By Hank Reineke
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit up front
that Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s character, Remo Williams (aka “The
Destroyerâ€) has played a small, but significant role in my life.
My older sister had been a high-school friend of one of
the author’s daughters. Though the
passing of time has made the chronology of events a bit hazy, I’m guessing it was
through that friendship that I was first introduced to Warren Murphy’s teenage
son. It was the son who – upon learning
I was a big fan of his father’s pulp-paperback novels – graciously gifted me a personally
autographed copy of The Destroyer #3:
Chinese Puzzle (1972). This now-tattered
paperback proudly sits on my book shelf to this very day. This, I guess, would have been about 1978. I was seventeen years old. I’m fifty-four now and admit I hadn’t much thought
about the Destroyer series for several decades.
Novelist and screenwriter Warren Murphy (The Eiger Sanction, Lethal Weapon 2) died
this past September at age 81. It was
only by chance that I happened to learn of his passing through a small obituary
in The New York Times. That night, with the warm nostalgia of the
Destroyer novels temporarily in mind, I did an internet search and discovered
that the series had spiraled from the dozen or so books of which I was familiar
to upward of 150 titles. Murphy apparently
bowed out following the publication of “Line of Succession†(Destroyer #73) in
1988. That book was also the last to
feature a shared credit with co-creator Richard Sapir who had passed away – too
young, at age 50 - the previous year. It
would be a tangled mess to figure out exactly who wrote what. Like the songwriting team of Lennon and
McCartney, the two had agreed to share credit even when the novels were product
of a single writer’s efforts. The
majority of the Destroyer books from 1988 to present have largely been written
by a series of ghostwriters.
If you weren’t around in the early 1970s, you might not
appreciate this golden-age of the paperback super-secret-agent. With their glossy and colorful cover-art depictions
of evil super-criminals, fiery explosions, wild gun play, grenades and other scenes
of mayhem, this was real-man literature at its finest. Though written in 1963, the first Remo
Williams’ novel “Created, the Destroyer†had languished in a cabinet until its belated
publication in 1971. Truth be told, the
novel might not have seen the light-of-day had it not been for the phenomenal
success of the Pinnacle Books series The
Executioner.
Don Pendleton’s anti-hero Mack Bolan (the
aforementioned Executioner), was an
angry Vietnam veteran at war with the Mafia and other unsavory hooligans
worldwide. The series was wildly popular. By early 1973 it was estimated that The Executioner series had sold some eight-million
copies in the U.S. Soon best-seller
lists, railroad and bus station book kiosks and the revolving paperback racks
in every drug store across America were crammed with titles featuring a new
army of pistol-to-the-cheek anti-heroes. A New York Times article from
March of 1974 identified a number of these pretenders to Mack Bolan’s blood-splattered
throne; there was The Destroyer, The
Butcher, The Death Merchant, The Assassin, The Marksman, The Inquisitor, the
Head Hunter,The Avenger, The Revenger, The Penetrator, and The Baroness. Even that exhaustive list somehow missed acknowledging
the long-running and popular Nick Carter
- Killmaster series and Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft titles.
Derided as a low-culture phenomenon by literary
critics, these assembly-line novels – filled cover to cover with gratuitous sex
and wanton violence - were undeniably slim and not always well-written; they
were considered the trashy offspring of the time-tested puzzling mystery
novel. The critical backlash was
inevitable and there were periodic sessions of hair-pulling amongst reviewers on
how the publishing industry had arrived at this inglorious moment. Where was blame to be assigned? Some thought the nightly splashed-on-TV-screen
violence of the Vietnam-era had made readers malleable to such literary mayhem. Some blamed the often nonsensical episodic
action-adventure motifs of Ian Fleming’s James Bond as a primary culprit. Others with a better sense of history traced
the disintegration of the traditional mystery novel to Mickey Spillane’s crass
and violent, “I, the Jury†(1947).
The preceding remembrance has been my long-winded way
to say that I was really looking forward to the Kino Lorber Studio Classics DVD
reissue of Remo Williams: The Adventure
Begins (1985). Not only do I hold
warm memories of the Destroyer series, but as a stone-cold James Bond fan, I
was enthused to finally catch this dimly remembered action-flick. Remo
Williams was helmed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger,
Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun) from a script by Christopher Wood (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). Hamilton’s and Wood’s James Bond has always
been the more tongue-in-cheek one, and I expected the filmmakers would adhere
to the best traditions of their tried-and-true playbook.
This isn’t a spy-film… or, rather, it is… of
sorts. The film tends to be an uneasy amalgam
of many genres. Remo Williams is
part-super spy, part super-hero, and part martial-arts master. Conversely, the grim sequence that opens the
film is staged as a throwback to the gritty, New York City “mean streetsâ€
police-dramas of the early 1970s. Following a brutal tangle with a trio of street-thugs on the darkened Brooklyn
waterfront, we’re first introduced to our reluctant anti-hero (Fred Ward) when
his unconscious body is dispassionately pushed into the East River. The bruised and beaten policeman is – intriguingly-
rescued from drowning by a pair of mysterious scuba-divers replete with
underwater flashlights. It’s all been a
set-up. The divers have apparently been waiting on his violent submersion.
