SYNOPSICS
The Final Programme (1973) is a English movie. Robert Fuest has directed this movie. Jon Finch,Jenny Runacre,Sterling Hayden,Harry Andrews are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1973. The Final Programme (1973) is considered one of the best Sci-Fi movie in India and around the world.
After the death of his Nobel Prize-winning father, billionaire physicist Jerry Cornelius becomes embroiled in the search for the mysterious "Final Programme", developed by his father. The programme, a design for a perfect, self-replicating human being, is contained on microfilm. A group of scientists, led by the formidable Miss Brunner (who consumes her lovers), has sought Cornelius's help in obtaining it. After a chase across a war-torn Europe on the verge of anarchy, Brunner and Cornelius obtain the microfilm from Jerry's loathsome brother Frank. They proceed to an abandoned underground Nazi fortress in the Arctic to run the programme, with Jerry and Miss Brunner as the subjects.
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The Final Programme (1973) Reviews
Where's The Final Programme?
This is one of those spectacular misfires; Fuest has taken Moorcock's splendid book and cut everything down to the bone so much that what remains is only the irrelevant sci-fi plot that was basically a throwaway excuse to hang all the elements of the book together. For this there really is no excuse; the next two books were available at the time the film was in production (the last was not publish until 1977) and if anyone had bothered to read them, they would have realized that Jerry Cornelius ain't James Bond. This a cheap Bond rip-off. The books were trans-dimensional, time hopping wonders; they had an arrogance of plot structure that really captured the complexities of multi-dimensional realities. This is a chase movie. It has a conventional three-act structure and, worst still, it ditches all the characters vital to the novel (or amalgamates three, four or five of them into one). It misses out on Moorcock's views of sexual liberation and worst of all Fuest has absolutely no idea what his source material is about. After seeing the Dr. Phibes movies I thought him to be an entertaining and imaginative director. After seeing this I realize his style has nothing to do with imagination but a talent for making do with low budgets. The Final Programme was made for around £600,000. Not inconsiderable for the time but it is wasted in every frame on trivia. For example, an early chapter of the book revolves around a massive assault on Jerry's father's Chatauex in Normandy by a team of crack armed mercenaries with hundreds of casualties; here it is reduced to a bit of mild house breaking just outside London. Jon Finch's Cornelius is the only plus point about it (he was, after all, a friend of Moorcock) and what the books really need is $400 million throwing at them (they have to be filmed back-to-back), faithful adaption, and a director like Alejandro Jodorowsky. The books have recently been reissued in a bind-up as "The Cornelius Quartet". Read them; you'll be going back to them for years to come trying to unravel all the different strands. The film has no strands.
"A Very Tasty World!"
The early-to-mid '70's saw a glut of movies predicting a pessimistic future for Mankind; 'Soylent Green', 'No Blade Of Grass', 'A Clockwork Orange', 'Logan's Run', the 'Planet Of The Apes' sequels and this, based on a Michael Moorcock novel. Jon Finch stars as Jerry Cornelius, Nobel Prize winner, rock star and secret agent, who embarks on a quest to free his beloved sister from the clutches of his evil brother Frank. The world Cornelius inhabits is the Swinging Sixties writ large; recreational drug use, rampant sexual promiscuity, and lack of respect for authority are rife. Writer, set designer and director Robert Fuest had worked on the 'Avengers' television series, and it shows. The sets are dazzling, the supporting cast good, and despite its pessimistic theme the film manages to be fun. Jenny Runacre steals the show as the bizarre 'Miss Brunner', a freakish mutation who absorbs the bodies of her lovers. You really need to watch this to believe it. Funny, stylish and erotic, its a genuine cult oddity.
"HELP Miss Brunner, I'm losing!"
