WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL

I have a clear memory of seeing this film at the cinema when it came out in 1971, which means I was fourteen years old when I saw it. 

So out of nostalgia I revisited it although I had no memory of any specific scene or moment. As I watched it nothing rang any bell with me, until near the end when Anthony Hopkins slightly loosens the front of a blouse of a young woman so that she can distract a guard. For some reason this moment evidently created a memorable erotic frisson for the young me. 

The woman then strokes the barrel of the guard’s gun suggestively and asks whether it is loaded. That I had no recollection of this unsubtle innuendo suggests it passed right over the head of 14-year-old me.

This is Alistair Maclean’s adaptation of his own bestseller and the producers hoped it would repeat the success of ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and maybe even be the start of a new franchise to rival the James Bond movies.

But it was a commercial flop for which the producers seemed to hold the director, a Belgian obscurity, mainly responsible.  Admittedly the direction is anonymous but there’s plenty of blame to spread around.  There’s a lack of any star to match the likes of Burton or Eastwood, the story is not Maclean’s best, and the score fluctuates from clunky one moment to being a blatant John Barry rip-off the next.

There are some pluses though. 

Hopkins was a relative unknown but he has an undeniable presence that keeps the viewer engaged. He’s well cast as an insubordinate chap with a chip on his shoulder,  his prickly relationship with Robert Morley (playing a more pompous version of M as only Morley can) is amusing enough, and indeed the dialogue is rather wittier than I was expecting.  

The film also benefits from being shot on location off the west coast of Scotland.  There’s a very good sequence involving a helicopter crash which Hopkins miraculously survives.

On the downside the film failed to convince me that the plot (which involves the disappearance of ships carrying gold bullion) was anything but silly.  In order to extract the most from Morley his character quite absurdly comes up to Scotland and ends up as Hopkins’ sidekick.

This being Maclean there has to be a twist except that here the identity of the real villain manages to be both obvious from the start and also implausible.  And for no good reason he turns up at the end simply so that he can be dispatched with a harpoon in the back. 

Jack Hawkins for some reason plays a Cypriot and only appears in a couple of scenes.