV version it’s that a little bit too much information is given away too early. On the other hand there is an extra plot twist at the end. On the whole it works pretty successfully.

What impresses me about these three adaptations is that whole the short stories had to be padded out the passing was done skilfully and without damaging the integrity of the essential plot, and without losing the flavour of the originals.

The Saint - The Spanish Cow

A seaside resort in the south of France provides the setting for The Spanish Cow. A very large middle-aged American widow has become the butt of everyone’s jokes due to her habit of rising to the bait every single time. What interests Simon Templar about her however is that she possesses some astonishingly valuable jewels. The Saint has no doubt that he could put such wealth to far better use. How does one go about separating a middle-aged woman from her jewels? The answer of course is Romance. The Saint’s larcenous intentions are scarcely honourable but when all is said and done he is after all a thief.

This is a very slight story with a twist that you’re probably going to see coming. It may be that the purpose of this story is to remind the reader that while the Saint is very often on the side of justice he really is a criminal. A criminal with a conscience perhaps, a criminal with a sense of honour perhaps, but a criminal nonetheless.

The Spanish Cow was adapted as the eighth episode of the fourth season. It want to air in 1965. Adapting this one posed a real challenge. Since they’d decided that the TV Saint could not ever be seen to be guilty of stealing the story was just not going to make any sense at all. Screenwriter Michael Cramoy solved the problem by throwing away Charteris’s story in its entirety and writing a completely original screenplay with the same title. In this version the American widow becomes the widow of a South American dictator. The Saint has no designs whatsoever on her jewels, but there are two groups of people who most certainly want to steal them. One group is the government which overthrew the dictator, the other is the late dictator’s brother who wants to use the jewels to finance a counter-revolution.

The dictator’s widow is given a gorgeous young female companion because every episode must feature at least one beautiful woman. Some bumbling French policemen are also added. The result bears not the slightest similarity to Charteris’s story. That’s not to say that the TV episode isn’t fun in its own way. It is. In fact it’s rather clever. But it’s a totally new story.

It’s interesting that the three season one episodes I’ve talked about here are all fairly faithful adaptations while the season four episode abandons any pretence of being faithful to the original. Does this indicate a change of policy on the part of the producers? I’ll have to do a few more short story-TV episode comparisons before committing myself on that question.

The Saint - The Rhine Maiden

TheAnd, as it happens, that crooked company promoter just happens to be on the same train. It seems highly likely that he has on his person a large part of the money he has swindled. It seems like a situation in which any adventurer worth his salt ought to do something. Rhine Maidens should not have their dreams taken away from them.

This is another story in which we see the various side of Simon’s character. He is himself on the train with him certain property which was not exactly honestly come by. He is after all a thief. But he is also a romantic. A very ruthless romantic. It’s a neat little story, and I do love mystery thriller stories set on trains.

The Rhine Maiden was episode sixteen of the third season of The Saint TV series. And it’s another story which was going to pose some problems. And the same solution was adopted as in The Spanish Cow - the TV script (by Brian Degas) has only the most tenuous connection to the original story. There is a crooked company promoter but he’s from London, not Ohio. The only Rhine Maiden here is a train called the Rhine Maiden Express. It provides the setting for a thrilling action climax but it’s not quite the same as a real live Rhine Maiden. The girl in the TV version is an English girl and she’s the daughter of the company promoter’s father.

A whole new (and admittedly quite ingenious) plot has been fashioned, based on a mysterious death and a creepy doctor with a very shady past.

If you don’t mind that it’s actually an entirely different story then it’s quite an enjoyable one.

So a pattern does seem to be emerging, with the later adaptations retaining very little of Charteris’s stories apart from the titles.

The Golden Journey is a whimsical little tale. Belinda Deane is an American girl. She is very pretty, very rich and very spoilt. It is obvious to Simon Templar that she is going to make her fiancé’s life miserable, and her own as well. Unless something is done. The Saint knows what Belinda needs. She needs to join him in a week-long walking tour across the Alps where she can learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, and the pleasures of roughing it and having to actually do some chores. Of course Belinda would rather die than going off tramping through the woods but Simon knows how how he can persuade her. The first step is to steal her handbag.

