I liked this film a great deal, though it goes off the track often. It was a pilot film from Gene Roddenberry that came out in 1977. Our Bob plays "William Sebastian" a strange criminologist specializing in the occult. Gig Young is "Dr. Ham Hamilton," a medical doctor who is an old colleague of Sebastian, and who reluctantly shows up when he is contacted by Sebastian asking for his help ( ... a very Sherlock Holmes and Watson-ish team). It turns out that someone has stolen Sebastian's heart - in an actual physical way, not romantically. (Did I mention this is an occult-supernatural story? )
O.K., so Sebastian is walking around with no heart (it is apparently in a box somewhere in England), and this state of affairs is going to limit his current state of health a good deal, as you can imagine (... keep your cute turtleneck sweater ON, Bob). As far-fetched as this sounds, it really is done very well, all due to the very talented Mr. Culp and Mr. Young. In their hands, this story is quirky and interesting and "spell-binding."
The story takes them on to England, to see the very strange Cyon finally, at their castle/country-manor where odd "goings-on" are going on! This is where things get a bit hokey with covens and strange nether-world demons, etc. etc. ( ... yeah, yeah - just like the political world in Washington, D.C.)
There are 2 versions of this film floating around. One that was shown originally on TV (I understand a version shown occasionally on the Sci-Fi Channel has the ending scenes cut and pasted back together with some scenes moved around.) And then there is the version that was released in Europe commercially, with an added scene or two of some topless ladies to spice up their devil-worshipping get-together.
As you may have gathered, this one didn't become a TV series - but it certainly is a most entertaining film - on its own.
Here is a review and some information of the film:
(For the following link -- for some reason Network54 won't highlight the entire link ... you will need to copy & paste this one and add the " ) " at the end to make it work.)
"Spectre" was a two-hour television film made from a story by Gene Roddenberry, produced by Norway Productions for Twentieth Century-Fox Television, and broadcast by NBC-TV on May 21, 1977, starring Robert Culp as William Sebastian and Gig Young as Dr. Hamilton. According to reasonably informed sources, Roddenberry wrote the screenplay several years after the original "Star Trek" series went off the air, and involved Holmes and Watson in a story that was dated after Holmes' retirement, and planned as a pilot for a series starring Leonard Nimoy as Holmes. But Nimoy didn't want to do the series, and Roddenberry wasn't able to get permission to use Holmes and Watson as characters, so he just changed the names to Sebastian and Hamilton and turned the project into a non-Sherlock-ian film.
SPECTRE was released a year before Gig Young's and his new bride's death - which was a tragic suicide-murder affair. He had had problems with alcohol for years. Still in this film, Gig Young was as suave and debonair as ever. Interestingly, in SPECTRE his character is also an alcoholic, but is miraculously cured by a spell cast on him by Majel Barrett (Gene Roddenberry's wife) who is apparently Sebastian/Culp's housekeeper and resident spell-caster.
As always,
Tatia
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This message has been edited by tatialoringnw from IP address 69.138.253.23 on Jun 25, 2007 1:04 PM
I like SPECTRE too, even if its tv-trappings mean some of the sequences (particularly the building fire early on that Culp and Young walk in and out of like it was a Universal theme park ride) are kinda done on the cheap -- Clive Donner is a good director, and Culp seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit, and whenever he's motivated, he can't be beat. Gig Young is likeable, but I'll be damned if he doesn't seem smashed during several of the sequences. The guy seems drunk throughout the project to me!
Absolutely Jim, I also had the impression that Gig Young was feeling no pain throughout the film. He carried it well, and on him it was kind of appealing. I’m sure his problem wasn’t quite so much fun in the real world. I have the version with the topless women, and was quite surprised by it (not unpleasantly) since I thought the movie had only been shown on American TV. Clearly I have the European version that Tatia mentioned in her comprehensive coverage of the film. Those rascally Europeans! I wonder if Roddenberry had European or even a theatrical release in mind since he filmed those scenes which could never have been shown on Prime-Time TV. (I mean—why else would you film them???)
My short (i.e. lazy) review is that I liked Spectre a lot and I thought Robert Culp was terrific in it.
