Peter Bogdanovich | Saint Jack / 1979

a moral man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Sackler, Paul Theroux, and Peter Bogdanovich (screenplay, based on the book by Paul Theroux), Peter Bogdanovich (director) Saint Jack / 1979

 

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1979 film Saint Jack was filmed on location in Singapore in May and June of 1978, featuring many of the city’s landmarks, including the now lost Empress Place hawker center, Bugis Street, the former Singapore International Airport, transformed in 1981 to a military airbase, Raffles Hotel, and other major spaces. Due to the conservative government and political climate of Singapore, a city the attempting to eradicate the history of any sexual and particularly homosexual past, Bogdanovich and his crew submitted a fictitious synopsis of a film that the director himself described as “a cross between Love Is a Man Splendored Thing and Pal Joey. Even the Singaporeans involved in the production were most convinced by the fabricated narrative, not even quite perceiving what was actually happening in the shooting.

     How startled they were to later discover that the central figure of this film, Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), a Buffalo, New York native portrays a genteel and friendly pimp, working ostensibly for a local Chinese importer but actually spending most of his time gathering up British, Americans, and European visitors and offering them nightly companionship working primarily out of a house which serves almost as his own private bordello.

     Yet we quickly perceive that if Jack is a pimp, he is unlike almost any such figure we have previously met in the movies or literature. This man is a kind of “saint,” beloved my most of the natives on the street and those working in the neighborhood, in bars, kitchens, and small shops, a man who knows everyone on sight and calls out their names with friendly aplomb. They in turn offer him and his friends liquor, cigars, and other special privileges in part because he provides so many of them and their friends jobs that certainly treat his mix of female prostitutes, transsexual women, and occasionally even a gay boy with a respect and dignity that clearly isn’t rewarded to them by the competing syndicate—determined to end Jack’s maverick operations—or for that matter by the British ex-pats, Frogget (James Villiers), Yardley (Joss Ackland), and Smale (Rodney Bewes) who drunkenly muddle through each afternoon and evening singing English melodies as if the colonials were still in control. They are tolerated only for their money and for their utter harmlessness as ghosts of something long passed.

     If Jack is also a kind of imperialist, he practices it with an almost always joyful banter and commitment to the local community that binds the locals to him and helps create a kind of shield of individuals surrounding him, some of whom do not mind playing sexual games and subservient roles for the tourists, particularly since the pay is good.

     But Jack doesn’t spend his entire time, either, as a ponce. His first action in the movie is to meet a British account at the airport and scurry him back to his inscrutable and obviously corrupt businessman employer. But once he meets the basically good if somewhat befuddled accountant, William Leigh (Denholm Elliott) who is more interested in playing a game of squash than meeting up with a whore, Jack keeps him with him the entire evening as if he were a kind of lucky token, taking him for a drink in the British expat bar, keeping him close as he hooks up a sweaty-faced Australian customer with a transsexual couple (Bridgit and Lily Ang) who play out a sex routine for the paying voyeur, and eventually even involving Leigh in a run for his life when faced with the always-following triad of syndicate enforcers (Peter Pang, Ronald Ng, and Teow Keng Seow).

    As Ron Yap argues, in what is surely one of the most intelligent and inclusive of essays on this film, “The Counter-Imperialist: Reflections on Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979) by a Singaporean,” Leigh becomes symbolically Jack’s “ally,” the way in some respects, the pianist Sam served Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca.

    Leigh also serves as a representative of time in the film, his annual visits announcing the passing of years in what is otherwise almost awash of routine in Jack’s life as he maneuvers his prostitutes in and out of the arms of the passing Singapore visitors and, despite his surface expression of eternal positivity, attempts to keep the devil from catching him, like his friend Leigh also imagining a time when he will be able to afford the freedom to return to a life he has long abandoned. Leigh, with a serious heart condition, that finally ends in his death in Jack’s hands as he desperately attempts to revive him with artificial respiration, as a signal that his own time in his attempt to fulfill human desires is coming to an end.

     On the first night he meets Leigh, Jack also first encounters a beautiful Sri Lanka model Monika (Monika Subramaniam) who wears a long blue sari which she gradually unravels to almost bare her body a bit in the manner Salome. If Jack is not a particular expressive fellow when it comes to the beauty of woman, it is clear that she pleases him, and the two remain bedmates for the rest of the film until it becomes clear that Jack is contemplating an end to his Singapore activities.

     His life may have gone of for years in the dark city of pretense if it weren’t for the evil forces of the gang, who abduct him, tattooing his arms in demeaning Chinese profanities such as “Red Butt Face,” “Son of Prostitute,” and “Curse of Dog Shit,” a kind of name-calling for life. Meanwhile, the trio and the other syndicate goods ransack and wreck the brothel, the girls escaping for their lives. If he is devastated by his losses, Jack can’t allow himself to fully express it, as he immediately visits a tattoo parlor to re-tattoo both arms with various images of flowers, covering up the slurs.

     An even more pernicious force appears in the character of Eddie Schuman (Peter Bogdanovich), a CIA operative who convinces Jack to become the ponce for an army station set up only to bus the soldiers serving in Viet Nam and elsewhere in the East Asia into it for a relaxing weekend or more of sexual pleasures. Eddie reclaims the Civil War legend that the word “hooker” came about from the illicit gatherings of men serving under General Joseph Hooker followed by a contingent of prostituted nicknamed “Hooker’s Brigade.” The word “hooker used to mean prostitute, however, appears to have been in use at least as early as 1845, long before Hooker came to prominence.

     It doesn’t matter, however, since Eddie is simply convinced that it is good for morale, and as far as Jack goes, it is simply another way to put his knowledge and connections to good use. At one point, with the promised visit of a US commander, Jack is asked to scrounge up a boy, this particular commander’s preference. No problem, Jack suggests. But it is a problem, a true moral dilemma, when soon after he is asked to follow a visiting senator who evidently is speaking out too strongly against the US activities in Asia. Jack is asked to film him in a compromising situation.

As we have seen, Jack does have moral principles, even if he does not recognize sexual fulfillment as being involved. Yet the payment of $25,000 or more is tempting, particularly since it might offer him a way out of his nefarious activities and a return to some sense of “normalcy.”

     The senator, played in a quite ironic bit of casting by one-time James Bond performer (George Lazenby, himself a kind of conjure artist, worming his way into the role without any acting experience simply by showing up for the audition in a tuxedo).

     It almost seems as if Jack is ready to turn in his halo as he follows the senator out of the Shangri-La Hotel, picking up a young Asian boy along the way before checking into the Hilton and returning to the street to provide him with his room number.

    Jack follows up, paying the kid for the room number, and begging him to keep the door unlocked. When the boy finally does visit the senator in his room, Jack sneaks a peek through the door, snapping a picture of the boy in the nude being hugged by the senator.

     By the next morning, it appears that he actually is planning to return to the US, with, as I suggest above, Monika determining it’s also time for her to return home. But when he exist his room to see Eddie sitting across the street on a park bench, he simply cannot give up his saintly bonhomie and refuses to hand over any evidence, soon after tossing the camera he’s placed in a small package into the ocean.

     This brilliant film was banned in Singapore until 2006, while most of the rest of the world got to enjoy Gazzara’s brilliant performance and a film the critic Liam Sherwin-Murray nicely summarized in The Paris Review:    

     

“A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.”

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).