Return from the Ashes - 1965 film review

I've mentioned the French crime novelist Hubert Monteilhet several times on this blog. Along with Boileau and Narcejac, Sebastien Japrisot, Catherine Arley and Robert Thomas, he took the post-war French story of suspense in fresh directions, and like those other writers, his work proved eminently filmable. Thanks to Sergio of that excellent blog Tipping My Fedora, I've become aware of two films of his book.Return from the Ashes. One was Phoenix, which I reviewed earlier this year and which updates the story in a very radical way. The other dates from 1965 and is rather more faithful to the original.

J. Lee Thompson does, I think, a pretty good job of turning the book into a dark and brooding movie with music by John Dankworth. The excellent cast is extremely well differentiated. Ingrid Thulin, a gifted actor who made a great impression on me many years ago in Bergman's well-regarded if rather depressing Cries and Whispers, plays the part of Michele, a very attractive and very rich widow who is also a successful doctor. Unfortunately, she falls for a good for nothing chess player (Maximilian Schell). They marry, but Michele is immediately arrested by the Nazis, and is thought to have died during the war.

In fact, she has survived the horrors of Dachau, but when she comes back home she finds that Stan, the chess-playing husband, has begun an affair with Fabi, her step-daughter, who hates her. Various complications ensue, but despite the warning words of her long-term admirer Charles (the splendid Herbert Lom) Michele remains devoted to Stan. But then Fabi tries to persuade Stan to murder Michele, so that they can be together forever, with the benefit of Michele's fortune....

I really enjoyed this one, and I'm glad that Sergio directed my attention to it. The film provides a good example of French domestic suspense, which I think has a highly distinctive flavour. The music contributes to the mood, and the acting is so good that the highly melodramatic plot seems not too implausible. It's a real shame that Monteilhet and his work are not better known in this country.

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Forgotten Book - The Walking Stick

The Walking Stick is a novel written by Winston Graham at the peak of his powers and it's very good news that Bello have reissued it, along with many other of his books. I'd seen the film based on it and made in 1970, starring Samantha Eggar and David Hemmings, and really enjoyed it. The book, published three years earlier, was just as good, and even though it is to some extent of its time, it seems to me to have worn very well, as so many books written by really good storytellers do.

By the time he wrote this book, Graham was a very experienced crime writer. If you compare it to Take My Life, which I blogged about recently, it's got more depth and more subtlety. It's a mark of his confidence that he felt able to write in the first person, as a young woman suffering from a disability (her leg has been badly damaged by polio, hence her need for the titular walking stick) and to do so in a way that carries conviction .Deborah, one of three daughters in a wealthy family, compensates for a sense of insecurity with a rather brusque approach, and the way she rebuffs an attractive young man, Leigh, who evidently fancies her, may seem unlikely to some readers, but I found it credible. In the end, however, she succumbs to his advances.

Leigh, unfortunately, is a bit of a dodgy character. He's an artist - but how good are his paintings? And how reliable are his accounts of his previous life? From the outset, it's clear that there is more to him than meets the eye. Graham's portrayal of Leigh reminded me of Francis Iles' portrayal of Johnnie in Before the Fact, and I did wonder if the earlier book was a slight influence, even thought the plots are very different, and the build-up here is slower than in the Iles classic. Even so, I gulped the story down..

Graham is interested in the moral choices that people make, and through careful character-building, he makes us believe in the choices - both good and bad, wise and foolish - that his narrator makes. Yet there's nothing preachy about this story - it's a straightforward yarn, yet told so fluently that it also makes you think a bit. Not too much, though - first and foremost, Graham was an entertainer. And a very accomplished one too.

Winston Graham

In the 1970s, the hugely popular television series ‘Poldark’ made Winston Graham’s name very well known. I never got into ‘Poldark’, a historical saga set in Cornwall (even though I thought Angharad Rees, one of the stars, was truly lovely) and I was never tempted to read the books. Not until some years later did I discover that, before he turned to swashbucklers, Graham was a highly accomplished writer of crime fiction.

Successful, too. He wrote the book on which Hitchcock based that interesting movie ‘Marnie’, starring Sean Connery, and also the story that sourced ‘The Walking Stick’, a quirky thriller boasting another starry cast that included the late David Hemmings, Samantha Eggar and Francesca Annis. I rather like both films.

And there is more. Winston Graham was the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1955, for The Little Walls. (In fact, in those days, the award rejoiced in the name of the Crossed Red Herrings Award. It changes name from time to time, having recently been the Duncan Lawrie Dagger an expediency to reflect the short-lived sponsorship of a bank, but the Dagger name changes are irritating; to my mind the Gold Dagger is the right title for the award for best crime novel of the year.)

So I decided it was high time to read a bit of Winston Graham. And thanks to eBay, I now have a decent and modestly priced haul of his paperbacks.