The European version is the version most oft shown these days, I think, as the Fox Film Channel has shown it repeatedly; I am still holding out hope Fox might release a legitimate dvd of it, though as its a tv film, no doubt this is a long shot; still, as it is "horror" it has a genre niche that might allow it sneak out one halloween or another...
F everybody's I, there was also a paperback novelization of SPECTRE, which, weirdly, was NOT published as (or perhaps more accurately, not designed as) a merchandising tie-in (though the "based on the teleplay by" credit is still maintained). It in fact appeared two years later (1979) with a generic horror cover vaguely suggesting THE EXORCIST paperback, which is not surprising, as both were released under the Bantam Books imprint. The prose adaptation is by Robert Weverka, who was a midlist author (still alive, I think) who became best known for several dozen film and TV novelizations, the most ubiquitous and multiply reprinted one being THE STING. You can find used copies of SPECTRE sold relatively cheaply at numerous internet sites. Here's the cover:
Thanks for the SPECTRE book information, Mr. Tiger ....
Most interesting that it did not come out as a merchandising tie-in -- Do you know when they changed the cover - perhaps by then SPECTRE was claiming a bit of "cult" status.
Have you read it? Is it faithful (or close to) the televised version? Do you recommend it at all?
And since we are speaking of SPECTRE .... one last photo of Sebastian's "heart-ectomy" and his resulting "heartless" scar.
for more on the props and demon heads, etc. from SPECTRE, check out
Oh, yeah, sure, I've always collected those things, and something like that, hitting on so many of my happy-buttons at once (the TREK connection, the Culp connection, the novelization-osity, Weverka as author) I'd've read right off the bat, and did.
Mr. Weverka's novelizations tended to be straight ahead. These were written before studio merchandising departments routinely demanded approvals, so though most novelizations were relatively faithful, there were authors like Lou Cameron, Manning Lee Stokes, Don Tracy (as Roger Fuller) and a few others who would sometimes put a screenplay through their own personal blender, with mixed results. But Weverka worked with what he was given, and his novelistic reinterpretation tended to be teased and grown out of what was already there, at least as he saw it.
SPECTRE was no different. At a standard paperback "signature" (book page count) of 160, and likely crafted to meet a designated word count, Weverka's SPECTRE novelization didn't have much room to indulge in deep internalization -- only enough to give the thing pace and a point of view, which Weverka did with smooth, if unremarkable efficiency. His style wasn't showy, but he was always an entertaining professional.
The cover never "changed" -- the jpg you see was the debut release. My guess is that the TV movie had, as you suggested, attained enough cult status, owing to Roddenberry's co-authorship of the teleplay, to prompt Bantam to release the novelization, especially as Bantam, at the time, was still reprinting their line of STAR TREK episode adaptations by James Blish, plus a number of originals. (They'd retain the reprint rights to all these but had since lost the franchise to Pocket.)
The following is conjecture, but I'd bet a couple bucks that it's true. I think, despite the above, that it's possible Bantam had commissioned the SPECTRE novelization to coincide with the TV flick and then held back publication when it didn't go to series. 1979, though, was the year the first STAR TREK movie was released, and the revitalization of the franchise in paperback may have prompted them to pull the manuscript out of the drawer and catch some related-interest business.
There was a not-dissimilar delay between Roddenberry's previous unsold pilot, THE QUESTOR TAPES, and its release in paperback by Ballantine Books. And there too there was a refreshed franchise to spur interst. At about that time (1974), Ballantine's science fiction imprint, Del Rey, was publishing the STAR TREK LOG series by Alan Dean Foster, adaptations of the Saturday morning animated episodes. Unlike Bantam Books, though, they did not commission an "outsider" to do the deed, but rather one of the seminal TREK TV writers, D.C. (Dorothy) Fontana. Also unlike the SPECTRE novel, the first printing of THE QUESTOR TAPES contained stills from the film, which starred Mike Farrell and Robert Foxworth in the leads. (Subsequent editions would be published with a non tie-in cover and under the Del Rey imprint.)
This message has been edited by JohnTiger from IP address 207.38.206.238 on Jun 27, 2007 1:08 AM
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