Baghdad, 1981. Actor Oliver Reed is not required on set so he has all his hotel’s booze under siege. It’s daiquiris by the pool at 10am, then sambuca, followed by champagne at midday. By 10pm, he is smashing down guests’ doors and demanding they join him in drinking Rémy Martin from a bucket. The day’s revels end with him goading companions to dangle him from the rooftop. “Oliver Reed was a weapon of mass destruction,” declares a co-star in the cinematic bomb that barely got made.
Saddam Goes to Hollywood (Channel 4, Sunday) is the story of how the Iraqi dictator decided to make a film about the rise of the country from British colonial control in the 1920s. Reed, more feted as a tabloid hellraiser than an artistic performer, was hired to star as an obnoxious bully in Clash of Loyalties, a vanity project with a budget as big as Return of the Jedi but no script. That turned out to be the least of the problems as the cast and crew flew in from London: Saddam had also greenlit the Iran-Iraq war.
The local technicians and actors were constantly being called up to the front. The film melted in the camera. The shoot overran wildly. The despairing stunt director, who had coped with Indiana Jones, did a midnight run. Somehow, they wrapped the finale, although the lead missed his cue, the extras ran the wrong way, all the explosions were mistimed and the Iraqi army nearly opened fire on the set because they thought it was an invasion.
Amid the Carry On farce, Reed played to showbiz Bullingdon type, swinging between charmer and monster. While his 17-year-old girlfriend hid in their room reading The Canterbury Tales (her mother saw her off at Heathrow with a homemade dundee cake), he drank, was violent to restaurant staff and sent bottles of urine to fellow diners.
Dictators loomed large for Reed in 1981: somehow he also found time to star in Libyan action movie Lion of the Desert, funded by Muammar Gaddafi.
This transfixing and evocative documentary catches the twin strands of comedy and menace in the two personalities that shaped the ludicrous project: Reed and Saddam. The dictator loved the film, which incredibly took only six months to edit, and sent everyone gold watches. Sadly, no one wanted to distribute it so the unscreened reels ended up in a Surrey garage. I longed to see the droll cast, who fired perfect one-liners between the archive shots (“It was a cocktail of not-good stuff”), reassembled for a screening of this horror show.
Keith Richards was such a gentle hellraiser. When his voice broke, he had to leave the school choir. Because his academic work had suffered while he was being angelic in a cassock, he was held back a year, his first brush with the establishment. “This is where the rebel got born.” Furious, he made repeated unsuccessful attempts to be expelled. Finally, he got to art school, discovered the blues, and pushed at the door ajar to a new world. On a train, he met an old acquaintance, Mick, carrying Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records under his arm. Things worked out quite well after that.
Keith Richards: The Origin of the Species (BBC2, Saturday) is Julien Temple’s masterly and intimate portrait of the pre-Stones years, from 1943 to 1962. Here were the chords that shaped many men of Keef’s generation – bombsite playgrounds, poverty, rationing, a grinding world of pinched options (“before rock’n’roll, it was all black and white”) – and those notes of family and chance that were particularly his: the only-child loneliness that drew him to teams, the funny mother who filled the home with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, the ribald aunts, grandfather Gus, who took him round music shops (“like being led into Aladdin’s cave”) and introduced him to the guitar (“for me, it was the prize of the century”).
Temple – visual historian of the Sex Pistols, director of the unregarded movie Absolute Beginners (note to self: rewatch) and of videos such as Undercover of the Night – curates Richards’ cackling reminiscences, Pathé film archive and snatches of Stones (The Last Time soundtracks dancing in the street on VE Day) in a poignant and playful key. Familiar, but who cares when the tune is this good? At its heart is that cracked drawl, constantly on transatlantic tour.
Although wreathed in smoke, Keef is only in daytime Jack Sparrow mode here – simple hoop earring, minimal rings, rasta headband – as he recalls the London kid whose hero was cowboy Roy Rogers. “He rides a beautiful palomino, he’s got guns and he’s got a guitar … and he whups everybody’s ass.”
