Dreaming of Harry Dickson

French director Alain Resnais at the Lido, Venice, 2006. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

Cinema history is littered with the corpses of movies that never were.

Some might have flickered no stronger than light bulbs in the grey cells of directors and producers, but others almost came to life, with scripts penned, money partly raised, sets built and in some cases, filming actually begun.

But, for a variety of reasons, we will never see Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness, Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote, David Fincher's Rendez-vous with Rama, Alessandro Jodorowsky's version of Dune, Bernardo Bertolucci's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, and countless other celluloid pipe dreams. Maybe we should be grateful that Sylvester Stallone's Edgar Allan Poe biopic never made it off the ground.

French director Alain Resnais has always been a great fan of popular culture, which is not always apparent from the intellectual rigour of his films; after all you wouldn't easily guess that the creator of Night and Fog, Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Providence, witty Alan Ayckbourn transpositions and so many other great film achievements, is also a rabid comics fan. He never comes to London without a pilgrimage to Forbidden Planet. He is also a big sci-fi connoisseur and made a rare incursion into the genre with Je t'aime, Je t'aime, one of his lesser films.

Throughout the 1960s, one of his most creative decades, it was often reported that Resnais was working on a major international production, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, for regular Truffaut producer Anatole Dauman. And for fans of both Resnais and pulp fiction, this was a salivating prospect indeed.

Adventurer and detective Harry Dickson was the invention of cult Belgian writer Jean Ray, best known to movie fans for the 1971 Harry Kumel adaptation of his haunted house novel Malpertuis. Dickson was initially commissioned by pulp periodicals as an American avatar of Sherlock Holmes, but Ray quickly threw the character into complex and fantastical plots which often crossed over into the most baroque supernatural worlds and the series, which ran to almost 180 short novels, is still a treasure trove of imaginative writing, very little of which has sadly ever been translated into English.

The film, which required a large budget by French standards, was at one stage to star Dirk Bogarde or Laurence Olivier as the eponymous Harry Dickson with mostly British and American actors in the cast, including Vanessa Redgrave. Surrealist Andre Delvaux had signed on to design the sets and Stockhausen had agreed to pen the music. Resnais and friends worked for almost 10 years on the film before finally giving up.

A taste of what we have missed is now provided by the publication this month in France of a book featuring the script by Resnais and journalist and writer Frederic de Towarnicki, together with recce photographs and sketches, and a fascinating history of the obstacle course encountered by the production team.

It makes for an invaluable piece of film history and evokes gaudy dreams of Harry Dickson fighting giant spiders and monsters of Greek mythology brought back to life; an unholy mix of Louis Feuillade's classic silent serials, Fritz Lang expressionist imagery and Indiana Jones. What a loss.

When the Harry Dickson project collapsed, Resnais returned to reality and black and white filmmaking, shooting La Guerre est Finie and a segment of the Loin du Vietnam sketch film. From epic tales of derring-do, to Franco/Spanish politics and Vietnam, the journey had been an arduous one. As film dreamers, we can only sigh and imagine the splendour of Harry Dickson.