I grew up hearing nothing but bad things about this movie. I think people were just so offended by it. But it has nice locations, stylish widescreen photography.
Some changes are fine, like turning Margaret Lockwood into a Carole Lombard screwball heroine played engagingly by Cybill Shepherd. I like Elliot Gould as a shaggy haired reporter. Their banter, where he talks about her legs and she talks about the men she married, is the most clearly George Axelrod bit of the movie (Axelrod wrote the script).
Other changes were silly. Why not keep someone trying to kill Angela Lansbury only for Shepherd to get a conk on the head? And have that cause her brain injury rather than Cybil doing it drunkenly.
Why not have Cybill Shepherd and Elliot Gould dislike each other at first and banter? Like getting him kicked out of the hotel room. And I missed the Oxford-Cambridge joke. And Shepherd wants to kiss Elliot Gould two thirds of the way through... why not hold off until the end? Did the nun get captured at the end? I wasn't sure.
Still it is a recognisable remake. There's Charters and Caldicott, the adulterous lovers, the nun who works for the baddies but helps them. Herbert Lom is always reliable but too familiar as a baddie - and I think the part would've been better with someone younger and more charming, more of a potential romantic threat to Gould for Shepherd. Angela Lansbury is fine as always but maybe too believable as a spy - dotty, old, tubby Dame Mae Whitty was more fun and unexpected.
I do think they would've been better off, if they wanted to remake it, updating it to the present day and setting it behind the Iron Curtain. I mean, they still had trains then.
The big issue I think is the direction from Anthony Page. He's not bad - perfectly servicable. But there's none of Hitchcock's atmosphere - the menace underneath at the beginning, the sense of Englishmen abroad, the paranoia of the main girl, the light by play.
It occurred to me at the end when Gould and Shepherd sing the tune Lansbury gives them that they were meant to co star in At Long Last Love - both can sing. Lansbury too. Not too late for a musical!
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