Skullduggery

 

I can't remember who recommended me the film Skullduggery, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066384/, but they said it would suit me. The subject matter does, but it was very badly executed. I don't know if this is a pattern, but it is based on a French novel, like Planet of the Apes, another clanger. Do French novels always adapt into bad English movies? The lead is played by Burt Reynolds, normally one of my favourite actors. I know him primarily for his series of outstanding comedy road movies directed by Hal Needham such as Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit. His character in this film really makes no sense. Well, it seems to split into two halfway through the film. He is, on the one hand, a classic 60's alpha male; conventionally good-looking, pragmatic, single-minded and materialistic. He and his friend have a plan to make their fortune mining a mineral in Papua New Guinea for use in making televisions; a reference to third world commodity exploitation in the western luxury goods industry. Indeed, Skullduggery tries in vain to become an early form of eco-fiction; a proto-Avatar. This falls flat on its face because of the failure to make Reynolds' character credible. It's almost inevitable that he would end up in the love interest subplot, a must for all films of that era; but his relationship with the leading lady, played by Susan Clark, is bootstrapped very badly into the narrative. They seem poorly matched as a couple with zero chemistry. She plays a scientist studying the "Tropies", a species of cryptid primate living in the middle of the island's dense forest. Reynolds and his mate decide to use Tropi slaves on their mining operation as unpaid labour. For a while it looks like the story is blending with my own novel Rockall, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html. So where is the Dill Gibson? The answer is almost unbelievable; Reynolds' character becomes the Dill Gibson. It appears even the film makers themselves seem to realize how inadequate their composition is because in one scene Clark says to Reynolds "I never knew you were the bleeding heart type." Nor did anybody else, especially this viewer. There is no process or development explaining Reynolds' transformation. Ideally that role should have been the domain of another character, but no such character was ever written. So when Reynolds decides on the spot that he is no longer the hard-headed entrepreneur and is instead a crusading humanitarian conservationist, he ends up in court accused of murder when one of the Tropies dies. The essence of the trial is whether the Tropies are human or not. This could have been a profound storyline, exploring what it means to be human in a deep spiritual sense, but instead it all came down to whether they were fertile with humans and whether they had a spoken language etc. What a missed opportunity Skullduggery is. The title is also very odd; and it's spelled differently from the similar word "skulduggery". I'm not sure why it was chosen, possibly because skulls appear a lot in the film.
(Apologies for the current lack of activity on HPANWO Voice. I've not had time to update it.)