As soon as the groovy bubblegum pop music announces the opening credits of Flashman you know you’re in for high camp, and possibly a very bad movie. Starring Paolo Gozlino acting under the name Paul Stevens, the character of Flashman is similar to Batman. He’s a fantastically wealthy middle-aged dilettante and member of the British royal family who secretly fights crime from his palatial mansion, assisted by his sidekick sister Sheila, and tended by his butler Jarvis. He tries to foil an organized crime head who’s been robbing banks with the help of a stolen formula for invisibility, and simultaneously attempts to thwart a clan of beautiful counterfeiters. As will happen, the two sets of baddies decide to team up, and quickly hatch a plan to steal the Maharajah of Singhwali’s vast fortune. Flashman plans to fix all of their little red wagons.
Channeling both Adam West’s cheeseball caped crusader and Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta’s masked lucha libre star Santo, Gozlino is smug, smarmy, superior, and seemingly always somewhat amused at the foibles of mere non-heroes. Watching him lord over his sister and the police, who are mental lilliputians compared to him, is both familiar and tedious. There’s mansplaining, then there’s masksplaining. The latter is worse. What Flashman really needs is a swift kick in the nuts, wherever they are. But such characters are only ever temporarily in actual danger. They may be tied up for a few minutes. They may be punched once or twice. But they are never, ever given reason to be a little more humble.
The most important lesson of Flashman is probably this: Never go cheap when it comes to tailoring—Gozlino’s superhero fits aren’t the second skin depicted on the poster. For that matter, when it comes to superhero movies in general never go cheap on efx. This one suffers from an assortment of effects ills, among them falling dummies, awful miniatures, and undercranking. We’ll say, though, that on the plus side the showdown in Lebanon’s impressive Tell Baalbeck ruins was shot in the actual location. But in the final analysis, what you have here is yet another movie that increases in enjoyment in proportion to mind altering or liver damaging substances consumed while watching. As a side note, we think the basic idea for Weekend at Bernie’s came from this film. You’ll see what we mean. Or maybe not. Flashman premiered in Italy today in 1967.
