The Light's on at Signpost (9 page)

Incidentally, while
I
and
II
were exceptionally successful films, on every level, I maintain they would have been better still if the N–B script had been left entirely alone. That’s a personal opinion, and an objective one, since my contribution was minimal, and wasn’t affected by the changes.

Anyway, I set off for Pinewood, and encountered a hazard that we have to face on the Isle of Man occasionally: fog had descended, the aircraft that would have taken me to Heathrow couldn’t get in, and all that was available was the flight to Blackpool, which I shared with an eccentric peer who had to get to the House of Lords for some vital vote or other. We got a taxi at Blackpool and drove at speed to Runcorn, where my companion, who I think had been a big wheel in the LMS or something in the old days, used his influence to get a southbound train halted, and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a taxi to be had at Euston, and his lordship was in despair, but fortunately I was being met by a studio car, and got him to Westminster in the nick of time. So not only did he manage to vote; he excited the admiration and envy of his fellow peers by drawing up at the Lords entrance in a limousine emblazoned in psychedelic colours with the legend: SUPERMAN! and the Man of Steel hurtling across the windscreen.

It was a bit of an anti-climax to get to Pinewood, where Dick and I sat in the viewing theatre watching a good two hours of material which had either already been shot for
Superman II
or left over from
Superman I
. I have no coherent memory of it, but I know there seemed to be endless shots of Gene Hackman and Valerie Perrine floating around in a hot-air balloon, and Reeve jumping off boxes, and the whole escape sequence which I remember only because it featured Angus MacInnes, with whom I’d worked on
Force Ten from Navarone
. My one thought as we left the theatre was: how the hell do we make sense out of
that
lot?

We conferred with the Salkinds and Pierre, and my first questions were: can you get Brando and Hackman back for the remainder of the shooting? They couldn’t, of course, which caused me some concern, since I couldn’t see how they were going to complete
II
without Hackman; Brando could be got round by using, in place of one Jor-El, a group of starry Kryptonian elders (Andrews, Howard, Susannah York, et al.). Dick was fairly quiet at our little conference, which took place in the lobby outside the theatre; when I asked him privately what he thought he sighed and spoke with feeling about discouraging shots of E. G. Marshall kneeling in the ruins of the Oval Office—I don’t know what he didn’t like about them; they were used in the film. Mind you, all that we had seen was fairly discouraging; I had a list of all the takes, and it struck me that an awful lot of it was going to prove superfluous.

Alex obviously assumed that we would now start sorting it all out; Dick was non-committal, and said he would phone me next day. What else was said, I don’t remember, but I have a memory of Dick standing, saying very little, looking extremely formal in a very nice tweed suit (which wasn’t like his usual casual style at all), and for some reason I thought, this is as far as we go.

Which proved to be true, in a way. Dick rang me next day and said he wasn’t going on with the project. So that was that, and I prepared to turn my attention to whatever other work I was doing at the time. I wasn’t all that interested in the project myself by this time, and when Pierre called me and asked if I would go to Paris to confer with Guy Hamilton, who was to come back on to the picture, I wasn’t enthusiastic, and if it had been anyone but Guy I think I might have bowed out.

But, let’s face it, I would be getting paid, and I can stand a couple of nights in the George V or Prince de Galles any time. I met Guy and his wife in London and we flew over. Come to think of it, I don’t recall why we were working in Paris; possibly because we had to confer with Alex. Anyway, for two days we worked on the thing
employing 1) my list of the material already shot; 2) the unshot material from the script of
II
; 3) our own ideas. These last we kept to a minimum, because the less new material, the better; the job was to link what was shot with what was unshot into a coherent story with as little fuss as possible. New stuff obviously had to go in for the Kryptonian elders, but Hackman’s part was a real problem, since at first sight it didn’t seem to be complete, and would take careful rearrangement.

I covered sheets of foolscap with notes in red, green, blue, and various other colours, denoting filmed material, unshot material, possible plot links, new material, etc., etc.; we cut and spliced and arranged and rearranged and somehow arrived at a synopsis which satisfied us both. Neither of us got a credit on the finished film, but we didn’t expect it—there is no such credit as “script cobbler” or “script fixer” or “plot arranger”, and the writing credit went to Puzo and the Newmans—why Benton was left off, I’ve no idea. By this time I just wanted to get home, and insisted on catching an early plane; I packed in haste, with Pierre helping, and as I was about to close my case he suddenly produced a book and asked me to read it on the flight. It was called
The Ice People
, of which more anon.

