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.

Fear is the Key - 1972 film review

During my teens, I went through an Alistair MacLean phase, reading every thriller he'd written. I began with The Last Frontier,and took in classics like H.M.S. Ulysses and Where Eagles Dare along the way. In time, MacLean's writing seemed to me to deteriorate, and I stopped reading him. But one of my favourites of his novels was Fear is the Key, which impressed me with its plot twists and emotional drive.

So I was glad to seize the chance to watch the film version, made in 1972,when MacLean's fame was more or less at its height. His stories were visual, and many were turned into films, most of which I watched - but somehow I missed this one. Perhaps because its cast was slightly less starry - although it did include a youngish Ben Kingsley, complete with a full head of hiir!

Barry Newman plays John Talbot, the main protagonist. Newman was well-known as the star of the TV series Petrocelli, but for me he was never quite in the top league of action heroes. Here he does a competent job, but although it's perhaps a harsh judgment, I feel he didn't have quite the level of charisma, magnetism or however one describes it that seems necessary for the role of Talbot. The obligatory glamorous young woman is played by Suzy Kendall, who was once married to Dudley Moore.

At the start of the film, Talbot is involved in a tragic but slightly mysterious incident. The action then shifts forward three years. Talbot is arrested and brought to court, where he shoots a policeman and escapes after kidnapping Suzy Kendall. There's a memorable car chase, and the plot twists come at acceptably regular intervals. Roy Budd supplies an excellent, jazzy soundtrack. Overall, a watchable action movie, but it's not of the same high quality as some of the best MacLean films.

Bear Island - film review

Bear Island is a 1979 film based on book by Alistair MacLean that I read when it first appeared as a paperback. As a teenager, I was a huge MacLean fan, and devoured all his novels, including a couple written under the name of Ian Stuart. Although he was an action thriller writer, he often used devices familiar to whodunit fans, above all "the least likely suspect", and this is why I preferred his books to those written by other thriller writers of the time such as Desmond Bagley (though I really did like Bagley), Duncan Kyle and so on.

I also watched several of the films based on MacLean's books, such as Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, When Eight Bells Tolls and Puppet on a Chain. Some were relatively faithful to the source, whereas others (notably Ice Station Zebra) were not. The problem I began to find with MacLean was that the quality of his work began to deteriorate, and Bear Island was the last of his novels that I really enjoyed. By the time I got into student life, my reading tastes had shifted, and I didn't bother to watch the film of Bear Island.

Had I done so, I would have found that, once again, the screenplay bore little resemblance to the book. There's a starry cast, led by Donald Sutherland as the daring hero, joining up with an expedition to a remote frozen island in the North Atlantic Unfortunately, Vanessa Redgrave, cast as the love interest, is wholly wasted as a Norwegian medic, and her accent is as dodgy as Richard Widmark's attempted German accent. Christopher Lee, who is rarely less than excellent, is not at his best, either, while Lloyd Bridges takes the role of Sutherland's trusted friend (and regular readers of MacLean will know what that means....)

The action scenes are very well done, but the story is laboured and over-long. I wanted to see what the landscape of Bear Island really looks like, and felt cheated when I learned that the film was shot in Canada and Alaska, because the landscape there is more photogenic. All in all, this film is a decent time-passer, but not as good as, say, Where Eagles Dare. Watching it has, however, reminded me of my long ago enthusiasm for MacLean, and I'm tempted to write more about him in the future.

The Mackintosh Man and Desmond Bagley

I've just watched The Mackintosh Man, a film dating back just over forty years, and based on Desmond Bagley's best-selling novel The Freedom Trap. The film was directed by John Huston, and boasted a dazzling cast, led by Paul Newman, and including James Mason, in one of his silky villain roles, and Dominique Sanda, as the glamorous young woman required by statute to keep the hero of thriller films company. Other notable actors to make an appearance are Ian Bannen, as the agent Slade, and Harry Andrews.

It's getting on for five years since I blogged about Desmond Bagley, a writer whom my late father really enjoyed. Like Alistair MacLean, another superstar thriller writer of the Sixties and Seventies, Bagley was a gifted entertainer, but the books of both men are not discussed very often these days, considering what dominant figures they used to be. At their best, though, they were both highly accomplished. I used to prefer MacLean when I was in my teens, because his books bore a closer resemblance to detective stories, but the quality of his work dipped in later years. That wasn't true of Bagley - he died while still at his peak.

