Director – Philip Saville, Screenplay – Ted Whitehead, Based on the Novel Gor Saga (1981) by Maureen Duffy, Producer – Sally Head, Photography – David Feig, Music – Hans Zimmer, Visual Effects Design – Andy Lazell, Makeup Design – Elizabeth Rowell, Designer – Humphrey Jaeger. Production Company – BBC-tv/Australian Broadcasting Corporation/Television New Zealand.
Cast
Charles Dance (Edward Forester), Jamie Foster (Gor), Gabrielle Anwar (Nell Forester), Philip Madoc (Colonel Lancing), Julie Peasgood (Ann Forester), Peter Wiggins (Young Gor), Roshan Seth (Dr Graham), Peter Elliott (Mary), Peter Tilbury (Chris Knott), Niven Boyd (Jessop), Rosemary McHale (Nancy Knott), Marc De Jonge (Marais), Ralph Michael (Old Priest), Sharon Duce (Emily Jessop)
Plot
Edward Forester is engaged in genetically engineering ape DNA. He has a breakthrough and successfully oversees the birth of a hybrid that is born of gorilla and human DNA. The male child, which they name Gordon or Gor, emerges as a perfectly normal human-seeming baby. However, the ministry orders the experiment shut down and Gor destroyed. Edward instead fakes paperwork to make it seem that he killed the child and sneaks Gor away to be raised by a colleague. Gor grows up as a normal boy but with no capacity for speech. Forester maintains careful oversight, taking Gor for surgery on his vocal chords to allow him to speak and then enrolling him in military academy. As Gor grows into a young man, he develops an attraction to Edward’s daughter Nell. As his eighteenth birthday approaches, Gor begins to ask uncomfortable questions.
First Born was a BBC TV Mini-Series that originally aired in three one-hour slots. The tv series is adapted from Gor Saga (1981), a novel by British author Maureen Duffy. Duffy has had a long career as a writer since the 1960s and produced a good many books, many of which lap over into genre material. (She is also outspoken for animal rights and as a gay’s rights advocate, having been out since the 1960s). First Born is the only of Duffy’s works to be adapted to screens so far.
Back in the era of the Mad Scientist film, there was a whole body of works about scientists conducting experiments to turn apes into humans etc – see the likes of Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Monster and the Girl (1941), Dr Renault’s Secret (1942) and The Ape Man (1943). These are the distant ancestors of First Born, which could in effect be one of these films wrenched into the era of Jane Goodall and Koko the gorilla.
From the opening scene, the mini-series adeptly cuts between Charles Dance with his pregnant wife Julie Peasgood and a delivery room scene where we assume it is Julie giving birth only to then abruptly see a hair-covered mother’s body and realise it is an ape child being delivered, From this point, First Born sets up a series of symbolic contrasts – between ape beginnings and human society, between the birth of the hybrid and Dance’s own natural-born daughter, between Gor undergoing surgery and Charles Dance taking Catholic mass, between the jungle and British high-society – all of which weave in and out throughout the show.
Charles Dance and Peter Tilbury with the hybrid
First Born was made back when Charles Dance was young and dashingly handsome, the star of such tv shows as The Jewel in the Crown (1983) and assorted film appearances. One thing you do end up surprised about is what an insufferable pompous ass his character is. “Stupid bitch,” he mutters in voiceover at having to listen to a receptionist have a conversation on the phone as he waits for the outcome of surgery. Or “I didn’t like the look of the woman but I had no other choice,” he says after leaving the baby in the hands of perfectly ordinary middle-class woman Sharon Duce.
However, Charles Dance is such an engaging character and the film’s sympathies so constructed that we engage in what he is doing – he trying to save a child against an unfeeling military bureaucracy that wants to kill it – that it takes some way into the series for it to click that we are actually watching a Frankenstein Film. His ruthless and single-minded determination to parent Gor and cover the truth up, all played out with Dance’s charm and good looks, is not incomparable to Peter Cushing in Hammer’s Frankenstein films. Even at the most generous, you have to concede the fact that his actions cross waaaay over any kind of ethical scientific guidelines.
It is captivating watching Charles Dance go through his experiments and efforts to preserve the child. And First Born is impeccably well made drama as only the BBC can do. My only issue is that I kept wanting to see Gor manifest more gorilla traits then he does – at most, he has greater strength (which we never see evidence of) and is lacking the equipment to vocalise speech until surgical intervention.
The gorilla hybrid child
First Born starts to come into its true strengths during the third episode. Here we get Gor as an adult (Jamie Foster). The drama centres around Gor starting to break free from home, making choices to go into the priesthood, and then romancing Charles Dance’s now adult daughter (played by a radiantly lovely Gabrielle Anwar), all before Dance precipitates a crisis by telling him the two cannot be together and Gor uncovers Dance’s private files on a quest to find the truth. The drama and romantic scenes work great and the mini-series starts to play off dramatically.
The only disappointment is an ending that has to adhere to mad scientist cliché [PLOT SPOILERS] and conveniently have Gor killed off almost by divine deus ex machina as he enters the gorilla cage to reconcile with his mother only to be torn apart. It is the old Frankenstein equivalent of conducting a radical new scientific breakthrough and then killing it of before the implications can be discussed. The final freeze frame on Charles Dance’s shocked expression at the christening of Gabrielle Anwar’s child as it gives a similar squawk to the infant Gor crosses a line from what had been careful scientific realism up to that point to crudely hammer home the fact that this is an abominable science film.
Director Philip Saville (1930-2016) had a career in British television that goes back to the 1960s, most successfully with the hit tv mini-series The Boys from the Blackstuff (1982). He has made a number of other genre tv mini-series, including Count Dracula (1977), the acclaimed Louis Jourdan adaptation of Bram Stoker for the BBC; The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986), the famous quasi-fantastical Fay Weldon feminist work about a woman’s revenge; a further Fay Weldon adaptation The Cloning of Joanna May (1991) about cloning; the Hallmark biopic My Life as a Fairytale: Hans Christian Andersen (2001); and the little-seen theatrical films with the strange Shadey (1985) about a man with psychic powers and The Fruit Machine (1988) about gay youths pursued by a killer.