That was the end of my connection with
Superman
. Dick came back on to the picture, and although I was summoned in haste to Pinewood during the shooting, it was simply to do a very minor tinker on one part of the plot which could easily have been accomplished without me. I watched one daytime scene being shot—an announcer talking to camera, and a couple of cars being wrecked—and one night scene involving the enormous New York street which had been built on the back-lot—life-size at one end, and dwindling down in size at the other to give a sense of perspective. It was a smashing set; I heard it was eventually demolished by a high wind, much to the annoyance of a later production which had hoped to use it. Pierre and I stood in the dark eating endless hot
dogs and watching them rehearse and then shoot the bit in which a woman with a pram doesn’t get hit by a falling girder.

There was a royal premiere attended by the Queen, followed by a dinner, but I confess that my chief interest was in recognising little bits and thinking “I did that” or “I was responsible for that,” or “Well, I sort of influenced that”, which is the only personal satisfaction you can get from a movie in which your participation has been limited to tinkering little things, script-snipping and arranging and so on. Critical opinion of it has changed; at the time, the flying sequences were regarded as terrific, there was much praise for the music and the opening credits, and the end titles provoked mirth for being of such length that they even included the breakfast cereal used by Clark Kent’s earthly parents. The early “earth” scenes were interminable, and I came out asking myself why the hell they hadn’t just been content to shoot the original N–B scripts, instead of padding it out with unnecessary junk. But it was obviously going to gross a jillion, which it did.

Superman II
was the better movie, probably because Dick had the direction all to himself. But I like to think back to that Paris hotel room, with Hamilton and me up to our ankles in coloured paper, and tell myself that our labours were not in vain.

S
UPPOSE THAT IN
1945, with the Nazi war machine smashed and Britain rejoicing after the greatest victory in her history, we had been told: “Of course, fifty years hence your leaders will have surrendered your sovereignty to the people you’ve just defeated and those you’ve liberated. In effect they will be your masters, your lawmakers—oh, and incidentally, it will be a crime to sell in pounds and ounces…” The prophet would have been ridiculed, perhaps even reviled as a traitor, and probably put in a padded cell.

Well, it has happened. Since 1972, when the country was dragooned into the Common Market by Edward Heath,
*
successive governments, with a cynical disregard for public opinion, have squandered countless millions of treasure for the benefit of the moocher nations of the EU, and in return our farming and fishing industries have been brought to the brink of ruin, our constitution undermined, and our laws, passed by properly elected Britons, brushed aside whenever they are at odds with the directives of unelected foreign bureaucrats whose corruption is a byword, in whose appointment we had no say, but whose will is sovereign while ours goes for nothing. Having been sold out not just tamely, but positively eagerly, we have seen despatched to the governing bodies of Europe our sorriest political failures, cast-offs, and hasbeens, who of course are pro-European to a man, since Europe has provided them (and in some cases, their families) from time to time with a gravy-soaked alternative to the unemployment they deserve.

We, and the other European nations, have to pay for a “Parliament” which has rather flatteringly been described as “an unspeakable assembly…of self-important nonentities”, and which not only performs no useful function but is a positively harmful and colossally expensive dead weight existing for nothing but the benefit of its members.

Worse still, our leaders have been criminally stupid in embracing, and enshrining in our law, the wicked and misguided twaddle of European “human rights”, submitting to the ruling of that unqualified kangaroo assembly, the European Court, and using all this farrago of Continental nonsense as an excuse for destroying the fabric of our nation. “We have to do it because Brussels says we must.” How often have we heard this pathetic whine from a gutless government.

Is it not remarkable that Britain, with a record on human rights superior to any other nation’s, Britain which has done more to spread honest law and democracy than all the European states together, Britain whose ideas and ideals have been adopted by every respectable people on earth, should be lectured on “human rights” by the Continent which gave us the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the
French Revolution and subsequent horrors of Napoleonic aggression, the police state, fascism, communism, and other benefits too numerous to mention—to say nothing of being so wicked, corrupt, and feeble that within living memory it had to be rescued by Britain, America, and Russia.

