The 1989 TV movies of The Saint, starring Simon Dutton as Simon Templar, got released on DVD last year. I missed the announcement because it wasn’t mentioned on saint.org, where I’m used to gettting all the major Saint news. So I’ve only just picked these up, at a decent discount from Amazon. The disks, which have only been available as bootlegs until now, have been nicely packaged by Acorn, the same company which released all the ITV Roger Moore Saint episodes from the ‘60s, and which I also respect as an expert distributor of theater-themed DVDs (from a documentary about Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi doing Hamlet to the miniseries of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Chronicles) and some of my famous British mysteries (Rosemary & Thyme, anyone?).
There’s a lot to like about these Saint movies. It’s really the only Saint series that gets to take its time. When the generally wonderful hour-long Roger Moore series was basing its episodes on Leslie Charteris short stories, they fit nicely, but when they tried to adapt one of the novels, like Plays With Fire, to a single episode, the results are forced and frenzied. The George Sanders series of B-movies aren’t much longer, and there aren’t very many of them. Some of them also make up ridiculous non-Charteris plots. While it’s true that the Dutton Saints aren’t based on specific Leslie Charteris stories, they’re true to the character in a way that, say, the Val Kilmer film of The Saint just eight years later profoundly was not. Dutton’s Saint enjoys the thrill of the chase. He likes showing off his cooking skills. He likes hobnobbing in multiple languages. (Good thing on that last one, because these movies were made for international distribution, with multi-cultural casts; some actors are dubbed into English while others are not. An amusing viewing experience at times.) The leisureliness of the Dutton Saints suits the character, suits the complex plots, suits the medium. If only they hadn’t gone for that lush romantic musical soundtrack which desperately dates the series—it sounds even earlier than late ‘80s, more like Macmillan & Wife or Hart to Hart. Which brings me to another point: Dutton’s Simon Templar unapologetically sleeps with a lot of women. That’s not so true of The Saint from the books, or from Roger Moore’s Saint (though there is an episode where the cops burst into his hotel room and find him with three women in bed—his unshakeable alibis). I don’t think it’s a given that Simon Templar sleeps around the same way James Bond does. But some adapters simply assume, and make it so.