The Looking Glass War - 1970 movie review

I became a John Le Carre fan in my early teens, devouring his first three books with a great deal of enthusiasm. Then I read The Looking Glass War, and simply didn't "get" it. With hindsight, that was probably due, at least in large measure, to my tender years. Le Carre has said that he aimed to write a satire about spying, but I think it's fair to say that it's a long way short of his best work. I thought about giving it another go, and then the film version, made in 1970, turned up on Talking Pictures TV so I decided to take a look at it.

The film has a strong and varied cast, although today, perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that the young son of Avery (Anthony Hopkins) is played by Russell Lewis, who is now renowned as the creator and sole writer of the excellent Endeavour and has written many other crime scripts for television.

The story begins with the murder in Finland of a British spy (Timothy West). Back home, a motley crew of secret service men, including Hopkins and Sir Ralph Richardson, persuade Leiser, a good-looking young Polish man (an oddly cast American actor, Christopher Jones) to undertake a mission at considerable risk to himself. So far, so good. Unfortunately, at this point Frank Pierson's screenplay begins to drag. And it continues to drag, apart from one or two interesting moments, right to the end. By that time, I really didn't care about the outcome. It's not nearly as good as another Le Carre film, The Deadly Affair, which I reviewed recently, far less the superb and much more recent TV series The Night Manager.

So the cast - including such stars as Susan George, Ray McAnally, Maxine Audley, and Anna Massey, as well as Pia Degermark (whose later life has apparently seen as much unhappiness as did the unfortunate Jones') - is largely wasted. The soundtrack by Wally Stott is a kind of poundshop Bacharach effort that simply isn't strong enough; Wally Stott (who later became Angela Morley) was talented, but he was neither Bacharach nor John Barry. Given Le Carre's fame and brilliance, I wonder if there is scope for a remake of this film. Perhaps. But if there is, it will need a much sharper script. 

When Eight Bells Toll - 1971 film review

Alistair MacLean wrote the film script of When Eight Bells Toll, and the novel of the same name, after enjoying a big hit with Where Eagles Dare. Producer Elliott Kastner thought that the James Bond franchise would fade away once Sean Connery departed, and he envisaged MacLean's new hero as a successor to 007. He persuaded Anthony Hopkins to take on his first lead film role as Philip Calvert, a tough guy in the Bond mould.

I read the book and saw the film as a teenager, at the height of my enthusiasm for MacLean's writing. At that stage, I'd read pretty much everything he'd produced, and I preferred him to Ian Fleming. I enjoyed both book and film, although I could remember nothing about them when I got the chance the other day to watch the movie again. I wondered if it would be a disappointment, because I lost interest in MacLean about the same time as he - it seems to me - lost interest in writing, in the Seventies. As a reader, I began to feel he no longer cared much about his work, and that's fatal for a writer. Having read Jack Webster's interesting biography of MacLean not long ago, it seems I wasn't far off the mark. Drink was MacLean's downfall. That, and too much money.

Anyway, what of the film? Well, the cast is top-notch. Corin Redgrave plays Hopkins' friend, and Robert Morley plays their boss, supplying comic relief. The suspicious characters in the cast include Ferdy Mayne, Oliver MacGreevy and the excellent Jack Hawkins, although the latter is rather miscast as a foreign tycoon. A Bond-style film of that era required sexy women aplenty, and Nathalie Delon plays Charlotte, while the under-rated Wendy Allnutt is Sue Kirkside. Wally Stott's soundtrack music is a sub-John Barry contribution.

The film wasn't a box office success, and Philip Calvert didn't return for new adventures. But I found it still enjoyable, undemanding entertainment. The story? Calvert is sent on a mission to halt piracy off the west coast of Scotland. Much of the filming was done on and around Mull, and the scenery is very watchable. So, of course, is Anthony Hopkins.

The Tenth Man - DVD review

The Tenth Man was originally written by Graham Greene as a film script. Abandoned for many years, it became a TV screenplay, directed by Jack Gold (whose work included Praying Mantis, a terrific thriller which I'd love to see again). I missed the TV broadcast thirty years ago, but caught up with it on DVD recently, and felt that it put many films to shame, in terms of casting, production values, and emotional impact.

Anthony Hopkins plays Chaval, a rich and selfish lawyer in occupied France, who one day in 1941 is picked up by the Nazis and thrown into jail. They used to pick hostages at random off the street, and execute a handful of them every now and then in an attempt to terrorise people into submission. A pivotal moment occurs when it's announced that one in ten of the men in jail are to be shot. Lots are drawn, and Chaval is unlucky. But he persuades a fellow prisoner to be executed in his place, in return for the gift of his home and possessions, which the prisoner intends to leave to his mother and sister.

When the war ends, Chaval is freed, but has no money. He makes his way back to his old home, and inveigles himself into the household, using a false identity. He finds that the sister (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been waiting for Chaval's return, because she wants to kill him for being, in effect, responsible for her brother's death. Slowly, a bond forms between him and the sister. All goes well until one day a stranger arrives (played by Derek Jacobi), claiming to be Chaval...

The story is a strong one, and the game-playing about identities works very well. The quality of the acting from the three charismatic stars, and of Gold's direction, is impressive. I find it astonishing that this script was apparently forgotten for so many years; I'm a Greene fan, and I think The Tenth Man ranks with his best work.

Solace - 2015 film review

The script of Solace, a film first shown a couple of years back, apparently began life as a sequel to Se7en, one of the best serial killer movies, and certainly ground-breaking in 1995. Things changed radically along the way, and although director Afonso Poyart acknowledges the influence of the earlier film, and also of Silence of the Lambs, he claims that Solace is not a serial killer film, but aout much more than that, talking about life and death and raising "interesting moral dilemmas".

