Clive Donner (1978)
First shown by the BBC in 1978, Tom Sharpe’s adaptation of Dornford Yates’s 1935 novel had never been repeated until this month – to mark the ninetieth birthday of one of the lead actors, Eileen Atkins. I jotted down a few notes about She Fell Among Thieves when it first aired. They were incomplete – no mention of Eileen Atkins, for a start! – and I now disagree with nearly everything I wrote then about Malcolm McDowell, her co-star, so I’m not going to do a ‘Take 1-Take 2’ job (see Dog Day Afternoon, for example). I will incorporate in the next few paragraphs some bits from the earlier notes that are matters of fact or that I think stand up in light of this very belated second viewing …
She Fell Among Thieves was the third of three BBC single dramas, in the second half of the 1970s, based on British novels of the inter-war years representing what a character in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On disparages as ‘Snobbery with Violence’ fiction: ‘Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.’ Although Geoffrey Household’s name isn’t in that roll call, his 1939 novel, Rogue Male, the first drama in the BBC trilogy, surely qualifies as part of the sub-genre; the second (which I’ve not seen) was John Buchan’s The Three Hostages. Like its predecessors, She Fell Among Thieves was produced by Mark Shivas and directed by Clive Donner. To cut a long story short (according to Wikipedia, Yates’s novel runs to 320 pages): in the 1920s, somewhere in the Pyrenees, a young woman called Jenny (Karen Dotrice) is being held captive by nefarious matriarch Vanity Fair (Atkins); Richard Chandos (McDowell), who happens to be holidaying in the area, attempts to rescue Jenny, aided and abetted by Jonathan Mansel (Michael Jayston), a British Consulate chap. Chandos and Mansel feature in several of Yates’s adventure thrillers, English gents who ‘tackle criminals, protect the innocent, woo beautiful ladies, and hunt for treasure’ (Wikipedia again).
Originally shown on BBC2, Clive Donner’s film was on BBC4 this second time around, preceded by one of the short reminiscent monologues the channel has used as a curtain-raiser to quite a few recent drama excavations. Two things in ‘Eileen Atkins Remembers … She Fell Among Thieves’ stood out. First, Donner approached Atkins to play Vanity Fair in desperation when Bette Davis dropped out shortly before shooting began. Her replacement worried at first that the rest of the cast would be sorely disappointed she wasn’t Davis but Atkins got over it. Second, the supposedly continental locations were actually Wales: Atkins recalled that she and Philip Locke (who plays Acorn, Vanity Fair’s sinister manservant) were very amused by the production team’s way of exoticising things – sticking up a signpost with French or Swiss place names on it. That gives the impression She Fell Among Thieves was done on the cheap. In fact, it’s a satisfyingly expensive-looking piece of work – photographed by Brian Tufano, designed by Tony Abbott, with costumes by John Bloomfield.
Mark Shivas and Clive Donner seem to have conceived these dramatisations as celebrations – even if tongue-in-cheek celebrations – of upper-crust English heroes of a particular era. It’s therefore striking that they wanted an actress as dominant as Bette Davis on board – and just as well for all concerned, including the Hollywood star herself, that she jumped ship. Eileen Atkins told us she was at pains to avoid being camp as Vanity Fair – with a seventy-year-old Davis in this exaggeratedly theatrical role, avoiding camp would have been virtually impossible. I’m not convinced, besides, that, at such a late stage of her career, Davis would have been able to do justice to the ornate dialogue – she might well just have belted it out. In only her early forties, Atkins was probably too young for the part but her verbal dexterity and flair, in conjunction with Elizabeth Moss’s make-up, minimise the problem.
Atkins does avoid camp; so does the rest of a high-powered cast that includes, among others, Sarah Badel (another of Vanity Fair’s prisoners), Richard Pearson (a dubious vicar), Simon Cadell (someone called Candle – brief Candle, too: he’s the first fatality in the story). It helps that the likes of Cadell and Philip Locke look unusual enough to come over as thoroughly eccentric without needing to try. Even so, you’re grateful for Malcolm McDowell. Eileen Atkins remembers his humour and that everything about McDowell was ‘right for film’. In a cast whose strong suits were the stage and/or the small screen, that counts for a lot: an upper-class English accent doesn’t come to McDowell as smoothly as to others here but his charm and physical ease in front of the camera benefit She Fell Among Thieves: he loosens up the prevailing stylisation and humanises Chandos’s sense of chivalrous obligation. When he eventually comes upon Jenny and she asks how he managed to reach her, Chandos replies, ‘Over the mountains, and one or two other obstacles’. McDowell gives this just the right mixture of bashfulness, humour and braggadocio. He’s admirably partnered by Michael Jayston, whose character’s rectitude is often very funny. In Mansel’s first exchange with Chandos, he’s affable but with a hint of sniffiness at the other man’s relative youth. Jayston is amusing too when Mansel impersonates ‘a trained Rolls Royce mechanic, ma’am’. His dogged gait contrasts nicely with Malcolm McDowell’s more exuberant movement. The stuntman for McDowell does a great job in the climax to the story.
Clive Donner doesn’t always direct as flexibly as you’d hope for someone with his cinema background. For example, in the first dinner table scene at Château Jezreel, the villainess’s very extensive lair, it’s disappointing that Donner favours quite tight reaction shots; the sequence would be more expressive with some longer shots of the table that allowed the viewer to get a sense from the actors’ physical attitudes of how more or less comfortable the characters are in the court of Vanity Fair. Elsewhere, there are a few too many shots of people running or hiding. She Fell Among Thieves is consistently entertaining, though. I don’t much care for the material but the actors make it enjoyable.
17 June 2024