The Saint - The Golden Journey

Thus begins Belinda’s worst nightmare. Simon even forces her to do the washing up. Simon insists that they cannot afford to stay in guest houses and they must actually sleep in the open which of course is the last straw for Belinda.  And when she misbehaves she gets a spanking. By the end of the week she will have learnt something or perhaps she will have murdered Simon.

There’s a bit too much of the back to nature stuff in this story for my liking. I’m afraid my feelings about the great outdoors are pretty much in line with Belinda’s. But the point of the story is the Simon intends to destroy the old spoilt Belinda and create a new one. Needless to say this is the sort of story that a writer could not possibly get away with today. It’s one of those Battle of the Sexes stories that were rather popular in the ’50s. But although it’s very lightweight in the plot department it does have its amusing moments and it’s difficult not to enjoy seeing a spoilt rich brat brought face to face with some real life.

This one was adapted as the tenth episode of the first season of the TV series.

The scene of the action is shifted to Spain but the story remains completely unchanged. Simon still steals all of Belinda’s money but it was obviously felt that they could get away with this - he is after all doing it for her own good. Pretty much every incident of the short story is preserved. Belinda even gets her spanking. Erica Rogers is very good as Belinda. She’s amazingly obnoxious and petulant at first, and enraged by the fact that there’s no way out for her - she either does what Simon tells her to do or she won’t eat.

The TV version is if anything slightly more amusing than the original story.

The final story in The Saint in Europe is The Angel’s Eye. Unfortunately the TV adaptation was one of the colour episodes which are much more difficult to get hold of than the black-and-white episodes and I don’t have access to a copy. The story itself begins with a man asking Simon’s help in regard to a very valuable diamond. The man works for a jeweller and has taken the stone to Amsterdam to be recut but the diamond cutter not only refuses to return it, he denies having ever seen it. Which of course intrigues the Saint. The twist in this story is really not all that dazzling but the story is enjoyable enough.

So I’ve looked at six adaptations - four very faithful adaptations from the first season and two from later seasons that bear no resemblance at all to the source stories. Interesting.

The Saint revisited - six B&W episodes

The Saint is in my view a more interesting series than it’s usually given credit for. One of the reasons it’s interesting is that the source material is so fascinating.

The Simon Templar of Leslie Charteris’s stories is unique among fictional action-adventure heroes in the extent to which he evolves over time, and the extent to which his evolution is logical and plausible. Superficially the Saint of the later adventures is still a young man but if you look at his behaviour and his outlook on life he clearly matures.

William Vivian Butler in his marvellous book on gentleman rogue action-adventure heroes identifies no less than five distinct phases through which the Saint passes.

The most intriguing is what Butler calls the Mark V Saint who made his appearance in 1949 in Saint Errant. He is clearly a very different man from the Simon Templar of the early tales but he’s also clearly a logical evolution of the young Templar. He is now older, wiser and a tiny bit sadder, and somewhat lonely. The early Saint had a collection of pals who functioned as his assistants/accomplices/partners-in-crime/disciples/followers or whatever you might like to calk them. They don’t all appear in every story but you can be sure that at least one will up up in every story. And the young Simon Templar has Patricia Holm, the Great Love of his Life, his perfect woman. All these supporting characters disappeared during the course of the 40s and by the time Saint Errant appeared the Saint was entirely alone, and remained alone.

The character in the TV series is based entirely on the Mark V Saint. Now while I would dearly have loved to see a series based on the Mark II Saint of the early 30s it could only have been done as a period piece. There were very sound reasons for choosing the Mark V Saint. What’s really cool, if you’re a fan of the books, is that the TV series captures the tone of the later Saint stories remarkably well. The TV Simon Templar has friends, but no close friends. He has women, but he doesn’t have the one woman who mattered to him. There is the subtle touch of melancholy that you find in the 1950s Saint stories and there is the slight sense of less and loneliness. Roger Moore captures these qualities in the character surprisingly well.

