By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: author, screenwriter and director James Clavell, who helmed To Sir, With Love, The Last Valley, Five Gates To Hell and Walk Like A Dragon.
The late James Clavell is probably one of the clearest and most obvious examples of an Unsung Auteur whose position in this column is predicated by their celebration in another artform. Though famous for his collection of popular, highly regarded, Asia-set sprawling novels like Shogun (initially adapted for TV in 1980 with Richard Chamberlain, and again to even greater acclaim in 2024), King Rat (adapted for the big screen in 1965 with George Segal), Tai-Pan (for more on the making of this 1986 film adaptation, click here), Noble House (filmed for TV in 1988), Gai-Jin, and more, Clavell also had a hands-on film career. As well as contributing to the screenplays for films like The Fly (1958), The Great Escape (1963), and The Satan Bug (1965), Clavell also helmed a handful of films himself, though – like other authors turned director such as Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Norman Mailer et al – these creative achievements are usually only mentioned in passing when Clavell’s career is discussed.
Born in 1921 in Sydney, Australia (though not often loudly claimed as an Aussie for some reason), James Clavell was the son of Commander Richard Charles Clavell, a Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia from 1920 to 1922. James Clavell served in WW2, and was famously interned at the notorious Changi prison camp, with his wartime experiences adding immeasurably to his eventual work as a writer. Though he found his greatest success as a novelist, Clavell’s early career aspirations were very much toward filmmaking, and he began writing and selling screenplays in the 1950s. Clavell eventually made his behind-the-camera debut in 1959 with Five Gates To Hell, a tough, vivid adventure film about a group of Red Cross doctors and nurses held captive by Chinese guerrillas in Vietnam. Though it features nuns and nurses picking up guns and lighting up the bad guys with furious vengeance, Five Gates To Hell is not an exploitation flick, instead offering up considerably more thoughtful entertainment.
Clavell’s fascination with Asian culture (and its often brutal collision with the west) continued with 1960’s western Walk Like A Dragon, in which Jack Lord’s gunfighter liberates a Chinese woman from a slave auction in 1870s San Francisco. After helming a few episodes of TV series like The Detectives, The Rifleman and Ripcord, Clavell directed his biggest – and most atypical – hit. Adapted from E.R Braithwaite’s novel, 1967’s To Sir, With Love features a bravura turn from Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier, who is exceptional as a schoolteacher struggling to connect with his students in London’s hardscrabble East End. Far removed from his usual interests of historical fiction, adventure, intrigue and Asia, Clavell crafts something truly masterful here, getting inside the heads of both his teacher lead character and his difficult young charges. Wonderfully performed by all concerned (Christian Roberts, Judy Geeson and Suzy Kendall are superb) and featuring a classic title song by Lulu (who also appears), To Sir, With Love is a truly essential “high school movie”…and the happily glaring anomaly on James Clavell’s resume.
The director was on far more familiar ground with 1967’s little-seen Savage Justice (about a Japanese girl who arrives in a Canadian coastal town to avenge her father’s internment-camp death during WW2), and then shifted gears slightly with 1969’s Where’s Jack? Filled with action and adventure, this unusual romp is set in 1720s London and follows the exploits of highwayman and folk hero Jack Sheppard (Tommy Steele). Bold and entertaining, Clavell really hit his straps here, crafting thrilling scenes of high adventure and building a grimily realistic world.
Clavell set his sights even higher on 1971’s strikingly ambitious The Last Valley, a highly complex adventure tale set during The Thirty Years War of the 1600s. A treatise on war and religion with big, bold performances from Michael Caine and Omar Sharif, The Last Valley is exciting and bracing, but also highly meditative and strikingly violent. Its philosophical set pieces and cerebral dialogue proved a turn-off for audiences, but The Last Valley remains a fiercely uncompromised work from Clavell and a real showcase for what he could achieve cinematically. The film’s disastrous box office results sadly hobbled Clavell’s future filmmaking ambitions…though cinema’s loss was certainly literature’s gain, with the gifted penman famously focusing instead on the written word. James Clavell (who passed away in 1994), however, didn’t quite see it like that. “I’m not a novelist, but a storyteller,” Clavell once said. “I’m not a literary figure at all.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
