The Stainless Steel Rat (1970)

D. Gerry Anderson
Colour


In many ways it should have been the perfect coming together. The first ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ book is great fiction for kids, it moves along at a fine clip, doesn’t aim for too much depth and isn’t concerned about painting the planets it visits in anything other than the broadest strokes. World building and complex plots are not what ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ is about, what it’s about is colourful adventure. Therefore Gerry Anderson must have seemed the ideal choice to film the adaptation. He had after all spent most of the 1960s making uncomplex and undemanding adventure series. If anything he created more depth for the worlds he encountered and so should have been great at filling in the blanks. His metier – as it was seen at this point by the general public and the industry itself – was puppets. And if anything was created to be filmed in Supermarionation, it was ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’.


This feature length pilot for a proposed series should have been a success then. Unfortunately, by 1970, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Gerry Anderson really fucking hated puppets.


It’s odd that the man most associated with Supermarionation, who coined the word even, was the man who became the biggest critic of it. Anderson wanted to work with real actors, he wanted to make films (he was involved in the development of ‘Moonraker’) and felt that puppets were a cul de sac. Unfortunately, as his later ‘UFO’, ‘The Protectors’, ‘Space 1999’ career proved, he wasn’t good at working with live actors. Indeed he had an odd habit of making actual actors give performances reminiscent of puppets. That was all in the future though, at this time he was still the man with the puppets, but the fact he was so desperate not to be the man with the puppets explains why ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ fails so badly.


‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz is a rogue, a crook in a world where crime has largely been abolished. He is a high-tech, futuristic gentleman thief, like a Raffles with a ray-gun. We open as he successfully carries out a heist, before moving confidently onto his next crime. Unfortunately the next crime brings him into contact with Inskipp, a thief even more legendary than himself, but one who is now working as an investigator for the state. (Inskipp is a glorious puppet by the way, so squat and rotund and sweaty. It looks as if he’s been left in front of the radiator for a couple of days). He recruits Slippery Jim, much against his will, but soon our stainless steel rat gets the righteous scent of the hunt in his nostrils. He finds himself in pursuit of Angelina, the great femme fatale of the galaxy.


Firstly, the things this adaptation does right. The puppets are excellent, a far improvement on what Anderson had been working with at the start of the decade. One wouldn’t go as far as to say lifelike, as they’re still puppets after all, but these puppets are clearly at the more expressive end of puppet performers. The story is well paced, with the script placing exciting set-piece after exciting set-piece. And it corrects the biggest problem of the book, which is that the relationship between Jim and Angelina is so ill defined. Here Anderson aims for chemistry between his puppets, giving them witty dialogue that makes them sizzle like Bogart and Bacall with strings. Indeed it appears at points as if Anderson doesn’t want to restrain himself to just kisses. No doubt when he watched the sex scene in ‘Team America: World Police’ he saw realised a load of images which had flooded through his mind when making this film.


But where it doesn’t work is that Anderson is clearly straining with all his might against the form he did so much to develop. He clearly fucking hates puppets, and that has bad consequences for this film. Even when it’s puppets in brave new worlds, he still directs it in the most pedestrian way, with none of the verve of his earlier work. As such the exciting set pieces following exciting set pieces are not really that exciting at all.


What’s more, no matter how expressive the puppet, they’re clearly not enough for him anymore. When it comes to one of his characters giving a real serious emotion, then the vague features of a real person are superimposed onto their faces (superimposition on top of supermarionation). No doubt it was supposed to add depth, but it comes across looking weird, spooky even. Here we have a man who is working with puppets and wants to work with actors and so decides to do both, but doing so adds zero of the qualities you generally get from live actors and just ends up making his puppets look even more fake and stranger than before.


Such is his contempt for the materials he’s working with, that the viewer begins to imagine that he might truly shatter the illusion by running onto screen before the final shot and snipping all the strings while cackling manically into the camera. No doubt he was delighted that this wasn’t picked up as series. Even though ‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz was a more nuanced and interesting character than Anderson had had before (maybe even the most nuanced and interesting character Anderson ever had) he was still – in this form – a fucking puppet. Underwhelming live action would follow for Anderson now, as for diGriz his wait for a proper film goes on – but I can’t help thinking that his puppet self is staking somewhere out right now.