User Reviews

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though, be warned (not a spoiler!), the ending, which I always believed would translate most effectively to film, has been replaced by a scene so crass that I cannot believe it was made by the same team as the rest of the film, but probably at the insistence of the producers.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.

It's 1901 and Simon MacCorkindale is a young British gentleman taking a sailing holiday alone off the Frisian Islands, near Germany's northern coast. He stumbles into a situation that arouses vague suspicions that something is up, and he sends for his college friend, Michael York, to visit him and bunk on his sailboat. To be brief about the whole thing, the two men uncover a plot by Kaiser Wilhelm to launch an invasion of England's defenseless east coast, using 100,000 German troops covered by the entire German fleet. The two Oxford men spoil it all after many suspenseful incidents.

It's obviously not an expensive movie but it's not bad. A great deal of attention seems to have gone into period detail. The boats we see look like the boats we'd expect to see in 1901. This was pre-fiberglass and pre-epoxy. Every boat looks made of heavy wood that's become soggy with time and weighs a ton, including the dinghy. It must have been work to row one of those monsters.

The filming was evidently done not in the Frisian Islands but off the coast of Holland, which is too bad. I wanted to get a look at the Frisian Islands. The Frisian language is well-known to linguists as being as close as it's possible to get to ordinary English. One sentence is practically identical in both languages, something to do with bread and cheese. The location shooting is impressive and evocative. The sea recedes and leaves vast areas of mud flats. Why anyone would vacation there is as much of a mystery as why the Kaiser would want to invade England in 1901. The espionage story is fantastic, resembling John Buchan. Nice shots of boats at sea though.

The acting is of professional caliber for the most part, although the English actors playing Germans aren't too convincing. Jenny Agutter is wasted in a small part. I kept hoping that instead of the weather's being cold and damp all the time it would suddenly turn sunny and blazing hot so that she could take a dip but my wistful wish was, as usual, unrealized.

But -- what's the matter with the film? It didn't quite click. Maybe it's partly my fault. The four or five German agents are all bundled up in big black overcoats and bowlers and I was confused at time about who was who, and why it was important to follow one of them and not another. Wolf Kahler was always recognizable but a bit young for Kaiser Willie.

The narration, by York, sounds stilted to modern ears, over-correct in its grammar and too formal in its description of relationships and events that are decidedly informal in their nature. The direction doesn't help much. The mano a mano fights are clumsy. And there is a scene in which Michael York trails a couple of Germans into a complicated old barn with straw on the floor, a crooked staircase, and a loft above. York darts around from one hiding place to another in the background while the camera focuses on the German agents -- in the same shot, like kids playing hide and seek. All I could think of was the windmill scene in Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent."

The scene I found most impressive? Michael York arrives at the station, in response to MacCorkindale's invitation. The two old friends stand staring at each other, using ritual forms of greeting. They don't embrace. They don't shake hands. York is impeccably dressed; MacCorkindale is in sloppy boating kit. Once aboard the sailboat, nothing has changed. The conversation is scant. The host doesn't offer the guest a drink or anything, and when York asks if it's possible to get anything to eat -- since he's been on the train for twelve hours at his host's request -- MacCorkindale answers nervously but eagerly that he thinks he has some cold tongue. The entire scene lasts about five minutes and is an almost perfect embodiment of the concept of "awkwardness." Two old friends who hardly know each other.

Erskine Childers tale of a an attempt to invade England was made into a movie in 1979. Its just come out as a region 2 DVD and I'm in heaven. The plot concerns a British sailor on holiday off the coast of Germany hunting duck and charting the sands that are forever shifting around the small islands there. Stumbling upon something that doesn't feel right he calls a friend from the Foreign Office to come and join him. Soon the pair are off on a grand adventure, the likes of which they don't make any more (nothing blows up and their are no car chases). Very much an old school adventure film, this was painfully dated the instant it came out as Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit and Alien ruled the roost. No matter I love this film. It has the feel of the works of Robert Lewis Stevenson or any of the great adventure writers that NC Wyeth illustrated. Slow and deliberately paced it never lets you get bored, since revelations and bits of action happen at just the right time. I love that much is made of skills that don't involve shooting things. Finely crafted and perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon, this is one of my favorite movies.

