The Queer Queen Kong

Queen Kong
James Moffatt
London: Everest, 1977
172 pages

James Moffatt ranks as one of Canada's most prolific novelists – second only to romance writer W.E.D. Ross – but where Ross is pretty much forgotten, even amongst aficionados of the nurse novel (his speciality), Moffatt has developed a remarkably strong cult following. His greatest achievement – and biggest sellers – were commissioned works designed to exploit skinhead culture. The first, Skinhead (1970), written in his late forties, was followed by Suedehead (1971), Boot Boys (1972), Skinhead Escapades (1972), Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973), Trouble for Skinhead (1973), Skinhead Farewell (1974), and Dragon Skin (1975); while churning out dozens of other novels, my favourite being 1973's Glam.

All were published under the name "Richard Allen," one of Moffatt's forty-six pseudonyms. It's likely that there were others.

A paperback writer, Moffatt is thought to have written close to three hundred published novels. He shared the secret to his prolificity in a 1972 interview with the BBC:

JM: I like to sit down in front of a typewriter - start writing from the title. Play it by that. The title gives me the idea, it gives me the whole germ of the story, and I continue it right through.
BBC: How many words a day do you get through?
JM: On an average, I get through about ten thousand words a day, when I'm meeting a deadline. If I have a month to write a book in, I may get through five hundred, a thousand words a day, until the last week - then I shot up to the ten thousand.
BBC: Do you ever go back and rewrite stuff?
JM: I never go back and rewrite. I don't believe in editing. I don't believe in rereading more than two pages on the following day. I believe a professional writer should have the story in his head, even if he's doing two, three stories at the one time. He should keep all story threads in his head.

In the lengthy James Moffatt bibliography, Queen Kong stands out as an oddity. His lone movie novelization, it challenged the author's method. Here Moffatt was obliged to follow a plot laid down by screenwriters Frank Agrama and Ronald Dobrin.

Queen Kong was meant to exploit King Kong, the 1976 blockbuster starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lang. RKO and producer Dino De Laurentiis were not amused. Arguing before Justice Goulding, Their solicitor, Nicholas Brown-Wilkinson, the future Baron Brown-Wilkinson, expressed their distaste:"Our view is that it is an appalling script. It is a script which the plaintiffs feel cannot do anything but repercuss poorly on their reputation if it is thought that King Kong is associated with that."

The lawyer for Dexter Films, which had sunk US$635,000 into Queen Kong, countered that the film was a "light-hearted satire." In this, I think, they encountered an unexpected response from Justice Goulding: "I do not think that in any real sense the relationship of Queen Kong to King Kong can be saids to be that of La belle Hélène to The Iliad. King Kong was not a serious work. It was a film of pure, light-hearted entertainment spiced with horror."

And there you have it, Queen Kong cannot be considered a light-hearted satire of King Kong because King Kong itself is light-hearted; the two are just too similar.

I can't argue.

Queen Kong owes more to the Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack 1933 original, than the 1976 remake. As the title suggests, much of the humour derives from role reversal. It stars Rula Lenska as Luce Habit, a tough-as-nails director in search of a leading man for her next motion picture. She finds one in Ray Fay (Robin Askwith), a petty thief with no acting experience, whom she spots in a London market. Luce drugs Ray, carries him to an awaiting ship, The Liberated Lady, and sets sail for the African nation of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga. Once there, its native population – primarily women, primarily white, almost invariably blonde – kidnap Ray as a human sacrifice to a gigantic female gorilla they call Kong.

However, Kong falls in love with the would-be actor, keeping him safe and healthy while Luce and her all-female crew plan a rescue. In the ensuing scenes, Kong is captured, is transported to London, and is put on display in chains, bra, and panties. At the event, Luce and Ray do the dance of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga, upsetting the creature. Kong breaks her bonds and goes on a rampage through the city, destroying buildings and one low-flying 747. She manages to find Ray, and saves him from being molested by Luce in an upscale hotel room. Kong climbs Big Ben, and sets Ray down. He uses a helicopters loudspeaker to call off the attack:

"You cannot destroy her, for she represents all women everywhere; women forced into a mould to satisfy the images of male chauvinism. If you destroy this beautiful beast, you're destroying a lifetime of female struggle. Yes, she represents woman; woman struggling to find her identity in a society viewing her as a kitchen slave and sex object."

