Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #226 The Final Programme (1973)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
Robert Fuest, who designed sets for The Avengers before graduating to directing the cult classic TV show and later the Vincent Price movies The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again is credited as the writer and the director of The Final Programme, a mind-melting adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s 1968 novel of the same name.
But Fuest has another, less expected credit on the film as well. The opening credits indicate that Fuest designed the movie in addition to writing and directing it. Building on his experience helping create the iconic visual language of The Avengers, Fuest designed the sets for The Final Programme in addition to being its screenwriter and auteur.
The unusual opening credit makes sense, since The Final Programme is meticulously designed more than it is written or directed. It is a triumph of style over substance, a groovy head film that suggests a 90 minute long acid trip more than a conventional movie.
The preposterously good looking Jon Finch, who controversially played MacBeth for Roman Polanski despite being a complete neophyte when it came to doing Shakespeare when he made the film, stars as Jerry Cornelius, the most impressive man alive and quite possibly the single most remarkable human being ever to walk God’s green Earth, including Jesus. He’s also essentially David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust by another name, a Dionysian hipster messiah with a brain and ego as big as the universe.
In addition to being drop-dead gorgeous, Jerry is also a Nobel Prize winning intellectual giant, a gifted musician, a pilot and the son of a visionary scientist whose titular plan has the potential to change life as we know it forever.
Jerry stalks through life in a drunken haze. He’s a boozehound who drinks directly from the bottle, nifty cinematic shorthand for alcoholism, and is perpetually shoving pills into his greedy maw.
Oh yeah, Sterling Freaking Hayden is in this movie too!
Jerry Cornelius acts like he’s better than other people because, on an objective level, he is better than everyone else. He is a God among men, a living messiah, a man so astonishing that he has the power to single-handedly jumpstart evolution and usher us into a bold new era of civilization.
A recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, Champagne and Bullets/GetEven/Road to Revenge similarly centered on a dazzling renaissance man who can do everything, and do it better than anyone else. But where Champagne and Bullets starred a rank amateur whose vibe was “laid off construction working thinking about joining a right-wing militia” Cornelius, as played by Finch with an abundance of sneering charisma and sullen magnetism, really does seem super-human in ability and intellect.
Finch reportedly turned down the role of James Bond in Live and Let Die but he undoubtedly had the looks and the brazen confidence for the role. If nothing else, the man did more for ruffled shirts than any other actor in the history of film.
As The Final Programme begins our hero/anti-hero’s genius father is being buried at the end of a long and extraordinary late. True to form, Jerry shows up late and makes a scene, then cheekily announces his plans for the palatial estate he will inherit: he wants to blow it up with napalm, preferably with his degenerate heroin-addicted brother inside at the moment of ultimate destruction.
Jerry may be a brutal bastard but he’s not entirely heartless so he does not want his vulnerable, beloved sister to die in the explosion. Yet he ends up accidentally killing her himself during a skirmish with his good for nothing brother.
The impossibly handsome, brilliant playboy is aggressively pursued by a cadre of mysterious bigwigs intent on carrying out his father’s dying project, which was to create a perfect being. They want to create something wholly new and unprecedented, a self-replicating marvel at once male and female, blessed with all of the wisdom of the universe and eternal life.
In order to accomplish this formidable feat they’ve connected the disembodied yet still living and functioning brains of the smartest people in the world to the world’s most powerful computer.
This being a product of the early 1970s, the world’s most powerful computer is about the size of a Xerox machine and looks roughly as impressive.
Our sneering anti-hero is intrigued mainly because he’s attracted to the distaff member of the team trying to recruit him, a slinky, sexy seductress who goes by Miss Brunner and isn’t above using her body and her ripe sexuality to get what she wants.
Brunner further teases Jerry by seducing a woman and a man in front of him but she has something much more involved in mind for the Uber-mensch at the film’s core, the most literal conceivable melding of spirit, mind and body.
Before watching The Final Programme I looked up its Wikipedia page and its description made it sound like the craziest fucking movie ever made. That’s because Moorcock, who I suspect may have been smoking the marijuana when he came up with this crazy shit, didn’t just create a uniquely bonkers world for Jerry Cornelius and his colorful family; he concocted an elaborate multiverse that spans ages and genres and features inherently literary conceits like the idea of an “Eternal Champion” whose destiny is to maintain a sense of equilibrium between good and evil, order and chaos.
The Final Programme is a triumph of style over substance, a groovy tribute to Swinging London overflowing with sex, dark humor and attitude. It reminded me of Heavy Metal in its incessant horniness as well as its kaleidoscopic world-building, in representing science fiction of ideas as well as science fiction as spectacle and science fiction as sex.
That seems weirdly fitting, since the Blue Oyster Cult song that inspired a patron to choose Heavy Metal for this column, “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was actually co-written by Moorcock.
That’s right: Moorcock wrote lyrics for bands like Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind when he wasn’t writing trippy science fiction novels too inherently crazy and conceptual for the big screen.
The Final Programme may not make a whole lot of sense but it is never boring. I had a blast losing myself in this weird world for 90 minutes and would happily watch it again, preferably with a crowd.
According to Wikipedia, the novel that inspired The Final Programme wasn’t published until several years after its completion because it was deemed "too freaky.” I could see where square publishers might look at Moorcock’s gender-bending science fiction fantasy as entirely too much but I found Guest’s fever dream of a science fiction opus the perfect amount of freaky. That is to say freaky as all get out, a mind-melter that lets its freak flag fly so high and so proudly that the whole damn world can admire it.
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