A Farewell to Richard Harrison

Richard Harrison, one of the most prolific and recognisable faces of European genre cinema, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 90 from natural causes. For anyone who has spent time digging around the more obscure corners of exploitation cinema, Harrison was one of those familiar faces who seemed to turn up everywhere. He might not have been as regognisable a name as some of the Hollywood stars, but if you have spent enough time watching sword-and-sandal epics, Eurospy adventures, Spaghetti Westerns, Italian crime movies, Ninja films and bottom-shelf action movies, chances are you have encountered the mighty Richard Harrison.

Born on May 26, 1936, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Harrison moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and initially worked as a fitness trainer and physique model before finding his way into acting. After appearing in smaller Hollywood roles, including South Pacific, he moved to Italy in the early 1960s, just as the country’s booming genre-film industry was looking for handsome American leading men. Harrison proved to be the perfect fit and became one of the faces of the sword-and-sandal cycle, appearing in films such as Gladiators 7, Messalina vs. the Son of Hercules and The Revolt of the Praetorians.

When Bond changed the face of the world, Harrison simply moved to the European spy-film explosion, most famously playing secret agent Bob Fleming in a series of Eurospy adventures. Films such as Secret Agent Fireball and Killers Are Challenged are exactly the sort of cool 1960s European espionage pictures that have become cult favourites, and Harrison was perfectly at home among the gadgets, beautiful women, international villains and increasingly ridiculous plots.

The Spaghetti Western was another natural destination. Harrison appeared in numerous Westerns during the 1960s and 1970s, continuing to work steadily as European genre cinema evolved around him. By the time he appeared in Beast with a Gun in 1977, however, the world of Italian exploitation had become considerably nastier. Starring Helmut Berger as a vicious criminal on the run, the film is a classic slice of violent poliziottesco cinema, with Harrison playing police commissioner Giulio Santini. Beast with a Gun was one of the first blu ray movies I picked up that hooked me on the Italian thriller and it is another example of just how far his career had travelled from the heroic figures he had played at the beginning of the decade.

Then came the 1980s, and Harrison found himself in a whole new world of cinema. The rise of the home-video market saw the increased output of the cheap action movies, Rambo knock-offs, commando adventures and Ninja films, and Harrison’s face was all over the bottom shelf of video shops. He appeared in a seemingly endless stream of international action pictures, including Blood Debts, Fireback, Terror Force Commando and Hitman the Cobra. But it was his association with a bizarre cycle of Hong Kong Ninja movies that would give him perhaps his strangest cinematic legacy.

For anyone who discovered these films through VHS, Richard Harrison became Ninja Master Gordon. Ninja Terminator, Ninja the Protector, Ninja Dragon, Ninja Squad, Ninja Operation: Licensed to Terminate, Ninja Commandments, Ninja Avengers, Diamond Ninja Force and numerous other titles featured Harrison in various Ninja-related adventures. Gordon appears, disappears and reappears, while footage, characters and entire sequences are recycled between these films.

This was largely down to the infamous producer tactics of the likes of Joseph Lai and director Godfrey Ho, who became notorious for combining newly shot footage featuring Western actors such as Harrison with footage taken from completely unrelated Asian movies. The results were dubbed, re-edited and repackaged as new Ninja adventures. The technique produced some of the most hilariously incoherent films ever to emerge from the 1980s video boom. Characters could be having a conversation in one film while apparently belonging to a completely different movie, and Ninja costumes, villains and storylines could change without warning. And throughout, Richard Harrison’s presence gave the films a strange grounding admist the cinematic chaos.

Harrison’s career in cult cinema didn’t stop with the Ninja films. He appeared in Jesús Franco’s Dark Mission: Flowers of Evil, alongside Christopher Lee, Christopher Mitchum and Brigitte Lahaie, another wonderfully odd international exploitation picture that feels like a perfect snapshot of the sort of cinema Harrison inhabited. He also turned up in Steve Barkett’s bizarre triumph Empire of the Dark, playing Arkham. This is corker of a movie, involving satanic cults, supernatural forces, monsters and just about everything else you might expect from an obscure early-1990s American exploitation movie.

Harrison wasn’t simply an actor taking whatever roles came along. He wrote and directed several low-budget genre films and was involved in the development of Scalps, the savage Western directed by Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Harrison had originally written the project for his own production company but ultimately sold the rights when he was unable to finance the film himself.

For those of us who love the forgotten films lurking on the bottom shelf, Richard Harrison will always be a familiar face. Bob Fleming, Beast with a Gun, Dark Mission: Flowers of Evil, Empire of the Dark, Scalps and, of course, that seemingly endless collection of Ninja movies are all part of an extraordinary career that stretched across some of the most colourful decades in exploitation cinema.

Farewell, Ninja Master Gordon, Rest in peace Richard Harrison.