Ray's speech is lengthy, but effective. The women of London take to the streets, saving Kong, and transforming society forever. Kong is returned to Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga, with Ray, leaving sad, cast-off Luce tearily hoping that Ray would be interested in a threesome.

For the most part, Moffatt follows Agrama and Dobrin's script, making use of nearly all their dialogue, no matter how bad. These lines, from the novel, are virtually identical to those delivered by Lenska, as Luce, in the film:

"Through the genius of the Kodak laboratories I am able to make home movies that look like the professional films one sees during the second half of the bill in any local cinema. However, the fault with the majority of home movies is that people just smile and wave into the camera lens. In my award-winning pics nobody waves at the camera. That's what I'm famous for – not one wave!"
     Even as she finished speaking a gigantic wave hit the small boat, whooshed over the decks and drenched Luce.
     "Well," the Habit ruefully admitted, "maybe one wave!"

As might  be expected, there is padding, the most obvious being the inclusion of "SOHO", a 48-line prose poem by someone named Tomi Zauner. But the most interesting – and jarring –  difference between the film and the novelization concerns the depiction of Ray Fay. Where the film has him as as an asexual pot-head, who looks like a member of The Sweet...

...Moffatt portrays him as a homosexual hippie.

The Ray Fay of the film has no backstory. Moffatt adds a fumbled tumble with a teenage girl, which leaves him with a preference to men. Gay Ray Fay is a "fag" – the word appears dozens of times in the novel – and he's not the only one. The men of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga are gay, and as Luce laments, "half the blokes you met in London are also queens."

Luce Habit pursues her leading man, dressing Ray in robes and feathered boas, while she wears pant-suits and tuxedos. This passage from the novel, which follows a spanking administered by the director, does not feature in the film:

Ray, unable to keep up his lung-torturing scream, felt himself go all limp – \wrists, too. Like a sad sack he tilted forward into Luce's welcoming arms.
     I'll protect you Ray, Luce whispered, hugging him to her gorgeous bosom.
     "Oh, God!" the star-in making moaned, feeling queer all over.

This scene does:

A man with the nicest, cleanest bone through his nose rushed from a hut – and called in a bush-telegram voice" "Oh, Mr Tarzan... Mr Tarzan – your wife Jane is on the vine!"
     Ray declined to accept the call although he trembled in an anticipation off a Tarzan-Fay link-up. What a Western Union that would be!
     He roamed deep into the village complex. The hits with bamboo supports fascinated him. Thatched roofs a la Dorset village cuteness appealed. Weren't they quaint! What looked to be a village queen's hut loomed large in his sights. He had a feeling about these things. He peered inside, found a villager scrubbing a toilet bowl. The old male "dear" swung, faced him, black teeth in an otherwise normal white set glistening.
     "Make your toilet as clean as your mouth," the native fag smiled, thrusting an Ajax bottle at Ray.

Moffatt's ending is different to that of the film in that suggestions of bisexuality and beastialty do not figure. The final chapter ends with Luce Habit going to bed with her female talent agent.

The agent's name is Ima Goodbody.

A thoroughly dislikable novelization to a terrible movie, it's not redeemed by a happy ending.

Trivia: Frank Agrama and Ronald Dobrin collaborated on just one other film: Dawn of the Mummy (1981). It concerns scantily dressed fashion models who disturb an ancient Egyptian tomb.

Dedication and Acknowledgement: 

Object: A mass market paperback featuring eight glossy pages of film stills. The author's name is misspelled on both the front cover and spine. The back cover gives indication that the book was sold in Canada, though I've yet to come across a copy. I purchased mine last year from a UK bookseller. Price: £4 (with a further £9 for shipping).

Access: WorldCat lists five libraries with copies, none of which are in Canada. The closest to me is held in the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library of Gustavus Adolphus College in St Paul, Minnesota.

Beware the British bookseller who entices by offering a Fair copy at one American dollar – and then charges US$24.95 for shipping.

Queen Kong – the Sensational Film – can be seen here on YouTube.

Related post:

Whither the Nurse Novel?

"April Night" by Archibald Lampman

Not as our home looks today, but as it did late last April.

It will again.

For now, this from Archibald Lampman's Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1915):

APRIL NIGHT

How deep the April night is in its noon,
The hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night!
The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright
Above the world's dark border burns the moon,
Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn
With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth,
The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth
Come up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon 

Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet
The river with its stately sweep and wheel
Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, gray like steel.
From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam,
Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet,
The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dreams.

