One of my fellow Atomic Junk Shop bloggers mentioned MY NAME IS MODESTY: A Modesty Blaise Adventure (2004) a month or so back; as a fan of Peter O’Donnell’s adventurer, I couldn’t resist ordering the DVD.
The screenwriters explain on one of the commentary tracks that they were working on a Modesty script and trying to work in her backstory; someone at Miramax (possibly Harvey Weinstein) suggested spinning her origin off into a separate movie, which explains the subtitle. The movie they were originally working on never got made which is a shame — judging by this it would have been a blast.
Modesty (Alexandra Staden) is a croupier in a casino under Louche (Valentin Teodosiu), a Mediterranean crime boss. A vengeful rival criminal kills Louche, then seizes control of the casino with an eye to removing the money Louche has in the vault for a big drug purchase. Modesty immediately steps up, negotiating with her captor to get the other employees to safety, in return for which she gives him pieces of her history. It’s true to the books, and to the encounter that inspired O’Donnell to create Modesty (a young refugee he met in Europe post- WW II) with the exception (as the writers note) that Modesty doesn’t smoke. The result is a fun movie, much more fun if you’re already a fan, and I am (you can find some of my past reviews of the books here). “Everyone is allowed to be lucky — you’re job is to make sure they’re not too lucky.”
SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (2024) interweaves black American jazz greats and their goodwill tour of Africa with the story of how following Congo achieving independence from Belgium in 1960, Belgium, the United States and other players (including UN leader Dag Hammarskjold) did everything they could to undercut it, due to the valuable minerals the Congo contained. Propaganda. Promoting secession in the mineral-rich region. Backing a military coup. All of which explains why the Congo would be war-torn for decades afterwards.
While it’s not news to me how ugly Cold War geopolitics got, the details are grimly fascinating. The jazz stuff doesn’t connect in well at all, however, even though it’s good in itself (Nina Simone singing Wild is the Wind is amazing); there’s even more awkward juxtapositions such as Eva Gabor in a pipe tobacco commercial vs. government official Allen Dulles lighting his pipe. Worth seeing even so. “After I took my seat the UN, I was contacted by an American ‘arm-twister.’
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