The Saint
As mentioned in the last post, The Lone Wolf was a major inspiration for The Saint, a detective that shared a number of his core traits, many of which were amplified for a new audience. There are also a number of significant differences.
Created by Leslie Charteris , Simon Templar became The Saint courtesy of his initials (ST). He debuted in Meet the Tiger in 1928, the first in the series of books written by Charteris that continued until 1963, after which he wrote in collaboration with other authors.
Templar often used aliases with the initials S.T. such as "Sebastian Tombs" or "Sugarman Treacle", was fond of making humorous and off-putting remarks and leaving his calling card… a stick figure of a man with a halo over his head. His targets include corrupt politicians, warmongers, and others he branded as low lifes, people whose lives he is willing to ruin and even kill for what he saw as the greater good.
The Saint moved with the times. During the 1920s and early 1930s he fought European arms dealers, drug runners, and white slavers, and by the first half of the 1940s Templar was working for the American government, fighting Nazis.
In some stories the Saint is working as a detective, while in others he is more of a vigilante who constructs ingenious plots to get even with rip-off artists, greedy bosses and con men. Templar also has laundry list of interests and skills that seemed to keep growing as the series progressed. These included talents as a poet, a songwriter and as an adventure novelist who had penned a story that sounds like an autobiography.
The Saint had many partners, the most resilient being girlfriend Patricia Holm who was portrayed as a capable adventurer, but who seemed to come and go from the series. Templar and Holm seem to lived together as a common-law couple in a time when such relationships were either uncommon or illegal. It was also an open relationship with Holm always unfazed as Templar flirts with the many other women he encounters.
Holm disappeared from the novels in the late 1940s, after which time Templar never had a steady girlfriend, nor any shortage of female attention. Male friends didn’t fare any better, often coming and going in rapid succession. While Templar never married, it is interesting that his former male friends did. Two married former criminals named (rather disconcertingly) "Straight Audrey" Perowne and Kathleen "The Mug" Allfield.
As the novels began to build an audience, Charteris approached RKO Radio Pictures to drum up interest in a film adaption. The first film made was The Saint in New York (1938), based on the 1935 novel of the same name. Following its success seven more films followed in rapid succession.
Some were based upon outlines by written by Charteris, while others were based loosely on his novels. Louis Hayward starred in the first and last film of the series. Hayward was a South African who, as a protege of Noel Coward had made his way to America to appear on Broadway before finding his way into the role of The Saint.
The second film featured George Sanders in the title role. Sanders was a British actor with an upper-class English accent and smooth, baritone voice. He was often cast as a sophisticated villain, which in many ways made him the perfect fit for The Saint who walked a similar line between hero and villain. His appeal was based on a perception that he was slightly less villainous than those he was aiming to take down.
Sanders made four more Saint films in quick succession before he was poached by RKO to play the lead in their forthcoming series about The Falcon, which they made into a blatant copy of The Saint. This was the source of the conflict between Charteris and the studio which effectively brought the series to an end.
But because these films were churned out in such rapid succession two more Saint films were produced starring another British Actor, Hugh Sinclair, before things went entirely pear shaped.
Charteris took exception to the upcoming release of The Gay Falcon, the first in The Falcon series, which he argued was a case of copyright infringement. Not only for the story and character similarities, but also because it starred George Sanders, who audiences would recognise as the Saint after his recent appearances.
The legal dispute forced RKO to put the film on hold, unable to release it until 1943.
While the relationship between Charteris and RKO was unsalvageable, British production company Hammer Film worked with Charteris on a ninth film, The Saint's Return (known as The Saint's Girl Friday in the US) from 1953, with Louis Hayward returning to the he had pioneered fifteen years earlier.
The appeal of The Saint was sufficiently wide enough to support two subsequent French productions. First in 1960 there was Le Saint mène la danse (The Saint leads the Dance) also released as The Dance of Death and Le Saint conduit le bal (The Saint leads the Ball) featuring Félix Marten as Simon Templar. And was followed up with Le Saint prend l'affût (The Saint Lies in Wait) in 1966.
The Saint TV series ran from 1962 to 1969 starring Roger Moore in what was probably the longest screen test for a role as James Bond… in many ways a very similar character. The Saint made a return to TV without Roger more in the aptly named Return of The Saint which ran for 24 episodes from September 1978 until March 1979. In 1987 a pilot titled The Saint in Manhattan, starring Andrew Clarke, was produced but couldn’t find a buyer.
There was the ridiculous 1997 film starring Val Kilmer who seems to practicing every accent he can muster as well as every silly disguise he can find that doesn’t fool anyone. The director Phillip Noyce has made many great films, all of them better than this
Between 1968 and 2017 there were eleven made for TV films, the last of which featured Roger Moore as a tribute to the actor not long before his death.
We may not have seen the last of The Saint but it doe seem to me the character has reached the end of his productive life. Though you can never discount the prospect of him returning as a gay man or a minority.