The Riddle of the Sands (1979)

Erskine Childers’ famed novel The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1902, is often regarded as the prototype for modern spy fiction, clearly echoing in works like John Buchan’s The 39 Steps and Ian Fleming and on even to the more ambiguous realms of John Le Carre with his charting of the faultlines between nations and people. Such was the novel’s impact in its day that the British government established new naval bases to counter the threat Childers identified. Tony Maylam’s adaptation of the novel is often written off as a leisurely and mannered, even lethargic affair, the product of a time when the British film industry was struggling to redefine itself. But I’ve developed great liking for it over the years because it’s the rare book-to-film translation that dares not give its source a hyped-up modern makeover. The Riddle of the Sands rewards a viewer willing to adjust to the film’s own, modest but well-wrought evocation of a time and place, and a way of being, at the mercy of strange tides, both literal and figurative, conspiracy and skulduggery uncovered at only the pace a boat can be blown by the wind or rowed with oars. At the same time, it also clearly belongs to the same neo-pulp movement as Kevin Connor’s weird fiction films, Star Wars (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), only unlike them its nostalgic thrills are offered in a far quieter, more pensive key.

Maylam at the time was best-known as a maker of sports and music documentaries, but forays into feature films proved frustrating for a director who could never gain traction despite making a handful of cult works, including the impressively nasty slasher movie The Burning (1981) and the dystopian monster movie Split Second (1992). Maylam’s documentarian sense of authenticity and rigour of context is apparent in The Riddle of the Sands, matching the source material’s grounding in Childers’ deep knowledge of yachting and the region he set his novel in: the vast realm of shallows water and sand banks off the northwest German coastline. The film opens with the maritime wanderer Davies (Simon MacCorkindale), who’s exploring the German coast and trying to create up-to-date maps of the area in his ungainly-looking but sturdy yacht Dulcibella. Davies has perturbing encounters with the lovely Clara Dollmann (Jenny Agutter), who’s holidaying with her parents in a larger, fancier yacht, and plays agreeable neighbour, inviting Davies for jaunts ashore and dinner with her parents: her father (Alan Badel) acts a good, upright nautical neighbour but retains an aura of secrecy, and has strong yet vague official connections, and her mother-in-law (Olga Lowe) is a grouchy junker. Davies soon gets the feeling that his close attention to the coast isn’t appreciated, realising at one point Clara has, deliberately or not, drawn him ashore so his yacht can be searched, and his suspicions harden when Dollmann seems to try and lead him into potentially fatal collision during a squall.

Davies writes to his old university chum Carruthers (Michael York), who’s settled into a solid if dull life as a member of the establishment, working at the Foreign Office and filling out a chair in a gentlemen’s club, asking if he wants to join him on holiday, hoping that Carruthers’ fluency with German and geopolitical knowledge might help plumb the mystery. Carruthers, bored out of his skull, decides to take up the offer, only to be annoyed and aggrieved initially as he realises yachting with Davies isn’t a cushy exercise, and initially disdainful of Davies’ vague and paranoid reports of skulduggery. But Carruthers is drawn in as he adapts to a seaborne life and more evidence of a mystery piles up, including when two men try to board the Dulcibella when Davies is away and beat Carruthers up when he disturbs them. The apparently affable Commander Von Brüning (Jürgen Andersen), often seen in Dollmann’s company, offers subtle warnings to the pair if they continue to hang around, even as he offers the reasonable explanation that Dollmann and associates are trying to salvage bullion from a shipwreck. 

Davies and Carruthers suspect that the Germans are readying stronger coastal defences, but soon are faced with a different, more alarming truth: Dollmann has discovered an exploitable route through the sand banks through which an armada of barges can be towed to invade eastern England. Childers, whose romantic sense of political contest transferred from British imperial interests to Irish Republican causes and eventually got him executed during the Irish Civil War, offered in his way a companion piece to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a starting point for Twentieth century fiction, through an oblique, paranoid take on the new psychic and political schisms of the dawning modern age. Trenchantly, the story of The Riddle of the Sands hinges on the character of Dollmann, who proves to be a former British naval officer who changed allegiances, prefiguring of Childers’ own eventual shift, although Dollmann’s motives are entirely mercenary. 

Whilst revolving around what were, by the time the film was made, bygone threats, the storyline nonetheless hit upon a sensibility that permeates modern geopolitics, the fear of the insidious invader and the covertly plotting rival power, and portraying two relative innocents driven by inquisitive patriotism to delve into fraught and ambiguous places. Maylam’s film avoids any hint of self-satire or retro jokiness, and instead obeys the logic of Childers’ blueprint in attuning itself to the rhythms of the setting, in a manner that sharply contrasts Maylam’s go-for-the-jugular work on The Burning and yet hinges on a not-so-dissimilar sense of lurking threat in the midst of natural beauty. Christopher Challis’ excellent photography purveys a zone of mist-shrouded islets, glistening pools in low-tide sandbanks, tide-swallowed trees, the creak of rigging, and cosy nooks for living. It’s a corner of existence where familiar demarcations of time and being threaten constantly to dissolve along with the ever-changing sands. 

