Tom knew his remake of Allo Allo was jinxed from the start. It would never be a patch on the original series.
Is Valkyrie - the forthcoming movie in which Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, ringleader of the famous 1944 plot on Hitler's life - jinxed? The suggestion has arisen after eleven extras were injured (one seriously so) falling out of a truck as it turned a corner on location in Berlin. A police statement reassures us that there are "no findings to suggest anyone famous was involved." What a relief.
Certainly, the production is troubled - but less, until now, by bad luck than by bad feeling. The German Defence Ministry pondered barring director Bryan Singer's crew from military sites, although the eventual ban extended only to the Bendler Block (now a war memorial), where the plot was hatched, and Stauffenberg executed by gunshot after its failure. Relatives of Stauffenberg have joined German politicians in expressing grave concern over the casting of Cruise as one of the country's few WWII heroes. Thomas Gandow, a German Protestant Church spokesman on religious cults, has described the star as "the Goebbels of Scientology", which he brands "a totalitarian organisation". Why on Earth the Germans should be so suspicious of a wild-eyed agitator for an arcane and mystical movement, one can only guess.
While Nazis are sinister enough, movies thought of as "jinxed" or "cursed" have tended to be those with supernatural themes. Rumour associates up to nine cast and crew deaths with The Exorcist, although delving into the matter shows the claims to be at best desperately tenuous and for the most part apocryphal, as is the tale of director William Friedkin soliciting an exorcism for the film set itself.
It's true that both Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair suffered back injuries, and that part of the set caught fire: unfortunate but not very spooky incidents the likes of which would hardly have spawned the same legend had they occurred during the filming of, say, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. A clever and highly effective publicity campaign for The Exorcist had plenty to do with it, and there may also have been an element of good old-fashioned culpability-dodging: "When you've been shooting over a year," said writer William Peter Blatty, "it's always nice to have demons to blame." It should also be pointed out that if movie folk are anything like theatre folk, that would make them deeply superstitious in the first place.
The violent deaths of Vic Morrow and child actors My-ca Le and Renee Chen (struck by an out-of-control helicopter while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie) and Brandon Lee (shot for real in The Crow ) have lent those films an eerie aura that the latter certainly would not have merited merely on its cinematic qualities. Lee, son of the iconic and similarly doomed Bruce, and playing an undead rock star when he perished, was fated to become a Gothic cult figure. No scary film ever suffered at the box office because "curse" stories were circulating about it. Except, perhaps, the 2004 prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning, which endured a far more substantial catalogue of mishaps than the original. And a fat lot of good that did it, leading to inevitable jokes that the only thing cursed was the script.
Accidents happen on film sets because action happens on film sets. But as cinema is in the business of fiction, fantasy and myth, so fiction, fantasy and myth become attached to the film-making process. How else would Tom Cruise end up playing a Teutonic aristocrat some six inches taller than him ?