The other important thing about the Mark V Saint is that he was a man out of his time. The devil-may-care adventurer of the 1930s found himself in a world that had no place for devil-may-care adventurers. He was also a restless rootless character, a citizen of the world who was truly at home nowhere. The Saint of the TV series is definitely a man slightly out of place in the 1960s. He is dashing and debonair, but in a decidedly old-fashioned manner. He is a gentleman in a world that no longer has any respect for the code of the gentleman.

Since I’ve just finished reading Saint Errant and I’m just about to post my review at Vintage Pop Fictions and since no less than six of the nine stories in the collection were adapted for the TV series I thought it would be fun to review those adaptations.

Judith

Judith retains the Montreal setting of the original story, the first in the collection. Montreal’s richest citizen, Burt Northwade, is about to become even richer by selling an important new invention to a major car maker. There does however seem to be some dispute about whether the invention is actually Burt Northwade’s to sell. Morally it seems that the invention should belong to his brother Frank, who was actually responsible for the invention. Frank’s daughter Judith certainly thinks so and she’s planning a spot of larceny to put things right.

Judith is just the sort of woman Simon Templar likes. She’s young and beautiful and she’s criminally inclined (she is played by Julie Christie, just a couple of years away from major cinematic stardom). No self-respecting buccaneer could resist volunteering to carry out the burglary for her. Of course it’s going to turn out to be far less simple than Simon imagines. It’s a neat little story with a rather nice twist at the end.

While the story has had to be expanded a little the essentials are pretty much unchanged. And it’s one of the TV episodes that shows the Saint quite unequivocally carrying out a crime, even if it’s ultimately for a good cause. The tone of the episode matches that of Charteris’s story pretty well - lighthearted and witty. A very good episode.

Iris

Iris is an actress in a play that is about to open. The only reason the play is going to open at all is that Iris’s husband Rick has put up the money for it. Rick, being a successful gangster, has  plenty of money. Rick does however have a problem. He is being blackmailed by Simon Templar. This is news to Simon Templar. Not only is he not the blackmailer, blackmail is something of which he very strongly disapproves. He is determined to find out who the real blackmailer is.

The television adaptation moves the scene of the action from Chicago to London. It also makes Rick a slightly less colourful character. Unfortunately it also makes Mr Stratford Keane, the director of the play, much less colourful. Patricia Holm is of course eliminated from the story. The Saint of the TV series has to remain a loner and cannot possibly have a full-time lady love. On the plus side Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal is added to the story.

Iris was not one of the better stories in the Saint Errant collection and it isn’t one of the stronger episodes of the TV series. It’s OK, but not great.

Lida

The first obvious change from the Lida short story is that the scene of the action has been moved from the Quarterdeck Club in Miami to Captain Kidd’s Club in The Bahamas. The second change is that the Saint’s long-time lady love, Patricia Holm, has disappeared from the story. The adaptation also adds some action, obviously essential for TV.

Joan Wingate is worried that her sister Lida Verity is in trouble and asks Simon Templar to help her. Unfortunately it’s too late. Lida Verity is found dead, of a gunshot wound. The universal assumption that it must have been suicide does not satisfy the Saint. Lida had a very wealthy husband. Any gambling debts incurred at the club would have been of little consequence to her. He is convinced the answer can be found at Captain Kidd’s Club.

The sequence of events has been changed a little and some extra characters added. One of them is played by the always entertaining Aubrey Morris, this time playing a more sinister character than usual. The original story has had to be expanded quite a bit but this is done very successfully. The vital plot elements are still those of Charteris’s short story and they still work. A very fine episode.

Jeannine

Charteris’s story Jeannine takes place in New Orleans but Terry Nation’s teleplay moves the action to Paris. A glamorous but apparently murderous female head of state, Madam Chen, owns a very very valuable pearl necklace. The police assume that the Saint will try to steal it. The Saint is most interested to find out that Madam Chen’s PR lady is none other than Judith, a beautiful but extremely larcenous young lady he has encountered before, but now she calls herself Jeannine. He assumes that Jeannine is going to try to steal the pearls and he’s right but in fact it seems like every second person in Paris is trying to steal that necklace.

