This was perhaps Alec Coppel’s best known novel and he wrote the screenplay as well. Before seeing it I was surprised to read that this wasn’t very successful at the box office because there was a time it was always on TV, and it starred John Mills at the height of his popularity. But it made more sense after a viewing.
Mills plays a guilt-ridden air plane manufacturer who’s drinking heavily at the beginning of the film. Although he seems to be successful, with a loving wife (Elisabeth Shue look-alike Phyllis Calvert) and daughter, he pops in a plane and almost kills himself, changing his mind at the last minute but crash landing. We flash back to why in the form of a confession to his wife…
Mills daughter is in love with a dodgy foreigner (who else in a British film but Herbert Lom?) When Mills trys to buy him off, Lom taunts him saying he banged his daughter. Mills punches him and thinks he kills him – a plot used by Coppel in I Killed the Count. He decides to dispose of the body, leading to a quite suspenseful sequence where he's almost busted by a maid, then several cops, etc. He eventually buries the body but no one discovers it and it’s not reported. He and his wife go back to check and the body’s gone. They try to find out what’s going on. And this is where the film loses it’s way (it was the same in the novel). Mills keeps searching for the body, and gypsies who may have taken the body – it doesn’t make sense. And there's all these repetitive scenes of him driving around and flying.
He eventually tracks down a deaf mute gypsy girl who has a ring which Mills put on the corpse – he tries to get it off her (why?) and winds up in a fight with her husband. The gypsies are arrested, so Mills tries to help them by asking his girlfriend’s new American lawyer boyfriend (Sam Wanamaker) to defend them. It gets even more messy – Calvert perjures herself on the stand, saying she gave the gypsies the ring; Wanamaker defends the gypsies and is so scolded by the court that he becomes determined to solve the mystery
The shonky logic and change of driving protagonist worked better in the novel than on screen. But at least something is always going on. And because it’s a British film the hero (Mills) can get away with killing someone. It's also given energetic, interesting handling: the opening credits are spoken rather seen; the camera moves around; it’s non linear in structure. Worth looking at. Coppel can't complain about the adaptation - it's very faithful to his novel.
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