The film benefits from the casting of Anthony Clancy as John Hopkins, a psychic who works with the FBI, but whose daughter has died from leukaemia. A pair of cops played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Abbie Cornish persuade him, against his will, to lend a hand when a series of baflling yet apparently connected murders take place.

The link between the crimes emerges,and Colin Farrell comes into the story, playing Charles Ambrose, whose motives are central to the moral dilemmas Poyart mentions. Hopkins and Farrell are both excellent actors, whose work I've enjoyed numerous times, and here again they do a good job. But they are limited by the material in the script.

For all Poyart's laudable ambition, this seemed to me very much like one more in a long line of flashily put together serial killer movies, with Clancy's psychic gifts providing a distinctive but increasingly irritating gimmick. The story and the performances kept me watching, but the truth is that the serial killer genre has been with us for so long now that greater originality is required than is on offer here. And despite a final twist, it's not a patch on Se7en.

Kidnapping Freddy Heineken - film review

Kidnapping Freddy Heineken is a film from last year which didn't refresh the parts of cinema audiences that other movies fail to reach. Received with some indifference, it soon made its way on to television, where I watched it recently. In fact, it's not by any means a bad film, though it is lacking in high quality - despite the presence in the cast of the great Anthony Hopkins,who plays the eponymous beer tycoon and kidnap victim with his customary verve.

The film is based on real life events which took place in Amsterdam in the early 80s. A bunch of five incompetent-seeming young men have run into financial trouble, and the banks refuse to bail out their failing business. An attempt to drive some squatting punks out of their company property is crudely and ineptly handled, and so the quintet need to find some other way to make ends meet.

The solution they come up with is to kidnap Freddy Heineken, and demand a multi-million ransom. Their ineptitude is such that it comes as a surprise when they manage to pull off the crime - also kidnapping the tycoon's chauffeur. The police struggle to make progress, but things start to go wrong when the villains become anxious about a delay in obtaining the ransom.

Jim Sturgess and Sam Worthington are the two principal conspirators. However, a major problem with the film is that we never really empathise with the kidnappers - in fact, the other three are ciphers. If the action were sufficiently compelling, this flaw in the screenplay might not matter too much, but overall, I felt that script did not live up to the potential of the premise. Kidnapping is a crime that engages the emotions, but the screenwriter never managed to capture this. So although the film is quite well made, I can understand why it didn't achieve success at the box office. 

Magic -film review

I enjoyed catching up with Marathon Man at long last so much that it didn't take me long to watch another film written by William Goldman not long afterwards. This is Magic.Goldman really is a gifted story-teller, and it's remarkable that as well as these two screenplays (he also wrote the novels on which each film is based) he was also the man responsible for the Western that even non-fans of Westerns love, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Magic stars that compelling actor Anthony Hopkins as Corky, a rather reserved magician who finds fame and fotune when he adds Fats, a dummy, to his act, and combines magic with ventriloquism. Now, anyone who has watched that classic portmanteau movie knows that ventriloquists' dummies are exceedingly sinister characters. And Fats is as spooky as any dummy could be.

The plot starts to thicken once Corky, who is becoming increasingly troubled, heads off to the Catskills, and meets up with his old flame, Peggy (Ann-Margret). Old flames, in stories like this, certainly don't die down, and the pair quickly become lovers. The snag is that Peggy has a husband, the limited and jealous Duke, and soon Duke's suspicions are aroused. When Corky's agent comes to find what has happened to his client, things take a very dark turn indeed,

This film was directed by Richard Attenborough, and has music by Jerry Goldsmith. In other words, as with Marathon Man, the credits are really impressive, and it shows. The basic plot material could, in inferior hands, be pretty crass, but Goldman and company combine very effectively. I haven't read the book (which I gather has a dimension to its plot that could not be translated to the big screen) but if it's as good as the film, it is definitely worth reading.

The Affair of the Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co. Ltd

I’ve watched an entry in ‘The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes’ series, this time based on a short story by Arthur Morrison. Morrison was a significant figure in the early days of the detective story. He is probably best known as the creator of Martin Hewitt, a detective who contrasted with Sherlock Holmes mainly because of his relentless ordinariness. Hewitt may have lacked charisma, but Morrison was an interesting writer, and a more fascinating creation, to my mind, was the protagonist of this episode – Horace Dorrington.

What is interesting about Dorrington is that he is not a good guy. It’s quite clear from the outset that he is cunning and manipulative. He is a private eye who has retrieved embarrassing letters for a wealthy woman, but although he claims to have paid for them, and is amply recompensed, in fact he freely admits to his secretary that he stole them. He takes an interest in the forthcoming flotation of a bicycle company, only to find that a financial scam is afoot. Dorrington being Dorrington, he determines to turn matters to his advantage, and does so effectively and indeed murderously.

Dorrington strikes me as almost a Victorian precursor of Tom Ripley (I realise there are differences, but it’s not a completely misleading comparison, I think.) Certainly, the affable sociopath strikes me as a rather modern figure in some ways, and this is a tribute to Morrison’s concept. The story came from a collection called The Dorrington Deed Box.

In the tv show, Dorrington is played by Peter Vaughan. This is an excellent piece of casting, for few actors do gleeful menace as well as Vaughan. The supporting cast is good, too – and Dorrington’s secretary is played by Petronella Barker, who apparently was the first wife of Sir Anthony (‘Hannibal the Cannibal’) Hopkins. . An entertaining tale that I was glad to watch.