This was not a remake of the Hitchcock film, but a return to the source material, as this feature about last night's dramatisation makes clear.The production looked expensive - co-production money must have helped - but what impressed me more was what the writer and director left out. There were no gratuitous sex scenes and, apart from a distant view of what might have been field-grey uniforms, there were no heavy-handed scenes of goose-stepping Nazis or Jewish discrimination, These have been de rigueur in virtually all modern TV plays set in the inter-war period, even when irrelevant to the story. It was also interesting that the heroine, a Paris Hilton of her time, was granted no redeeming features by the script until given a purpose in life by the quest to find the vanishing lady.
Oh, and it was gripping, too.
2 comments:
Good point Ffranc ... but I would have liked a bit more 'politics'. It wasn't war time, so what was going on in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes? Was this after the coup, was if before Italy annexeed a chunk of present day Slovenia and Croatia.
The lack of politics left me ungripped. That is, what was Mrs Foy afraid of, what was the 'heroine' afraid of and what had she seen.
I would have liked more. And it finished too soon - there was another 20 minutes of 'what happened next'.
Anon., the story was told from the Brits point of view and I think demonstrated how insulated those relatively well-off travellers were from what was going on politically and among ordinary people.
As to the ending, one could make up ones own mind as to what happened next. I believe Max would have risen to the challenge, sought Lucy out and whisked her off to the continent for his next engineering job. How they would have extricated themselves as war broke out around them would make another 90-minute drama. :-)
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