It’s unfortunate that Julie Christie was by now becoming too big a star to reprise her rôle as Judith. Sylvia Sims however does a pretty decent job. Jacqui Chan does some glorious scenery chewing as the cruel but lecherous Madam Chen.

The twist ending which Leslie Charteris pulled off so adroitly in the short story is still there in the TV adaptation and it still works but it’s not done with Charteris’s skill. The subplot involving the opposition to Madam Chen is entirely Terry Nation’s invention but it does provide an echo of Simon Templar’s motivation in the original story. It’s still a very good thoroughly enjoyable episode.

Teresa

Teresa is set in Mexico, as was the original short story. Like most of the stories in Saint Errant Teresa was a fairly brief and deceptively simple short story with a clever sting in the tail. A woman, Teresa, is searching for her husband who disappeared a couple of years earlier. For TV the story had to be expanded very considerably with scriptwriter John Kruse adding a backstory in which the husband has carried out a failed assassination attempt on the President of Mexico. He’s also added a fun circus background. The extra material is effective and entertaining.

Eventually right at the end we get to the core of Charteris’s story, with Teresa and Simon Templar finding the bandit El Rojo who holds the key to the mystery.

The episode works extremely well and it’s a fine example of the successful and almost seamless integration of library footage (the circus scenes) with new material. There are a couple of dodgy process shots but for me that adds to the fun.

Luella

Luella is a tale of blackmail. The action is moved from Los Angeles in the original story to London. Big-time American banker Bill Harvey and Simon are old friends. While Bill’s wife is in Paris he decides to sample the London night-life and gets himself set up by blackmailing gang. Luella (played by the luscious Sue Lloyd) is the bait in the trap. Worse is to come when Bill’s wife finds out about his little misadventure. Somehow Simon has to come up with a scheme to get Bill off the hook, and put the blackmailers out of business.

One interesting feature is that the original story specifically mentions the Saint’s practice of returning stolen or extorted money to its rightful owners, less a commission for himself. That commission is not mentioned in the TV episode - it would after all have made the Saint appear to be profiting from crime.

While a tongue-in-cheek flavour is fairly standard in this series this episode is rather startling and unusual in that it’s played as out-and-out farce (and with occasional forays into slapstick). It works more successfully than one might have expected although I’m glad it was an experiment that wasn’t tried too often.

As was the case with Lida Patricia Holm is eliminated from the story in the TV adaptation. Since she played an important part in the story the plot had to be altered so that Bill Harvey’s wife Doris becomes the Saint’s accomplice in his plan to checkmate the blackmailers.

David Hedison, who later the same year (1964) would achieve major TV stardom in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, guest stars as Bill Harvey and displays a totally unexpected enthusiasm for farce.

Final Thoughts

These are all fairly brief short stories which rely on having one really effective twist at the end. Leslie Charteris happened to be rather good at providing such twists. All six stories had to be expanded for television, in some cases dramatically expanded, and in general the additional material is entertaining even if it sometimes slows the pacing a little.

The more I see of this series the more I grow to like it, and the more I find myself appreciating Roger Moore’s performance. These six episodes range from fairly good to extremely good.

The Saint - The Ex-King of Diamonds (1969)

The Ex-King of Diamonds was the fourth-to-last episode of the final season of The Saint. Broadcast in January 1969, this episode is of more than usual interest to cult TV fans since it served as a sort of unofficial pilot for The Persuaders!

The idea was to give Simon Templar a partner. The partner would be someone who would provide a complete contrast to the smooth cultured English Templar. He would be a brash American, Rod Huston. Not just an American, but a Texan. A Texan oil millionaire. Despite their differences in style there would be some similarities between them - like Simon Templar Rod Huston is a rich playboy type, rich enough that money is no longer a motivation for him. And like Templar he would have an innate sense of fair play - the sort of man who would amuse himself by righting wrongs.

