QB VII | |
---|---|
Created by | Leon Uris |
Starring |
Ben Gazzara Anthony Hopkins |
Composer(s) | Jerry Goldsmith |
Country of origin | United States |
Production | |
Executive producer(s) | Douglas S. Cramer |
Running time | 390 minutes |
Production company(s) | The Douglas S. Cramer Company Screen Gems |
Distributor | Sony Pictures Television |
Release | |
Original network | ABC |
Original release | April 29, 1974 – 2001 |
QB VII by Leon Uris is a dramatic courtroom novel published in 1970. The four-part novel highlights the events leading to a libel trial in the United Kingdom. The novel was Uris's second consecutive #1 New York Times Best Seller and third overall. The novel is loosely based on a court case for defamation (Dering v Uris) that arose from Uris' previous best-selling novel Exodus.
QB VII was made into an American television six-and-a-half-hour miniseries produced by Screen Gems; it was also the final program from Columbia Pictures's television division to be made under the Screen Gems banner. It began airing on ABC on April 29, 1974. Adapted to the screen by Edward Anhalt, it was produced by Douglas S. Cramer and directed by Tom Gries. The original music was written by Jerry Goldsmith and the cinematography by Paul Beeson and Robert L. Morrison.
The six-and-a-half-hour miniseries won six primetime Emmy Awards and was nominated for several more.
Adam Kelno has fled to England in the days following World War II. Having escaped from a death camp in Nazi Europe, he finds that his identification with anti-communists in Poland has made him a target of the Soviet Government, which brings up war crime charges against him in England. When the witness is unable to identify him as one of the doctors who castrated him, he is released. Kelno takes his wife and young son to Sarawak, where he labors for years, upgrading public health standards. Upon his return to England, he is knighted. Twenty years have passed, and he has just begun to enjoy his life of renown, when a book is published, which names him as a willing participant to Nazi medical experiments on Jews in the camps. He sues for defamation, and finds that not only can he not escape his past, but that the plaintiff in a defamation case has his own reputation on trial. "QB VII" refers to the courtroom in which the trial is held, Queen's Bench, Room #7.