THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: Daniel Mann
SCREENWRITER: Trevor Wallace, Eric Ambler
FILM STARS: Sam Waterston, Zero Mostel, Yvette Mimieux, Shelley Winters, Stanley Holloway, Donald Pleasence, Vincent Price, Ian McShane.
COUNTRY: Canada
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Eric Ambler
TYPE: Novel
PUBLISHER: Fontana
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1975
COUNTRY: Great Britain
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1940
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title
NOTES
GENRE: Espionage
WORDS: Eric Ambler wrote many solid espionage and action thrillers. This is one of his most famous. Filmed nicely before in 1943 with Orson Welles (and co-directed by Welles) this new version, despite it’s cast, doesn’t match (an obvious statement) though there is a clunky fun to the film. The book is set in the 1930s and is a solid read though this film version has been updated to 1975. That would have confused any of the punters wishing to read the book of the 1975 film … if there were any.
Poor Donald … a corpse on the cover.
LINKS
TRAILER
Great job keeping the blog updated amidst all the chaos, Frank. Hoping you and your readers have been spared the worst of it.
By chaos – I assume you mean the floods, or COVID? What can happen next? maybe Putin will invade Brisbane.
My readers, at least the ones in Brisbane during these floods are a resilient bunch with the heart of Gallipoli and the spirit of Pharlap (intentional mixing of expressions). You will recall that they are a brave bunch that exist no where else, in Australian, nay, the world, and maybe the universe. At least that’s what the suckhole media repeat everyday. Of course they were none too happy when some of the “mud army” (volunteers doing clean up) also engaged in some looting. Un-Queensland-like apparently.
It’s a great book, although I confess I haven’t seen the movies. Ambler was a very good writer, much better than Fleming in my view, who has sadly fallen out of fashion.
His technique of using a protagonist who is involuntarily drawn into espionage activities has been copied by Alan Furst (and possibly others), but Ambler did this rather better.
Yes, I have three or four (unread) Ambers on the shelf. What attracted me to them (or, some of them) was that the cloak and dagger was set in the between the wars times and in and around the former Yugoslavia (and the Balkans generally). I haven’t read enough of him to compare to Fleming (though I haven’t read that much Fleming).
Interestingly, in Ian Fleming’s “From Russia, with Love”, James Bond reads Ambler’s “The Mask of Dimitrios” on the plane taking him to Istanbul.
Fleming’s novels are very uneven. The first novel, Casino Royale, is the best , and the plot would not be out of place in a work by Graham Greene . I think the story was loosely based on a real life wartime plan to blackmail a German diplomat who was embezzling embassy funds to support his gambling habit.
Thereafter the plots became increasingly became more outlandish.From Russia with Love, the second best book, has a plausible plot and is well written. The Istanbul setting and the use of the Orient Express have echoes of Ambler.
The books will appear on this blog at some time (movie tie ins for the Bond films were everywhere back in the 80s and 90s). If I get around to reading Fleming I will read as you advise.