The Riddle of the Sands *** (1979, Michael York, Simon MacCorkindale, Jenny Agutter, Alan Badel) – Classic Movie Review 9558

Director Tony Maylam’s attractive 1978 adventure The Riddle of the Sands is deliberately old fashioned, with stiff-upper-lip performances, a handsome, well-crafted production and that convincing period atmosphere that the British do so well.

The 1903 Erskine Childers novel makes a decent turn-of-the-last-century adventure movie with stars Michael York (as Charles Carruthers) and Simon MacCorkindale (as Arthur Davies) just right as the couple of topping British seafaring chaps needed to go after German spies in the Baltic.

It is the autumn of 1901, and Carruthers, a junior official in the British Foreign Office, is invited on a yachting and duck-shooting holiday aboard the yacht Dulcibella by his old university acquaintance Arthur Davies. He reveals he has a hidden agenda for visiting Germany’s North Sea Frisian Islands and the two British yachtsmen eventually discover a German plot to launch a military seaborne invasion of England. Davies’s yacht, the Dulcibella, was converted from an Isle of Wight lifeboat.

Director Maylam’s handling could be a fraction livelier and pacier, though, and that would have made it a more dynamic movie. Otherwise, The Riddle of the Sands is pretty good, quality adventure stuff, with careful, attentive work all round.

Also in the cast are Jenny Agutter, Alan Badel, Jurgen Andersen, Olga Lowe, Michael Sheard, Hans Myer, Wolf Kahler and Ronald Markham.

It is the feature film debut for both director Tony Maylam and producer Drummond Challis, son of the film’s cinematographer Christopher Challis, who provides a striking, distinctive look to the movie.

The screenplay by Tony Maylam and John Bailey is faithful to the novel, though details and the ending are changed. Maylam considered the book ‘had a rather more anti-climactic ending, and we felt a more upbeat ending was essential for a feature film. But we feel it is still very much in the Childers style. Without bastardising the story, we are making the characters more defined, and the ending is now much more believable and exciting.’ Among the changes from the novel are the inclusion of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Wolf Kahler) and the fate of the retired German sailor Dollmann (Alan Badel).

The Riddle of the Sands is directed by Tony Maylam, runs 102 minutes, is made by Worldmark Productions, the Rank Organisation and the National Film Finance Corporation, is released by Rank Film Distributors, is written by Tony Maylam and John Bailey, is shot in Panavision by Christopher Challis, is produced by Drummond Challis, is scored by Howard Blake, with production designs by Hazel Peiser.

RIP the suave, posh, handsome Simon MacCorkindale, who died of cancer on 14 October 2010, aged 58.

The Childers family had previously not wanted to sell the film rights but the novel had now passed into the public domain.

It was shot in the Netherlands, West Germany and at Bushey Studios, Hertfordshire, England. Many scenes were filmed on the Frisian Islands, as in the book.

Alas, after all the hard, painstaking work, the film under-performed, even though its budget was low at £1 million. It was not released in the US until 1984 and was one of the last films financed by the Rank Organisation.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9558

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