Modesty Blaise (1982 film)

This version of Modesty Blaise is an American TV pilot program, intended to be the start of a TV series. It was written by Stephen Zito, directed by Reza Badigi, with Barney Rosenzweig as Executive Producer. The program was based (very loosely) on the characters created by Peter O'Donnell for his comic strip, Modesty Blaise, and the plot has a few elements taken from the first Modesty Blaise book (which in turn had been a novelization of a practically unused screenplay that Peter O'Donnell had written for the first Modesty Blaise film) but is largely original.

The program featured Ann Turkel as Modesty Blaise, Lewis Van Bergen as Willie Garvin, Keene Curtis as Gerald Tarrant, Sab Shimono as Weng and Douglas Dirkson as Jack Fraser, with Carolyn Seymour as villainess Debbie DeFarge. It ran 50 minutes. The planned TV series was never made, however the pilot was televised by the ABC network.

The plot, set in what appears to be Los Angeles, involves Modesty and Willie preventing the kidnap of a young girl who turns out to be a computer genius and has been working for Tarrant's agency. Although both Modesty and Willie's back stories are given as described by O'Donnell, no explanation is provided for their North American accents or presence in California. Tarrant, as an operative of an American secret service, naturally does not have his knighthood. The super-computer they have been developing has been stolen by Debbie Defarge to use to make a killing on the New York stock exchange. Willie's knife-throwing skills and Modesty's habit of ripping off the lower part of her dress when called to action are faithfully reproduced, but in other ways, the characters bear little resemblance to O'Donnell's literary creations.

External links

• Modesty Blaise at the Internet Movie Database