I saw Alain Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After in the cinema a few years back, and I left in a kind of ecstatic trance, and ever after wondered if I was going to have an experience like that in the cinema again. The Final Programme hit the same spot, despite a quite ludicrous ending Bogart quote that seemed almost like an act of self-deprecating sabotage. I walked out of the film gasping and crooning. The Final Programme is one beautiful puppy. The story is from a Michael Moorcock novel, it's about a young man, Jerry Cornelius who, following the death of his genius plutocrat father goes off in search of a microfilm, jealously guarded by his insane brother, in a mansion full of high tech traps and also sought by colleagues. Don't take the plot too seriously though, it's something that you aren't meant to subject to too much scrutiny. The film is an utter masterpiece of atmosphere. I have an interest in British pop art, which has been a shamefully under-recognised movement. I was just astonished to discover that this movie had a lot of the elements from it. For example the walls of Miss Brunner's house are decorated with it, including perhaps the most famous piece of the whole movement, Peter Blake's "Babe Rainbow". I had a sort of pilgrimage last year to Pallant House art gallery in Chichester where a lot of this stuff is stored. There was a Colin Self exhibition on at the time to supplement their permanent collection of British pop art (a movement that predated the American equivalent and is easily as good). His work carries this nuclear apocalyptic beauty/malaise, that you also catch in The Final Programme where characters just offhandedly mention that Rome doesn't look so good without the Vatican, or how miscellaneous other erasures have just happened. You even get Sterling Hayden making an appearance reprising his Buck Turgidson role from Dr Strangelove, only he's better here as Major Wrongway Lindbergh, and wearing lovely orange shooting glasses and (perversely) an ankh medallion! Yup the film sure is one hell of an aesthetic treat, and apparently the design is by Fuest himself, a painter in a previous life who had exhibited at the Royal Academy (excellent preparation for a filmmaker). An example of the outstanding production design that I will mention in a moment is Miss Brunner's nightie. Miss Brunner is a wet dream of a character that you can hardly believe, tapped firmly enough into male sexual fantasy she bears comparison with Kathleen Turner's China Blue in Ken Russell's film of the same name. She is a totally sexually confident woman, absolutely gorgeously dressed and coiffured at all times, in control, who leaves the shooting to the guys, as if they were just being silly little boys. I would call her a black widow, but she's like a golden widow spider (whatever that is), she is destructive, like a Kali (Indian mysticism plays a part in the movie too), playfully sadistic and just utterly mesmerising. She appears at one point wearing a pleated white nightie, that has a crocheted openwork top with the word LOVE in the centre, with scrolls and hearts. There's no way they got that off a hanger somewhere, it's got to have been made by a pop artist, quite the most glorious thing I've seen in a hundred years. She mentions at one point that she always gets the best out of people, well she manages to convince a gorgeous associate to tinkle the ivories with baroque music whilst naked, so I can quite see her point! She has these gorgeous red curls, pink lipstick, gold eye shadow, covered in pink ruffles over a starred white tunic. Sorry to obsess, but well, she obsesses me. The movie stars Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius, he's like a more sprightly Oliver Reed, extremely charismatic, and I've no idea why his career didn't take off after this movie, but it doesn't seem to have. He's just hilarious as well, he walks up to a spike with some blood on it at one point, touches it and says "ah rhesus negative", ludicrous yet he carries it perfectly. He spends half of the movie eating chocolate digestive biscuits, just crazy. The movie also contains half of my favourite character actors ever, including Patrick Magee (Mr Alexander in A Clockwork Orange - the guy whose wife is raped) and Hugh Griffith (sheikh in Ben-Hur). I just can't believe what I was watching. Unusually for sci-fi the technobabble and philosophobabble actually seemed to be pitch perfect! Truly a strange experience for me, saw Dmitri at one point reading the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology, one of the most splendid books in existence, something that hypnotised me as a child. It almost appeared like Fuest had made this film for me personally, even though at the time I hadn't been born. Best of all, this appears to be on DVD!
Jerry Cornelius in search for his fathers invention.
A weird Sci Fi movie about Michael Moorcock's creation Jerry Cornelius. In this movie J.C. is finally doomed to merge with a woman to make a new kind of man, the result is bizarre. The movie is a mixture between the style of Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" and Luining's "Feed." What makes the movie really different from both mentioned is the dialogues that are full of a strange kind of black humor.
A fascinating footnote
The novel from which this movie was taken, The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock, is structurally identical in plot and character to another Moorcock novel... Elric of Melnibone, the first of the Elric series. This is not a coincidence; both books are part of the Champion Eternal cycle... a series of interconnected series about the Champion Eternal, who exists in every time and every universe, condemned always to fight -- and never know why he is fighting. He goes by many names -- Elric of Melnibone, Jerry Cornelius, Count Urlik, Prince Corum, each with his own series. In some incarnations he knows who he is, in others he thinks he's a normal man (occasionally, a particular incarnation is female). Sometimes two (or even three) incarnations meet each other. The cycle, which makes up about a third of all Moorcock's ouevre (probably dozens of novels), is one of the most monumental achievements of meta-fiction ever written... but I think this is the only book of Moorcock's made into a movie, though he did contribute to the adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel The Land That Time Forgot (dinosaurs on an island). Now that Fritz Leiber is dead, Moorcock can lay claim to being the greatest living fantasy writer. The movie The Final Programme (a.k.a. The Last Days of Man On Earth) does an incredible job of capturing the Jerry Cornelius character, much better than I would have expected. But the ending is changed from that of the book, and not for the better. Still definitely worth a rental. Dafydd ab Hugh