The film follows the story of Newman's character, who agrees to take part in a scheme to track down The Scarperers, a gang specialising in springing major criminals from jail. Some sources suggest that Bagley drew inspiration for his plot from the jailbreak of the Soviet agent George Blake, but this is emphatiically a work of fiction. Newman attacks a postman and steals some diamonds, and is duly caught (the excellent Peter Vaughan plays one of the cops). Sentenced, rather improbably I thought, to twenty years inside for a first offence, he is contacted by the bad guys, and the story zips along from there.

Huston was a gifted director, and even though this is a long way short of being his best film, it's not at all bad. Some of the action takes place in Ireland, which Huston loved, and some in Malta, and a competent story is told with pace and efficiency. I never really warmed either to Newman's character or his lover, and this was part of the reason why I thought this was a decent film, but not a truly memorable piece of work. But it was good to be reminded of Bagley's brisk story-telling style.

Desmond Bagley

One of my must-read blogs is Petrona’s, and a typically interesting post a while back reminded me of a thriller writer who was a huge star in the 1970s, and who is not remembered often enough today. As a teenager, I was a fan for years of Alistair MacLean, until his later books began to seem very samey, and then I read a few by Desmond Bagley, before concentrating my attention on whodunits.

Bagley was, arguably, second only to MacLean among British thriller writers of the time. My late father was very keen on Bagley’s books, and encouraged me to read him. I agreed with his verdict that Running Blind was an excellent story, benefiting from a well-realised setting in Iceland. (Dad also tried to persuade me to take an interest in Wilbur Smith, but his books never appealed to me in the way that Bagley’s did.)

Bagley died at the age of 59, and a highly successful career came to a sad and premature end. Some time after that, I met his widow Joan at a CWA conference in Tunbridge Wells. Joan was a very pleasant woman, and she was a close friend of a friend of mine, Eileen Dewhurst. Eileen stayed with Joan several times at her home in Guernsey, and one of these trips inspired her to write an excellent Guernsey-based novel, Death in Candie Gardens.

I was rather baffled at one point in the conversation, when Joan started talking about someone called Simon. It turned out that this was Desmond Bagley’s real name. But I never asked why he adopted a pseudonym. Sadly, Joan died about a decade ago, but I have discovered that there is a very good website about her husband’s books which pays proper tribute to them both: http://www.desmondbagley.com/

Patrick McGoohan

The news of Patrick McGoohan’s death saddened me. I was also startled, though of course I should not have been, to learn that he was 80. I still think of him as the smouldering hero of two major television series of my childhood.

I first came across him when I was very young, after he became a household name through his portrayal of the secret agent John Drake in 'Danger Man'. I’ve not seen an episode since I was about ten, and no doubt the show would not look too exciting today. But I was enthralled, week after week, and so were millions of others. (The theme tune was very popular, too.)

When it was announced that McGoohan was appearing in a brand new thriller series, therefore, everyone paid attention. I was one of those who watched the first episode of ‘The Prisoner’, in which an unnamed agent (some people suggest it was Drake) is kidnapped after announcing his intention to quit. He finishes up in a mysterious village, where he is known as Number Six. Escape from the village is impossible.

The weirdness of ‘The Prisoner’ annoyed many people at the time. ‘Danger Man’ had been straightforward action, but this was a very surreal story-line, very 1960s, as if Kafka had collaborated with a scriptwriter from ‘The Avengers’. I enjoyed it, although like many others I was baffled by it. No wonder it became a cult. Incidentally, if anyone has never visited the real-life location of The Village, Port Meirion in North Wales, I can recommend it most strongly – a wonderful place to visit; it’s also good to stay at one of the hotels, for when the tourists are gone, you can wander around The Village undisturbed – very eerie, sometimes.

Later, I enjoyed McGoohan in both Ice Station Zebra (I was going through an Alistair MacLean phase at the time) and in 'Columbo'. I saw little of him after that, but I remain an admirer. His acting range wasn’t in the Alec Guinness class, but he was very good at what he did. He will be missed.