Stuart Damon (better known as one of the stars of The Champions) was cast as Rod Huston. And he really goes to town with the part. He throws every possible rich Texan oil millionaire cliché into his performance but it works. This is after all an ITC action adventure series - nobody is supposed to take it seriously.

The episode has plenty of things going for it. The story is a good one. A deposed king (King Boris, played by Willoughby Goddard) is financing a revolution by cheating at cards. Cheating on the grand scale - he intends to win several million dollars at the casino at Monte Carlo. And with the ingenious method of cheating that he has devised it appears that nothing will be able to stop him. The only possible problem is brilliant French mathematician Henri Flambeau (Ronald Radd) who knows all the odds when it comes to games of chance.

The Saint and Rod Huston clash violently at first, in fact they spend most of the first half of the episode trying to beat one another senseless (this adversarial relationship would be repeated in the opening episode of The Persuaders!) but of course eventually they learn to work together.

The Simon Templar-Rod Huston partnership worked successfully enough to convince Lew Grade that it would be a winning formula for a series. A few modifications would be made - Roger Moore would become Lord Brett Sinclair and Tony Curtis would play a brash self-made millionaire from the Bronx rather than a Texas oilman - but the basic formula was obviously sound. The Persuaders! was a great series and there’s no question that Tony Curtis proved to be the perfect foil for Roger Moore although it is a bit sad that Stuart Damon (who hoped to reprise his role as Rod Houston in that series) missed out.

The Ex-King of Diamonds is not just interesting as the forerunner to The Persuaders! - it’s a superb and very very enjoyable episode of The Saint in its own right. Very much worth a look.

This episode is of course to be found in various boxed sets of The Saint but it's also included as an extra  in Network's The Persuaders! DVD boxed set.

The Saint - the black-and-white years

Like many long-running television series The Saint went through a sort of mid-life makeover. The first two series were co-produced by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman and were based on Leslie Charteris’s own stories. When Berman departed in 1965 Roger Moore and Baker took over as producers, the series switched to colour and there were several minor format changes. The distinctive opening sequence in which Simon Templar breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly was dropped. While some of the later episodes were based on Charteris’s stories others were completely original stories.

Since Network DVD has released this series in two boxed sets, one comprising the black-and-white episodes and the other the colour episodes, it will be convenient to discuss the two phases of the series’ history separately. At this point it is the earlier black-and-white episodes I will be discussing.

Leslie Charteris created the character of Simon Templar in the late 1920s. By the 1950s The Saint stories had made Charteris one of the world’s best-selling authors. Making a television series based on the character was an obviously attractive idea but the problem was that Charteris had been very unhappy with previous big-screen and radio adaptations and was reluctant to sanction a TV series. He had been particularly displeased by the popular RKO Saint movies starring George Sanders, considering Sanders to have been totally wrong for the role. While Sanders had some of the necessary characteristics to play the character (the smoothness and the hint of ruthlessness) on the whole Charteris was correct. Sanders was too languid and lacked the energy and physical presence the character required.

In the early 60s Charteris finally gave ITC the go-ahead. After considering Patrick McGoohan ITC (very wisely) abandoned that idea and cast Roger Moore, who had wanted to play the role for years. Despite initial misgivings Charteris was happy enough with the choice of star, although he increasingly disliked the series itself. Charteris was never able to accept that adapting a short story for television required some changes in order to fill an hour-long episode.

The literary version of The Saint had gone through several major changes, starting off as a an extravagantly larger-than-life devil-may-care and very very English leader of a gang of amateur crime-fighters, then being toned down somewhat and made somewhat transatlantic and finally emerging in the 1950s as a romantic if slightly world-weary loner. Since ITC wanted to give the series a contemporary setting it was Charteris’s later 1950s version of Simon Templar who provided the basis for the TV series. The 1955 short story collection The Saint on the Spanish Main has very much the feel of the TV series.