The policeman awakes on a hospital gurney following an
indeterminate passage of time, but no longer recognizes his own mirrored reflection. He had been submissively drugged and made to endure
a series of non-sanctioned plastic surgeries. The roguish policeman is, not unexpectedly, both confused and angry. Things become clearer when he is introduced
to intelligence operatives Conn MacCleary (J.A. Preston) and Harold Smith
(Wilfred Brimley). He learns from these two
serious men that he has been selected to serve a top-secret organization, CURE,
which – he’s reminded - doesn’t actually exist for all intent and purposes.
Technically, he
doesn’t exist. Police officer Samuel
Edward Makin, his former self, is now dead and buried. He has been reborn as a mystery man with no
record of ever having existed. He has
been given a new name for the sake of convenience, Remo Williams, and is told that
he’s been chosen to act as a sanctioned assassin since “Our cops are corrupt,
our judges are bought, and our politicians are for sale. Everywhere you look, slime is on the loose.†MacCleary invokes a heretofore little known
“eleventh commandment:†“Thou shall not
get away with it.†It must be said that
this brand of rough justice, no matter how well-intentioned, sounds a bit
fascistic and not very American-like. His
first target, it is explained, is George S. Grove (Charles Cioffi), a shady
multi-millionaire who is ostensibly developing a weapons system for Ronald
Reagan’s “Star Wars†program. CURE has
reason to suspect Grove’s patriotism and wants Williams to eliminate the shady
government contractor.
This non-Constitutional method of offing corrupt
officials and contractors from government posts is entirely intentional. Murphy and Sapir both worked as city-desk editor-reporters
for such Jersey City based dailies as the Hudson
Dispatch and the Jersey Journal. Murphy also served as the beleaguered press
secretary to disgraced Jersey City Mayor Thomas J. Whelan. Whelan was one of the infamous “Hudson County
Eight,†an octet of elected official and cronies prosecuted by New Jersey’s Attorney
General on extortion and conspiracy charges. Murphy would later tell one interviewer that he only turned to writing-fiction
“when everybody I worked for in Jersey City politics went to jail.â€
More than a decade following publication of the first Destroyer novel, actor Fred Ward was
tapped by filmmakers to play the rogue CURE assassin Remo Williams. Though he bore little resemblance to the handsome
slim-face agent featured on the paperback covers of the Destroyer series, Ward’s
stoicism, rugged features and twice-broken nose gave him a Charles Bronson-like
macho presence. The film’s oddest bit
of casting was that of Joel Grey, the esteemed Broadway actor and dancer, as
Chiun, a wizened Korean of indeterminate age. The Korean nationalist is a devoted practitioner of the totally fictitious
combat discipline of Sinanju, which
he touts as the most supreme of all martial-arts forms. Sinanju
is something of a religion to Chiun. Which is why, I suppose, no one is terribly surprised to see this inscrutable
master literally walk on water near the film’s climax.
It was reported that the fifty-two year-old Grey wasn’t
originally interested in the role. I first
assumed the actor’s reluctance to play an elderly Korean was simply a matter of
aesthetics. Having seen the movie, I now
suspect the actor’s initial reluctance was the result of his reading the
script. Christopher Wood’s screenplay does
little to present Chiun as anything more than a tired cliché: he’s merely one more in a long-line of
mysterious and inscrutable wise-men from the East. In testament to his gift as an actor, Grey
nearly manages to pull off the charade. Thanks
to the amazing work of Academy Award nominated make-up artist Carl Fullerton,
Grey is convincingly re-cast in his appearance.
The master and unwitting student first cross paths in a
basement apartment. Unaware that Chiun
is on the CURE team, the initial meeting between the Sa Bum Nim (“Master Instructorâ€) and his reluctant protégé soon
turns violent. In the course of the played-for-laughs
dust-up that follows, we learn that Chiun has achieved such mastery of Sinanju that he has developed his
reflexes to the point he can outmaneuver a bullet fired at close range. This skill, of course, will later come in
handy.
In the interest of more dramatically documenting Remo’s
conversion from slothful beat-cop to athletic super-agent, we’re made to
witness the transformation in something resembling real-time. The better part of the movie’s first hour is
wasted on only mildly amusing vignettes of Remo’s schooling in Sinanju practices. He’s taught to walk stealthily on the ledges
of high-rise buildings, to hang by his fingertips from Coney Island’s famed Wonder
Wheel, and to participate in any number of challenges that seem a template for television’s
Ninja Warrior obstacle-course series. Sadly, such turgid pacing is what,
eventually, dooms the film’s already lagging narrative. There’s very little sense of urgency
throughout the movie’s two-hour-long running time, no ticking time-bomb to engender
suspense. The tracking down of nefarious
industrialist George Groves is reduced to nothing more than a convenient and disposable
sub-plot. There’s also a cinematically opportunistic
but non-starting romance between Remo and smitten U.S. Army Major Rayner
Fleming (Kate Mulgrew) that – like so much in this film - amounts to little in
the end.