DATE: Sunday, June 1, 1997                  TAG: 9705210711

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

MARKETING TAKES A SAINTLY TURN

Marketing is the choral introit of our era, and, amid that unabashedly exuberant send-up, the Saint goes marching in.

Again.

``They're going to make their money,'' confirmed Burl Barer, author of The Saint (Simon & Schuster, 248 pp., $5.99), the novelization of the screenplay to the recent ``major motion picture from Paramount.''

Said money is the $70 million the Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue action film reportedly cost to produce. In spite of universally negative notices, ``The Saint''s box-office take in America has gone well beyond $50 million, with at least $18.5 million more already tallied in 14 foreign countries, including Spain, Australia and South Korea.

There's more to come; the movie opens June 17th in France.

You may recall the titular character created by Leslie Charteris - swashbuckling Simon Templar, ``The Robin Hood of Modern Crime'' - who was featured in more than 50 books and celebrated for his ``saintly way of doing the most unsaintly things.'' He was portrayed on film, before Kilmer, by Louis Hayward, George Sanders and Hugh Sinclair; on radio by Vincent Price, Tom Conway and Barry Sullivan; and on TV by Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy and Simon Dutton.

Charteris, who died in 1993 at 85, would have preferred Cary Grant.

The new film, an endlessly collaborative project of many years and many scripts in which The Saint steals a formula for cold fusion and prevents a political upheaval in Russia, is based on nothing Charteris ever wrote, nor is Templar remotely recognizable to his old fans.

``It's PG-13,'' said Barer, 49, ``unless you know Russian.''

The author, whose cheerfully hyperbolic website pronounces the novelization ``a modern masterpiece of action and adventure,'' had to revise his book radically and fast when preview audiences recoiled at the death of Elisabeth Shue's character, the Saint's main squeeze.

``They reacted as if Princess Leia had been bumped off before the first droid landed,'' Barer reported from his office in Walla Walla, Wash.

Shue was summarily reshot, resurrected and rewritten on deadline.

``It wasn't all that difficult,'' said Barer.

Not for him, the logical choice for the job, since Barer had already won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for his definitive The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television (1993).

But Barer's contract has a canny clause in it that specifies he will say absolutely nothing critical of the film.

Helpfully, myriads of critics have rushed to fill that void for him.

``So,'' wrote Derrick Bang fairly typically in Enterprise magazine, ``there's another classic character destroyed by Hollywood's throw-money-at-it mentality.''

Reviewer Charles Taylor, writing in Salon magazine, noted pointedly that there is no mention of Charteris to be found anywhere in the new screen ``Saint.''

Novel by Barer. Story by Jonathan Hensleigh. Screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh and Wesley Strick.

Trademark and copyright by Paramount Pictures.

Disregard by design?

``After a while,'' Taylor deadpanned, ``I suspected the omission was less an oversight than simple respect for the dead.''

But the incomparable Leslie would have understood completely.

In 1962, at the outset of the immediately mediocre Roger Moore TV series, Charteris was characteristically unrepentant:

``When, after many years of noble and lofty-minded resistance, I finally broke down and sold the Saint to the Philistines of television,'' he wrote, ``I fear that I must have added one more argument to the armoury of critics who maintain that every man has his price; because I certainly got mine.''

So it may be said for all the Saints, who from their labors rest in print, on film and, as the millennium impends, across cyberspace.

The one who is featured in Barer's next novel, Capture the Saint, begins his latest exploit on that most contemporary and wearyingly persistent of huckster venues, a talk show.

He's plugging a movie based on a book of his own authorship.

Inevitably, Simon says thumbs up. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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