The Riddle of the Sands (film)
| The Riddle of the Sands | |
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| Directed by | Tony Maylam |
| Produced by | Drummond Challis associate: Michael York |
| Written by | John Bailey Tony Maylam |
| Based on | novel by Erskine Childers |
| Starring |
Michael York Simon MacCorkindale Jenny Agutter |
| Music by | Howard Blake |
| Cinematography | Christopher Challis |
| Edited by | Peter Hollywood |
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Production
company |
Worldmark Productions
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| Distributed by | Rank Film Distributors Ltd |
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Release date
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Running time
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99 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £1 million |
The Riddle of the Sands is a 1979 English spy thriller cinema film based upon the novel of the same name written by Erskine Childers. Set in 1901, and starring Michael York and Simon MacCorkindale, it concerns the efforts of two English yachtsmen to avert a plot by the II Reich to launch a military seaborne invasion of England.
In the Spring of 1901, Carruthers, an aristocratic junior official in the British Foreign Office, is invited on a yachting and duck-shooting holiday by an old University acquaintance called Arthur Davies. On Carruthers' arrival on Germany's Northern coast to join the yacht Davies explains to him that he has a hidden agenda for the trip and the invitation beyond duck-hunting. While boating around the Frisian Islands correcting antiquated British sea charts of the coastline's shifting topography, by chance he had met a retired German sailor by the name of Dollman and his family, including a daughter called Clara, with whom Davies has initiated a romantic attachment. He narrates further that whilst sailing together along the coast in a gale Dollman had, when Davies had tried to put into a particular estuary for shelter, inexplicably prevented him from entering by executing a deliberately hazardous sea-manoeuvre, to the degree that both their lives had been endangered by it. Davies then reveals to Carruthers that his real interest in the area is that he suspects that the Imperial German Navy is engaged in covert military activity of some nature in the Frisian Islands, with the intention of threatening the security of the North Sea from the British perspective, which the Royal Navy is strategically misdirected to meet, and this is why he has invited Carruthers' presence, given his linguistic ability in Deutsch and professional contacts within Whitehall, on a pre-text of a holiday.
Carruthers and Davies go on, amidst cryptic warnings-off from circling German naval officers, sailing expeditions among the Frisian isles and inlets, and fights, to carry out covert surveillance at the estuary in question, to discover that the II Reich is using a naval base hidden in the islands to carry out rehearsals for a seaborne passage across the North Sea of a German army with the aim of militarily invading England, and that Herr "Dollman" is in fact Lieutenant Thomas, an embittered former Royal Navy officer who is treasonously assisting their preparations with his detailed knowledge of England's coast and naval defences.
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Wikipedia