Brazen impudence is too mild a phrase for the effrontery of the European Court in issuing its diktats to us, and all the epithets of cowardice are insufficient to describe the British governments of both parties who have been so craven and witless as to accept them.

I am ranting, no doubt about it. But then, I am enraged at what has been done to my country by the contemptible dross elected to Westminster in evil hours, worst of all the Heath government which gave Britain its death blow, and New Labour who have trampled on the corpse. But not half so angry, I dare swear, as our forefathers would be if they could see the betrayal, by worthless politicians, of the country they worked so hard to build, and the surrender of the precious freedoms won by better men at Gravelines and Trafalgar and Waterloo and Flanders and Alamein and in the skies above Kent.

“Oh, emotive drum-beating!” I can hear the snoopopaths cry. “Jingoism of the most Victorian kind, a bellow from a bygone age!” That is how they see their country’s past, and are too stupid and complacent to look to its future. But even they would do well to ask themselves what Churchill and the first Elizabeth and Chatham and William Wallace and the Unknown Soldier (yes, and Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln) would have thought of the pass to which Britain has been brought in the past half-century.

It will be said that these worthies belonged to other times, and their notions are out of date. Not so. The freedoms they believed in are eternal, and we will lose them forever if we allow ourselves to be conned or bullied into, first, joining the ludicrous euro, and inevitably thereafter, railroaded into a European superstate, a union of European soviets controlled by people whose ways are not our
ways, whose values are not our values, and whose polities have shown themselves inferior to ours at any time in the past millennium.

Consider how willingly they accept dictatorship, whether of Louis XIV or Napoleon or Hitler or Mussolini or Franco, and compare their pathetic record with ours, who tolerated even such an enlightened despot as Cromwell for a bare decade. Europe is simply not fit to have any say in British affairs, and if one recalls Kipling’s line about “lesser breeds” it is not as a racist slur but as a simple truth, and because one questions their competence, their reliability, and above all, their honesty.

Corruption is plainly endemic, not only in great matters at the very top in the European Parliament, but in such trivia as the World Cup 2006 scandal; the bribe, the backhander, the favour, the nepotism, the freebie at public expense—these are the air that the EU breathes, and there are signs in our own political establishment that the infection is spreading, although we still, fortunately, have some way to go before our scandals reach European proportions.

How unfit the Continental politicos are for government is patent from such indecent proposals as that emanating from Strasbourg which would have “undemocratic” parties blacklisted—this stemming from the propaganda campaign against the inclusion of Haider’s Right-wing party in the Austrian coalition. “Undemocratic” meaning any party or politician of whom the Left wing disapprove. Had it been a Communist party, the party of Stalin and the Gulag and an even greater bloodbath than the Holocaust, not a word would have been said;
*
Left is right, and Right is wrong, you understand, and the fact that Haider’s party, whatever one may think of them and him, had been democratically elected, went for nothing. The irony is that nothing could be more Fascist than the attempt to ban a political party; so much for the EU view of democracy. To quote Brecht on Hitler: “The bitch that bore him is in heat again”, in Brussels and Strasbourg—and these are the people who dare call their opponents Fascists.

The totalitarian dangers of Europeanisation are to be seen at every turn. It is European gospel that EU Commissioners must put Europe ahead of their national loyalties; it is European doctrine that we have the “strongest obligation” to the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, who must be brought into the union without delay. Personally, I amconscious of no obligation to Bulgaria or Romania, to name but two, and the last thing I want to see is these sponger nations consuming our national wealth and, in time no doubt, imposing on us the “democratic ideals” they learned under communism.

The great mystery is why the Eurofanatics want to see us under the sway of Brussels. It has already cost us a fortune and done us untold damage: why should they wish to cost us more and damage us still further? The motive of those on the European gravy-train is plain enough, but what’s in it for those commercial interest spokesmen who clamour for the euro and closer integration? Shortterm profit? Perhaps; there are those quite base and stupid enough to think the loss of national sovereignty a small price to pay for lining their pockets. They would probably be on the Right, but what attracts the Left? Being part of a glorious union of Socialist Republics? Surely not, at this time of day.

