In
1959-60, the distinguished Quebec actor Gilles Pelletier (who had earlier
appeared in Otto Preminger’s The 13th
Letter and in Alfred Hitchcock’s I
Confess) came to Ottawa to shoot 39 episodes of the R.C.M.P. television series, coproduced by Crawley Films, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Executive
producer F.R. “Budge†Crawley cast Pelletier as Corporal Jacques Gagnier, a
Mountie working at a detachment in rural northern Saskatchewan. Interiors were
shot on a brand-new soundstage near Ottawa at Old Chelsea, Quebec. Exteriors
were filmed in nearby Aylmer, Quebec, and in Outlook, Saskatchewan, which stood
in for the fictional western town of Shamattawa, the center of the action of
this contemporary adventure series.
With
all that talent on board, why did R.C.M.P.
only last one season? The show was well produced. Crawley partnered with
the CBC, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and figured it would
be a snap to break into international TV markets, especially in the United
States. R.C.M.P. was a
crisply-shot, realistic and sometimes extremely violent crime drama which stood
in stark contrast to the usual stagebound and fusty Canadian television
programming of the time. Influenced by the
European neorealist school of filmmaking, the show
had the look and feel of a documentary, very convincingly conveying the dismal
Canadian ambience (especially in wintertime) and the homegrown criminal element
of small-town Canada. R.C.M.P. more
than held its own against similar U.S. TV fare.
According
to Pelletier, what was overlooked was the fact that the American TV networks,
distributors and producers operated like a closed circuit. They weren’t interested
in buying a foreign TV series unless they had a hand in its production from the
word “goâ€, and Crawley wouldn’t allow that. He said if they had that kind of
control, R.C.M.P. would lose its
distinctively Canadian cachet and be like any other American-style series.
Sean Connery in Zardoz: looking like a pitch man for adult incontinence products!
The pop culture web site Detour has a brief homage to director John Boorman's ill-fated 1973 sci-fi epic Zardoz (referred to by many as Zardoze) The bizarre futuristic tale involved immortality, slavery, sex-obsessed women and The Wizard of Oz. It's the kind of movie that should alarm you if it starts making sense to you. Nevertheless, we have affection for the film and are among those who consider "Boorman's Folly" to be an intriguing, thought-provoking gem. Where else can you see Sean Connery (who replaced Burt Reynolds in the leading role) strutting his stuff in what looks like a red Depends diaper, while Charlotte Rampling runs amok starkers. For more click here
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