In the late 70s Rank reactivated its filmmaking division which had been limited to Carry On movies and the odd horror flick; Tony Williams greenlit eight films at a cost of ten million pounds. This slate went on to be criticised for its conservatism, but you can't really blame him - it was a conservative company, and why not make kids films like Wombling Free or Tarka the Otter? (Both had name recognition coming from a TV show and classic book respectively.) And while remaking The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes was going to be critically risky, both had name recognition, Rank had the rights, and in the case of 39 Steps they wanted to try putting in more John Buchan, which hadn't been done on screen to date. Eagle's Wing even at the time was a ludicrous bet - an English art house Western, come on... - and Silver Dream Racer would have seemed too "try hard", with David Essex's pop idol days on the wane. But Bad Timing was a legitimate punt at doing something art house-y... and it was definitely time for a film version of The Riddle of the Sands to be made.
Really a film of this should have been made years ago - preferrably in the 30s or 50s - but Erskine Childers' family wouldn't allow it so filmmakers had to wait until the novel was in the public domain. On the sunny side this has meant it could be shot in gorgeous Panavision, in colour and heavily on location - the movie looks terrific, with its windswept North Sea locations, small coastal towns and sand bars.
Michael York and Simon MacCorkindale are well cast as Carruthers and Davies - but I feel they lack a little something in the charisma department. Really this needed Dirk Bogarde and Kenneth More. The script tries to emphasise some different between them, getting comedy out of stuck up, high maintenance York and free-spirited mucking-around-on-boats MacCorkindale, but it doesn't really work because basically they are both jolly-good-chap types who went to the same school - they needed to have different personas (say Roger Moore and Richard Harris... though I know those two would have been more expensive but I'm sure similar types of actors were out there). If more time had been spent developing these two as characters the film might have been more successful.
Jenny Agutter looks pretty as always but struggles with her German accent and the romantic subplot between her and MacCorkingdale is really undeveloped - why not turn it into a love story? They changed the ending too so that the traitor character (played well by Alan Badel) doesn't kill himself but is killed by the Germans - which gives it some action but also robs the piece of an emotional kick at the end, and still makes the leads passive.
I think the adapters make a mistake not sticking us just with York for the first fifteen-twenty minutes or so, making us identify with him, building up the mystery about MacCorkindale; by cutting away to MacCorkindale too soon and telling his story it robbed us of some drama, and made it unclear who our hero was. (I think John Carter movie made a similar mistake i.e. not sticking with our protagonist for a long time at the beginning.)
The book was loved in part because of its authenticity about boats and navigating through sand banks, which was never going to translate that well to screen, though it looks good. The suspense on land is handled a bit too perfunctorily - this is where the movie could have been really spooky and exciting, but it isn't. Also a lot of the action is repetitive - our two heroes on a boat, or chatting to Germans over dinner. It lacked progression.
Okay this review has turned out more negative than I wanted. I like the movie a lot - it's so beautiful looking and has such integrity; it was clearly a labor of love from those involved, and the novel was treated with the greatest respect. I wish it had done better at the box office; British cinema would have benefited greatly.
No comments:
Post a Comment