Mr McCorkindale - wearing the mother of all moustaches - is a keen yachtsman exploring the sands off the Friesian Islands.An archetypal Edwardian Gentleman with all the vices and virtues of his class. No apparent means of support unlike his fellow Oxford Man Mr York who is Something in the Foreign Office and rushes to his aid when he receives a telegram about some Germans not being quite "The Thing".Together they uncover a dastardly Hun plot to invade England,led by Queen Victoria's nephew. Clearly a precursor of the better known "The 39 Steps","The riddle of the sands" is as eerie as the creeping fog that regularly envelopes the Friesians,luring ships to their doom.The movie is a mixture of pastels and greys,the dockside buildings,churches,bars,a rare splash of muted colour. Mr McCorkindale's yacht is a thing of beauty indeed in this age of carbon fibre,the train clean and shiny,the waiting rooms reassuringly fugged with smoke.It is a fine evocation of an era when it was indeed the first prize in the lottery of life to be born an Englishman. Elegant and beautifully paced,one of the last of the Rank productions, "The riddle of the sands" deserves to be far better known. From the slough of despond that was 1970s British Cinema it rises and shines.

I first saw this film in the cinema as a child and finally saw it for a second time on DVD today. This is an unusual espionage thriller in that there are no explosions, high speed chases or even shoot outs. It does however have great atmosphere and a sense of claustrophobia as our heroes navigate the through sandbanks near Germany's islands in the North Sea in heavy fog.

Arthur Davies is an English yachtsman sailing around the Frisian islands hoping to updated the antiquated Admiralty charts. Here he meets a suspicious German, Herr Dollmann, and his delightful daughter Clara. Dollmann invites Davies to come to Hamburg with him but when the weather turns bad he tries to run Davies onto the sands. Thinking something odd is going on Davies invites his friend Charles Carruthers to join him so that he can investigate what is going on. Initially they think that Germany may be secretly constructing navel defences amongst the islands however they discover there is something far more sinister being planned.

Michael York and Simon MacCorkindale perform well as the two Edwardian Englishmen and Jenny Agutter is delightful as Clara although her second billing would suggest a larger part than she in fact had. Don't let the lack of dramatic action put you off, it is still a gripping story and the U certificate means that it is suitable for all ages.

Coming 3 years after the even more insipid 'Logan's Run', Micheal York and Jenny Agutter are paired-up again in more conservative dress, but this time they're in the past instead of the future.

Under wicked Kaiser Wilhelm, the Germans are plotting a covert sea-borne invasion of Britain. An English holiday-maker accidentally stumbles upon their scheme whilst sailing.

It's a very slowly evolving drama, played almost as shallowly as the waters they navigate. Fay Mr York may be handsome in an artist's model sort of way but never passes for an action man. His effeminate voice certainly doesn't help. Jenny Agutter does her usual pose of fresh-faced innocence with which she was invariably been typecast. I met her a few months ago in Camberwell, and apart from a few eye-lines hasn't changed all that much.

Unlike most of the genre, ie; spying, sabotage, etc; the pace is largely unhurried, with none of the untimely shocks or bloody murders one usually associates with the genre. The relaxed and rather light-hearted way in which the story unfolds seems to hark back to a more civilised time. The whole production is reminiscent of 'The Railway Children', as though primarily aimed at kids. It's not just as if the plot is set in the early part of the 20th century, but is being narrated from the same perspective. That's cleverly done (if it was intended) but even for 1979 vintage the style requires a little getting used to. It's constantly on the edge of becoming boring - which is what sailing is like if you're used to powerboats. Though it usually manages to right itself before complete capsize.

Photography is sympathetically worked, giving an excellent sense of obscurity. And combined with the reflective music score together they lend the movie a 'water-colour' feel.

Compared to modern productions with their frenetic cut-and-cut-again editing, confrontational in-you-face drama, and flair for the overstatement, the movie really does seem like a postcard from the past. But that's not to say it isn't engaging and a pleasure to see.

If it's on the telly (typically Saturday afternoon) and I've nothing else to do then I can't help watching it. Though I'm never quite satisfied with it at the end. It seems to lack something, but I don't know quite what. Maybe I've just watched too many 'action' movies.

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.

Have not read the novel about two Brits trying to uncover Imperial German skullduggery in 1901 around the Wadden Sea and Frisian islands in NW Germany, so cannot comment whether it captures its essence. What you get is a slow paced, tribute to messing about in small boats, kind of detective tale that does not really convince. Some holes here and there, some rush at exposition at vital moments, prevent the piece from fully working. There's a lot of good humour between York and McCorkindale as two ill assorted Oxford men, but when the action hots up, the film is a little unconvincing and a trifle rushed. While Hitler from Indy and the Last Crusade appears as a German spy at the turn of the century - yes, the Germans are a bit clichéd in portrayal yet again. A pity we do not find out why Dollman is a traitor! The film needed perhaps a Hitchcock to make it a classic like '39 Steps' which is set very similarly in theme and time. Must read the book or get to see the German TV version - German actors playing Edwardian Brits!!!!