There are some, to be sure, who have entirely different notions about independence and national honour and integrity from the rest of us. The child of, say, Balkan immigrants may well have a different concept of what it means to be British (supposing he has any at all beyond possession of a passport) than the man or woman whose ancestors have been here for a thousand years. (And that will be denounced by liberals as an abominably racist thing to say. Which doesn’t stop it being true.)

One way or another, the question whether Britain remains a free
nation or becomes the vassal of a totalitarian Europe will be settled soon, and those who oppose our further integration would do well to remember, and proclaim as widely and as loudly as possible, the unashamed dishonesty that has characterised the pro-European movement from the beginning. Not since Lenin and Hitler cast their obscene spells has there been a political campaign so blatantly deceitful. In 1972 we were assured it was merely a Common Market, and that no political union was envisaged: it is now shamelessly admitted that this was untrue, that political union was the aim from the start. Whether one can trace this back to Vichy France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and the plan drawn up by the defeated Nazi generals in 1946 for an armed and united Europe dominated and led by Germany, is a matter for conjecture; what is certain is that the last thirty years has seen the mischief moving into high gear: lie has been piled on lie, deceit on deceit, and folly on folly, and there can be no one, surely, so naive as to suppose that the underlying motives of the Euromaniacs are pure and altruistic.

It has actually been pretended that European union has kept the peace for half a century. This is one of the silliest lies; the peace has been kept by nuclear deterrence—and the fact that Germany has been in no position to flex its military muscles.

One need cite only a few examples of the Europhiles’ lack of scruple: the refusal to accept the original Danish “no” vote, with the referendum being rerun so that the Eurocrooks could get the right answer; the sorry lie that failure to join the euro could jeopardise eight million jobs; and the disgraceful conduct of the Conservative government in bullying and blackmailing their backbench sheep at the time of Maastricht.

But the most dishonourable ploy of all has been the red herring thrown in the public’s face by the European lobby implying that the sovereignty issue is irrelevant, and all that matters is satisfying the five economic criteria for Britain’s entry into the euro. In fact, this is the least of what matters, except to the money-grubbers;
economic conditions change like the tide, but the right to freedom does not. What matters above all is sovereignty, the right to make our own laws (thrown away with the incorporation of the mad and disgusting European Convention on Human Rights into our domestic law, which has already caused disruption in our courts), the right to remain independent of the unworthy, undemocratic, unprincipled, authoritarian, bureaucratic rabble of Brussels. That, first, last, and every time, is what matters, and “economic criteria” pale into irrelevance.

We do not need the euro, the Monopoly money which begins to bear a close resemblance to the French Revolutionary
assignat
and the Weimar currency. Those who do want it parrot the cry that common currency will not lead to political union, but that is a falsehood wasted, for everyone knows that political union, the declared aim, would be inevitable. The British people have shown that they want neither, and a growing number (including a former prime minister) would like to see us out of Europe altogether. It is probably the knowledge of this that has driven the scaremongering of the Europhiles to the point of desperation.

My fear, and it is a growing one, is that pusillanimous, foolish, and dishonest politicians will complete the process begun by Heath in 1972, and that Britain will become a helpless cog in the European machine, a mere province of the Holy Brussels Empire without real power or influence in the face of our traditional enemies. Babble about being “at the heart of Europe” is wishful thinking.

My hope, and it is a fervent but slender one, is in two stages. First, I hope to see the British public resist the propaganda onslaught of the pro-Europeans, in which the broadcast media, led by the BBC, have shown themselves willing tools of the government, and vote a resounding “no” in the referendum, if and when it comes. I believe they will, in spite of Blair’s patronising arrogance in suggesting that Britons can be “educated” into compliance once he has explained things to them.

Given a “no” vote it is unlikely that Blair, even under the bullying of his French and German friends, would have the nerve to reject it, much as he might like to. If it were anything better than waferthin he would be perfectly capable of leaping on the pro-British bandwagon, no doubt trying to pretend that he had only been with the Europeans to spy on them.

My second stage, whether a referendum were “no” or not, is less probable. I want to see the whole rotten edifice of the EU collapse in ruin, and if Britain can emerge from the wreck with her nationhood intact, then whatever temporary damage she has suffered by her ill-starred involvement will have been a small price to pay for independence.