Here meetings of people are either tense and distanced or cheek-by-jowl, shows of friendliness elaborate in insincerity or charged with wordless demands, and Carla’s efforts to reach out to Davies see two lost humans connecting in spite of, and because of, the strange fate that puts them together. Undoubtedly one of the best facets here is Howard Blake’s lush and haunting score, coaxing out the alternations of the dreamy and the nightmarish evoked in the adventure. The casting of the film might have seemed a touch obvious at the time, with York playing again on his rather Aryan aura as previously exploited in the likes of Zeppelin (1971), Cabaret (1972), and Something For Everyone (1970) (he produced the film), and Agutter plunged back into the steam-and-straw-hat world she’d inhabited as a young actor on The Railway Children TV series. But Agutter is very good as a girl restrained more by expectation than nature and who eventually faces a crisis of identity, and MacCorkindale is excellent as Davies, who carries the aspect of an instinctual loner and Edwardian proto-dropout. His self-sufficient, masculine space invaded by the toey but agreeable Clara, he must bluff his way through conversation with her as she intrudes upon him half-naked. MacCorkindale expertly plays Davies' awkward appeal for faith as he contends with Carruthers’ evident fazing upon arrival, getting frustrated enough with his coldness to thump the breakfast table whilst Carruthers makes a show of trying to puzzle out what German breakfast condiment he’s tasting. 

The idly wandering world Davies inhabits is disturbed by the hard, churning, imperative force of steamboats, a force that proves repeatedly to have a deadly aspect: Maylam is attuned to the aspect of the modern, technological world knifing its way through the dreamy vagary of the old. Maylam resists inserting any gunfights or action scenes into this and perhaps it leaves the stakes of the drama all a little too dry and gentlemanly according to modern cinematic expectations, but it stays true not just to the source but to the sensibility Maylam tries to evoke. The main augmentation for modern and matinee tastes is to give Clara, a very minor figure in the book, a more considerable role. The bustle of the shore scenes in turn-of-the-century Germany sees nascent militarism and guarded aggression starting to manifest amidst the prim quotidian world of sun-dappled streets and brass-and-silver bistros. Episodes of derring-do are relatively restrained, as Davies sneaks into a colossal, superficially dilapidated industrial building and discovers the trove of readied barges, but has to elude a chasing workman who finishes up getting crunched when Davies rolls a cart down on him. Later as Carruthers repeats the feat to spy upon Dollmann, Von Brüning, and bowler-hatted bureaucrat Böhme (Michael Sheard) as they summarise the plot. 

Maylam’s atmospheric direction is at its best in a key sequence where Davies and Carruthers set out to row to an island where the Germans are operating in the midst of a heavy fog, correctly assuming their foes won’t expect them in such weather, with Davies displaying his genius for navigation in guiding the labouring Carruthers in rowing across the ocean without any visual guide: the miasma descends but skill and integrity of the heroes nonetheless locate the fixed points of reference in a universe of moral and political murk. The stakes finally become manifest as a detachment of soldiers called out for trial run for the proposed invasion scheme march through a silent and locked-up town. The first sight of a detachment marching in robotic order with leather boots stamping on the cobbles and Picklehauber helmets catching the moonlight creates an effective image of a nightmare just about to dawn which the future will never entirely awake from. 

Wolf Kahler, a regular face in movies of the time, usually playing Nazis as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, appears as Kaiser Wilhelm II, who comes to personally watch the trial run but proves just as susceptible as any of his subjects to an order bellowed in the right tone of unreasoning demand. But for the moment Carruthers manages to foul up the test by beaching the towing tug and Davies saves Carruthers from being shot by Dollmann by blasting him with a shotgun. Dollmann doesn’t die although he’s badly injured, and at Clara’s request Davies and Carruthers let him and his wife go off in the Dulcibella. The ending, which sees the Kaiser steer the tug into the Dulcibella, killing Dollmann and his wife, is a change from the novel that nudges the film closer to the more familiarly cynical territory of 1970s thrillers: state power wielded with exterminating precision to erase an inconvenience. Could The Riddle of the Sands have been made into a more overtly exciting and intense movie? Surely. But I like it the way it is, with its soft scent of sea salt and gunpowder, and yearning sense of long blonde hair and white canvas whipping in the wind.