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Simply A Masterpiece

Good movie but grossly overrated

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Erskine Childers may have written the prototype of the modern day spy thriller with the book this movie is based on, but it doesn't change the fact that this movie adaptation is a big bore for the most part. Like many British movies, this plays like "illustrated radio", having a screenplay that may work on the radio, but becomes deadly dull when filmed. The movie is mostly talk talk talk, and not particularly interesting talk at that. The talented cast does give it a shot, but their lively performances only adds a tiny amount of spark. It doesn't help that the fairly low budget of the entire enterprise is evident throughout. In the end, the movie is a drab bore, which is a real shame because one can see the potential for a really good thriller here and there.

It's great that someone decided to film the book. It is not an easy one to manage. Others have noted how well the sailing scenes are done. Simon MacCorkindale is excellent and convinces as an enthusiastic and athletic amateur yachtsman. Michael York is stiff and is the same as he has been elsewhere. The first half of the film is quite good.That was the good news. On the negative side, the 1970s show through too much. The men's hair is a bit too long and the beards look as if they came out of the dressing-up box.Worst of all, no attempt is made to get the German right. There are German actors, who, of course speak correctly. However, it was a disastrous move to leave undubbed the atrocious accents of the non-German actors. I could go on.In the second half of the film, we seem suddenly to be the world of the Famous Five, or, at best, an old episode of the Saint or Danger Man. The fight scenes are laughable. The baddies are awful, especially the Kaiser. How Alan Badel strayed into this farrago, I do not know.Less seriously, much of the filming was done in Holland, and it shows. Holland is not really like North Germany and we never quite get the unique atmosphere of the German Frisian islands or coastline.

As a long-time fan of the book I went to see the film with some trepidation, afraid it would have been mangled into an Edwardian James Bond parody. I need not have worried, for all but the last minutes - seconds even - this is as good a rendition as I could hope for. Fans of the book though, be warned (not a spoiler!), the ending, which I always believed would translate most effectively to film, has been replaced by a scene so crass that I cannot believe it was made by the same team as the rest of the film, but probably at the insistence of the producers. Otherwise this might well rate as my second favourite film of all time after The Third Man.

Although Erskine Childers 1903 book The Riddle of the Sands is now more than a century old, it remains for me the finest espionage novel ever written. This is no doubt partly because I was myself a yachtsman familiar with sailing among the North Sea sandbanks and mudflats, so the descriptions of dramatic battles with falling tides remain very real to me. But apart from this it is a real pleasure to read a genuine spy thriller free of the usual code breaking sequences or a plethora of violent deaths. And it must be remembered that this book is reputed to have drawn attention to an unrecognised threat to the U.K. so effectively that it led to changes in British national defence policies prior to World War I. Few other books have ever been able to point to such a dramatic significance. SPOILER AHEAD - It is amazing that this book was never filmed until 1979, and remains incredible to me that the film is still so little appreciated it has never been released in the form of a DVD. Even at the level of a travelogue, the muted colours and atmospheric rendering of the yachting scenes in the Fresian Islands make it well worth watching. Beyond this the story of two young yachtsmen who stumble on the plans being prepared for a German invasion of largely undefended stretches of low lying English coastline in East Anglia is a real thriller, and the characterisation in the film does not fall too far behind that which made the original novel so famous. The photography is also almost impeccable. The key chapter of the book "Blindfold to Memmert" describes an incredible feat of navigation with two oarsmen piloting their dinghy about 13 miles across drying sandbanks through a thick fog. A thick fog does not make for a very dramatic picture and transcribing this chapter onto celluloid as a gripping story was a remarkable feat which has not always been appreciated; but I tremble to think about what might have been produced with a less understanding Director and cameramen. Unlike many movies based on espionage novels, this film is reasonably true to the text, and still more true to the spirit, of the original book; even though the final sequences have been spiced up a little to make the film more exciting. Amazon.com still list this cracker in the form of a videotape, but it is more than time for us to be able to purchase it as a DVD.