Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23179 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-01-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Formats: Color, DVD, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Customer Reviews

Casablanca in the Far East (Time capsule of Singapore)
"Saint Jack" is a character movie, revolving around Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), an American hustler trying to make his fortune in 1970s Singapore in small time pimping. He dreams of building a fortune by running a brothel himself and returning to the States to lead a life of luxury. Savvy but not unsavory he strikes up a friendship with the character played by Denholm Elliot, a genial and decent auditor who travels to Singapore every year. (Elliot's character is not unlike his role in the Indy Jones movies, except less bumbling)

Bogdanovich does a wonderful job of weaving the web of relationships around Jack - the girls, the hotel owners, the madam and the expatriate Americans and English who form Jack's clientele. Through their interactions with Jack, we get a rich character sketch of a fundamentally decent and loyal man beneath the worldly and pragmatic exterior. Not unlike Bogart in Casablanca.

The setting of Singapore in the 1970s deserves a mention because it is as much a star of the film as Gazzara. This film was shot without the permission of the Singapore government and is still banned in Singapore for it's not necessarily flattering portrayal of the country. But it is a surprisingly successful attempt to capture the look and feel of Singapore in that lost era - in that transition stage after its days as an exotic colonial outpost visited by the likes of Somerset Maugham but before it cleaned up and catapulted into wealth. For this alone the movie is something of a rare gem, both in craft and content. Singaporeans who lived through the 70s will recognize the remarkable authenticity. "Casablanca", which merely offers a caricature of Casablanca, doesn't even come close in this regard.

Ultimately, the background of the Vietnam War comes into the picture as Jack is offered the opportunity by the CIA to run a brothel for the R&R activities of US soldiers on leave in Singapore. The movie weaves in deeper issues here which are not as clearly communicated as in the book (are they ever?). The soldiers are not altogether themselves - psychologically damaged as it were. In a scene where a CIA operative and Jack survey the frolicking soldiers and comment that they are leading the happy lambs to the slaughter, the more sinister nature of the R&R operation is made clear.

The anti-war theme continues as Jack is offered wealth, and the opportunity to leave Singapore to return to the States that it confers, if he assists in photographing an anti-war US congressman (played by George Lazenby - incidentally an early striptease scene in the movie plays to Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" as a tongue in cheek reference to Lazenby's role as Bond 10 years prior) in a compromising situation. The moral dilemma of going against the greater good by hobbling the anti-war effort versus obtaining one's personal desire to leave Singapore is again, redolent of "Casablanca".

There is no Ingrid Bergman to provide glamour and no French police chief to provide comic relief, but "Saint Jack" offers a more satisfying Bogart in Gazzara - a "Casablanca" for the real world and all it's complexities.

Character study with a great character actor
Saint Jack is unique among Peter Bogdanovich's films in that it is more than any other focused on a single character, Jack Flowers, played by the great character actor Ben Gazzara. What comes out in the film is that living in Singapore, Flowers gets to strut his stuff as an American, taking advantage of the totally loose environment of Singapore in the 70s to run a fancy whorehouse. He knows and calls many native residents by their first name, wears Hawaiian shirts most of the time, looks relaxed and doesn't even flinch much when his place is ruined.

Befriending William Leigh, one of the several Brits who hangs out in this strange metropolis, Flowers is both amused and touched by Leigh's conventional stiff upper lip "Brit-ness". As Flowers encounters Singaporean thugs, young, horny American soldiers (the setting is the early 70s during the VietNam conflict when Yanks were given a respite in Sin City aka Singapore), dissolute Brits (it seems all they do is drink, sing, and complain), and his beloved hookers, he keeps his calm--one thing Gazzara is great at portraying--and banters with the best of them.

The question really is, Why? It's never actually answered, but we do have a lot of fun encountering these various people and seeing what Singapore looked like back then (it's changed so much, says Bogdanovich in an intriguing interview included with the DVD, that you wouldn't recognize it now if you knew it from back then). Flowers makes his way through it all unruffled, joking, shrugging off tragedy when it occurs, until, near the end, it hits home and he sobers up--for a short time. And then it's back to being Saint Jack, the go-to guy for all high rollers, gotta-have-fun people, and those who just want to drift through life.

This is a lot more than a travelogue; it's a way of life that has sadly passed us by in our current terrorism-wired world, and for that--combined with the fascinating portrait of a bygone era in a city that no longer exists as it did--it's definitely worth seeing.

Fascinating Film, Tedious Commentary
This is a really great film if you want to watch something that's tremendously atmospheric and realistic. It was shot in Singapore in the late 1970s, and was intended to portray the country in the early 1970s, when the US war was still raging in Vietnam and US soldiers roamed throughout East Asia looking for some "R & R" (which usually meant prostitutes and booze).

Peter Bogdanovich shot the film almost entirely in the back-lots and alleys of Singapore, and the realism is astounding, since he used 99% genuine locations, and 95% local non-actors playing supporting roles. This was the "old" Singapore, teeming with life and seething masses of people who moved through the markets and shops and alleyways, making transactions and interacting. The realism is so palpable that I could almost feel the steamy tropical mugginess, and the swarms of people milling about the city. I could almost smell the good (and bad) fragrances that mingled in the air, and I could certainly hear the cacaphony of noises that the movie recorded in the background. This was the pre-sterile Singapore, which has now been completely obliterated in the name of "progress". What is now an island of relentless skyscrapers was, twenty-five years ago, a jumbled metropolis of terraced wooden houses, shops, and hovels, along with some magnificent older architecture (like the famed "Raffles" Hotel).

The story of "Saint Jack" is that of an American pimp, played by Ben Gazzarra, and his attempt to run a successful business catering to the relentless flood of American GIs who traveled around searching for a quick "good time". The secondary character is a British businessman, played by Denholm Elliott, who visits Jack three times in the course of the movie, each visit constituting an "act" in the plot. Both Gazzarra and Elliott are fantastically natural performers, and one can hardly differentiate between the times when they are speaking written dialogue, or when they are improvising.

I had a huge problem with the commentary by Bogdanovich - it is mind-numbingly boring and repetitious. The vast majority of it is: "this (setting) was real", over and over again. Or else "this (Chinese store-keeper/clerk/prostitute) was not a professional actor". Or "this dialogue was improvised/written by the actors". DO NOT waste your time listening to the commentary. Instead, watch the interview with Bogdanovich - he says it all there, and he says nothing in the commentary that he hasn't already said much more succinctly in the interview. I was actually considering using one of those "clickers" to COUNT every time he used the word "real" in the commentary, but then I realized it would be an exercise in futility, since I am certain that he said it at least 250 times in the course of the commentary.

This was definitely a case where my great admiration for the director based on the movie itself was decreased by hearing the director's monotonous and unimaginative commentary.

And I could have used a "helpful" commentary, since this DVD does not include close-captioning, and there was often dialogue that I couldn't quite catch or understand. Thus, there were some aspects of the movie that I couldn't appreciate, since I wasn't quite sure what was happening in the plot.