Theroux's book was recommended to Bogdanovich and his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd by Orson Welles. The rights to the novel were owned by Playboy Productions, the movie arm of Hugh Hefner's magazine. Shepherd was involved in a $9 million lawsuit against the magazine for publishing unauthorized photographs - and the rights to Saint Jack became part of the settlement. Hefner would be credited as an executive producer.
Bogdanovich suspected the subject matter, which focuses on the sex trade, would not be well-received by the Singaporean government, so he pitched them a fake film, titled Jack of Hearts, that he described as a "cross between Pal Joey and Love is a Many Splendored Thing." Jack of Hearts was accepted, but Bogdanovich, along with his star Ben Gazzara, would go on to film Saint Jack instead. This would require all sorts of evasions and lies to the state authorities, but somehow they got out of the country with a completed film. As soon as the truth came out, the film was banned in the country and remained so until 2006. The full story is in Ben Slater's Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore.
Paul Theroux adapted his own book for the screenplay, along with Bogdanovich and Howard Sackler. It follows Jack Flowers, a Korean War vet and small-time pimp in Singapore. His dream is to open up a high-class brothel in a disused colonial estate, though he is undercut by local gangsters who think he is intruding on their territory. Along the way, Jack strikes up a friendship with William Leigh (Denholm Elliott), a sickly accountant who sees in Jack a kind of principled freedom. He is the opposite of the remaining Brits, a dissolute lot still exhibiting the decay of the colonial administration. Jack is free of any ties, whether national or personal, until he gets into the clutches of the US Army by way of Eddie Schuman (Bogdanovich) - providing prostitutes for Vietnam War vets on leave. Schuman is the snare trying to pull Flowers back into the network of Western society, which promises money and moral rot.
Ben Gazzara anchors the film, playing Flowers with a gruff, upright gravitas. In the Chicago Reader Dave Kehr specified his accomplishment: "Gazzara draws his consummate self-possession, his boxer's stance, and his sly smiles in the face of adversity from a long-lost film tradition: the performance is assured and seamless and dead-ahead in a way that seems all but anachronistic in the self-doubting cinema of the '70s." He has a clipped, no-nonsense style that radiates authenticity. He has never dissembled a day in his life, cannot abide the daily glad-handing and niceties of social interaction. Instead he is genuinely interested in everyone he encounters, charmingly asking after everyone's children, and is legitimately interested in the answer.
Leigh is envious of, and fascinated by, this seeming freedom from rules. They have an odd couple relationship, Leigh uptight and middle class where Jack is perpetually loose and seemingly classless, riding up and down the social ladder wherever his business takes him. His brusque, unexpected character was built off of a Howard Hawks quote. In a Q&A transcribed in The Guardian, Bogdanovich says, "we decided to try to make a picture where all the obligatory scenes didn't exist. This was slightly based on something Howard Hawks had said to me once, 'There are certain scenes that the audience expects. And when you don't give it to them, they're so happy.'" So they cut out anything that seemed expected or obligatory - anything where Jack seeks revenge for his losses or anything approaching heroism. Instead, he sloughs everything off like a duck, refusing to engage on standard terms. The ending is especially curt, a 180 degree turn away from Eddie Schuman and financial stability and back into the streets, tossed off with a majestically devil-may-care "Fuck it."
By R. Emmet Sweeney