The best portrayal of the 1930s version of The Saint was Louis Hayward’s performance in The Saint in New York. Hayward captures the manic energy and the schoolboy sense of mischief perfectly. Roger Moore would have been entirely wrong as the Simon Templar of the 30s but he is absolutely perfect for the later version of the character - sophisticated, amused, slightly world-weary and even at times with just a subtle hint of melancholy and even loneliness.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the famous signature tune that signals Simon Templar’s appearance onscreen was composed by Charteris himself, and Charteris was also responsible for the equally famous stick-figure Saint logo. Charteris loved the fact that his creation became a pop culture icon. Many writers eventually become disillusioned by their most famous creations. Agatha Christie disliked Hercule Poirot and Conan Doyle grew so weary of Sherlock Holmes that he tried to kill him off. Charteris by contrast was delighted by Simon Templar’s popularity, even editing the Saint fan magazine himself in the 50s.

One major problem for a TV adaptation is that while Simon Templar was a hero and very much on the side of justice he operated outside the law. In fact his methods were often quite frankly wildly illegal. The TV series would have to tone this down a little but they could not abandon this aspect of the character altogether. Templar’s disdain for the letter of the law and his decidedly uneasy relationship with the police was an absolutely crucial part of the character’s appeal. You can’t be a modern Robin Hood unless you are also to some extent an outlaw. On the whole the TV series handles this problem reasonably well.

When production started in 1962 the series was very much state-of-the-art as far as television action-adventure series were concerned. By the standards of its day it boasted high production values and looked as slick and professional as any contemporary US series. This was very much in keeping with Lew Grade’s long-term strategy for ITC, to make series that could compete in world markets and most importantly have a chance of cracking the US market. And in the case of The Saint that strategy paid off handsomely. After achieving success in syndication the series was picked up by NBC. Apart from The Avengers it became the most internationally successful British television series of the 60s. 

Initially the producers had assumed that British car companies would jump at the chance to have one of their cars featured in a TV series, but to the surprise none were interested. Finally in desperation Volvo were approached and the Swedish car company was delighted to help out. It proved to have been a wise move as sales of their P1800 sports car soared once the series went to air. Roger Moore was so pleased with the car that he bought one himself.

Much of the show’s success was certainly due to Roger Moore. His extremely laid-back acting style and his ability to play the role in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner without overdoing it and without mocking the character suited the character and the series perfectly. 

While the series became a 1960s pop culture phenomenon it’s notable that Simon Templar himself has more of a 1950s rather than a 1960s sensibility. He regards many of the manifestations of 1960s pop culture with amused contempt. He remains throughout the series a slightly old-fashioned hero. Rather than being a weakness, that turned out to be one of the show’s strengths. Had the series tried to make him a truly 1960s character it would have failed. His old-fashioned view of the world makes him something of an exotic, much as John Steed’s old-world manners and dress sense made him an exotic. In fact many of the most successful characters in 1960s British television share this quality. Patrick McGoohan regarded the 1960s as marking the beginning of the degeneration of western civilisation and insisted on playing his iconic 1960s TV characters as characters who were in revolt against the modern world. Adam Adamant’s Edwardian values in Adam Adamant Lives! equally obviously mark him as a rebel against the world of the 60s.

Simon Templar’s 1950s sensibility makes this series rather politically incorrect by today’s standards, a major factor in its favour. 

Network DVD’s boxed set of The Saint black-and-white episodes offers very pleasing transfers plus quite a few extras, including several commentary tracks.

The Saint still holds up remarkably well. The exotic locations that provided the settings for most episodes were achieved in the standard manner for 1960s television, with some stock footage and some imaginative set dressing. While this dates the program it adds to its charm. As producer Robert S. Baker points out in one of the commentary tracks the idea behind the series was not to aim for realism. The show was intended as a tongue-in-cheek fantasy, this being the main reason for having Roger Moore breaking the fourth wall at the start of each story - the viewer is expected to take the stories as stories rather than real life. When you approach the series in this way it still provides an enormous amount of stylish entertainment. Highly recommended.