Related posts:

'When April Comes!' by Virna Sheard

Now That April's Here, Virna Sheard's 'April'
Verse from an April a Century Past

Reluctantly Revisiting Canada's Great Virus Novel

Nobody told me there'd be days like these. The Nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs are the least of my worries.

I've been spending this time of self-isolation out and about in my role as an essential worker. On days off, I wander about the woods of our secluded home gathering firewood for next fall and winter. I sometimes fear I'm turning into the Michael Caine character in The Children of Men.

The Children of Men is not be the thing to watch just now. I managed to make it through the first episode of HBO's The Plot Against America, but could take no more. Since then, it's been SCTV and old episodes of 30 Rock.

I'm in need of a good laugh these days, though I well understand the curiosity of those who've asked me to recommend Canadian novels dealing with pandemics.

The craziest by far is May Agnes Fleming's The Midnight Queen (1863), which is set in London during the Great Plague. In Tom Ardies' Pandemic (1973), part-time secret agent Charlie Sparrow combats a millionaire who looks to unleash a killer virus upon the world.

But my greatest recommendation is The Last Canadian (1974) by William C. Heine, which just happens to be the first Canadian novel I ever read. Ten years ago, I shared my thoughts about the work in a blog post, which was subsequently taken down and reworked for inclusion in The Dusty Bookcase — the book.

I'm bringing it back for the curious. Enjoy... then look for something funny.

AT LONG LAST LUNACY

The Last Canadian

William C. Heine

Markham, ON: Pocket Books, 1974

253 pages

In the opening chapter of The Last Canadian, protagonist Gene Arnprior leaves his suburban home and speeds along the Trans-Canada toward Montreal. A to B, it's not much of a scene, but the image has remained with me since I read this book at age twelve. The novel was the first in which I encountered a familiar landscape. Of the rest, I remembered nothing... nothing of the sexism, the crazed politics or the absurdity.

Penned by the editor-in-chief of the London Free Press, it begins with late night news bulletins about mysterious deaths in Colorado. Gene recognizes what others don't and takes to the air, flying his wife and two sons to a remote fishing camp near James Bay. As a virus sweeps through the Americas, killing nearly everyone, the Arnprior family live untouched for three idyllic years, before coming into contact with a carrier. As it turns out, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger... Gene lives on, but must bury his wife and children.

The Last Canadian is a favourite of survivalists everywhere. Someone calling himself Wolverine writes on the Survivalist Blog:

The immediate response reaction is instructive. Second there are the North country survival techniques. Third there are psychological factors of being a survivor in a situation where most others die. And there is more, dealing with post-disaster situations, though I won't go into that because it would spoil the book for you.

I won't be as courteous. Spoilers will follow, but first this complaint: the title is a cheat. Gene is not "The Last Canadian" – there are plenty of others – rather he considers himself such because his citizenship papers came through the day before the plague struck. Gene is an American who came north for work. He'd enjoyed his time in Canada, had made many friends and "had come to understand the Canadian parliamentary system, and agreed that it was far more flexible and effective than the rigidity of the American system of divided constitutional responsibility."

Reason before passion.

Is it then surprising that, there being no parliament, he's drawn back to the United States? Heading south, Gene resists all invitations of the Canadians he meets, whom he considers "eccentric" because they've chosen to stay put, supporting themselves through farming and whatever might be found in local shops. There's much more excitement to be found south of the border.

First, he stumbles into a Manhattan turf war – but that's hardly worth mentioning. As a carrier, Gene inadvertently kills a number of Soviet military types who have set up a base in Florida. In doing so, he becomes Enemy #1 of the USSR. They send frogmen assassins, set off bombs, plant land mines, and lob nuclear missiles in his general direction, but still Gene beetles on. When a Soviet submarine destroys his Chesapeake Bay home, killing the woman he considers his new wife, Gene seeks revenge.

Though he has no evidence, Gene comes to blame the Soviets for the plague (in fact, it's a rogue Russian scientist), and dedicates himself to infecting the USSR. He begins with a short wave radio broadcast directed at the Kremlin: "If the Russian people were half as smart as your literature says they are, they'd have tossed you out long ago. Because they haven't, I have to assume they're as stupid as you are."

You see, because they are stupid, Gene has decided that all citizens of the Soviet Union should die. He cares not one bit that the plague will spread beyond the borders of the country, killing the rest of Asia and Europe, never mind Africa.

It's all crazy, but the reader is not surprised. Though Heine spills an awful lot of primary colours in an effort to paint the man as a hero, concern has been growing for quite some time. Remember when he hit his wife, just so she'd understand the gravity of their situation? How about when he'd threatened to tie his young son to a tree and whip him until he couldn't stand – all because he'd fallen asleep while tending a fire? Then there's that little glimpse of Gene's psyche provided when his new love, Leila, tells him a horrific story of being kidnapped, beaten and raped repeatedly by a psychopath:

"You can't imagine the things he made me do. And he killed a man to get one of his girls."

Gene felt another chuckle welling up. In the few years he'd spent in Korea and Japan, he'd read about most of the sex things there were to do, and tried a few himself. He stifled it, however, recognizing her revulsion.

Yep, pretty funny stuff... and don't forget to add that boys will be boys.

Intent on killing billions, Gene makes his way up the Pacific Coast, dodging Soviet and American forces, before crossing the Bering Strait into the USSR. Hundreds of Americans and an untold number of Russians die as a result. His journey and life are finally ended by a clusterfuck of nuclear strikes – Soviet, Chinese, American and British – which obliterate the Anadyr basin.

Lest the reader agree with the Soviets that Gene had become a madman, Heine is at the ready to set things right. You see, Gene's actions were perfectly understandable; the British prime minister tells us so.

We're left with the image of radioactive clouds composed of the people and terrain of Anadyr. They drift across Canada, sprinkling poisoned dust over the land. Some settles on the graves of Gene's wife and children:

In time the rains washed the radioactive dust down among the rocks and deep into the soil.

Something of Eugene Arnprior, who had suffered much and had done more to serve mankind than he could ever have imagined, had come home to be with those he loved.

Thus ends what I believe to be the stupidest Canadian novel.

Trivia: Published in the US under the snicker-inducing title Death Wind, and later as – go figure – The Last American. 

Terrifying, either way.

In 1998, the novel was transformed into a Steven Seagal vehicle titled The Patriot. Here the action hero plays Dr Wesley McClaren, a small town immunologist doing battle with Montana militiamen and the lethal virus they've released. Sure sounds like Gene Arnprior could help out, but he's nowhere to be found. Maybe he's up on Parliament Hill taking in the House of Commons. Who knows. The Dominion to the north is never mentioned, nor is the Soviet Union, for that matter. Truth be told, The Patriot has as much to do with the novel as it does good cinema.

It can be seen, in its entirety, on YouTube:

 

Object: A typical mass market paperback. The cover photo is by Jock Carroll, who also served as editor of this and other paperback originals published by the Pocket Books imprint. The final pages advertise more desirable titles in the series, including:

FESTIVAL by Bryan Hay. A modern novel which reveals the rip-off of drug-crazy kids by music festival promoters.

THE QUEERS OF NEW YORK by Leo Orenstein. A novel of the homosexual underground.

THE HAPPY HAIRDRESSER by Nicholas Loupos. A rollicking revelation of what Canadian women do and say when they let their hair down.

Access: As far as I've been able to determine, The Last Canadian went through at least seven printings, making its scarcity in the used book market something of a mystery. Just two copies are currently listed online. At US$99.95 and US$133.53, both are described as being in crummy condition.

Where do these survivalists get their money?

Take heart, April is less than four days away. The President of the United States has assured us that the virus will be gone by then. Something to do with the heat, he says.

Strange days indeed. 

Related posts:

Silent, but Deadly

Figuring Out the Queers of New York
The Hairdresser as Straight Man
The Sea Lord Unsheathes His Sword
The Critical Age: Thoughts on a Film I'll Never See
Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

Maria Monk and Me

I didn't know her.

How could I?

We were born one hundred and forty-six years apart, and yet I think of Maria Monk each and every day.

I offer this by way of explanation.

Things are about to become quieter and dustier here as I focus on a book I'm writing about Maria and the Presbyterian clergymen who did her wrong.

I believe an exploration of Maria Monk and the hoax perpetuated under her name is long overdue. As if to confirm, this past weekend I stumbled upon this being offered online:

In fact, the artwork used, Jean-Jacques Lequeu's And we too shall be mothers, because...!, dates from 1794. Maria Monk was born in 1816.

Still, I was tempted.

Related posts:

Pornography of the Puritan

Maria Monk and the Kennedy Campaign

Words of Hate for Maria Monk

Maria Monk's Immortal Book

Christmas Comes Early