Robert J. Maxwell It's 1901 and Simon MacCorkindale is a young British gentleman taking a sailing holiday alone off the Frisian Islands, near Germany's northern coast. He stumbles into a situation that arouses vague suspicions that something is up, and he sends for his college friend, Michael York, to visit him and bunk on his sailboat. To be brief about the whole thing, the two men uncover a plot by Kaiser Wilhelm to launch an invasion of England's defenseless east coast, using 100,000 German troops covered by the entire German fleet. The two Oxford men spoil it all after many suspenseful incidents.It's obviously not an expensive movie but it's not bad. A great deal of attention seems to have gone into period detail. The boats we see look like the boats we'd expect to see in 1901. This was pre-fiberglass and pre-epoxy. Every boat looks made of heavy wood that's become soggy with time and weighs a ton, including the dinghy. It must have been work to row one of those monsters.The filming was evidently done not in the Frisian Islands but off the coast of Holland, which is too bad. I wanted to get a look at the Frisian Islands. The Frisian language is well-known to linguists as being as close as it's possible to get to ordinary English. One sentence is practically identical in both languages, something to do with bread and cheese. The location shooting is impressive and evocative. The sea recedes and leaves vast areas of mud flats. Why anyone would vacation there is as much of a mystery as why the Kaiser would want to invade England in 1901. The espionage story is fantastic, resembling John Buchan. Nice shots of boats at sea though.The acting is of professional caliber for the most part, although the English actors playing Germans aren't too convincing. Jenny Agutter is wasted in a small part. I kept hoping that instead of the weather's being cold and damp all the time it would suddenly turn sunny and blazing hot so that she could take a dip but my wistful wish was, as usual, unrealized.But -- what's the matter with the film? It didn't quite click. Maybe it's partly my fault. The four or five German agents are all bundled up in big black overcoats and bowlers and I was confused at time about who was who, and why it was important to follow one of them and not another. Wolf Kahler was always recognizable but a bit young for Kaiser Willie.The narration, by York, sounds stilted to modern ears, over-correct in its grammar and too formal in its description of relationships and events that are decidedly informal in their nature. The direction doesn't help much. The mano a mano fights are clumsy. And there is a scene in which Michael York trails a couple of Germans into a complicated old barn with straw on the floor, a crooked staircase, and a loft above. York darts around from one hiding place to another in the background while the camera focuses on the German agents -- in the same shot, like kids playing hide and seek. All I could think of was the windmill scene in Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent." The scene I found most impressive? Michael York arrives at the station, in response to MacCorkindale's invitation. The two old friends stand staring at each other, using ritual forms of greeting. They don't embrace. They don't shake hands. York is impeccably dressed; MacCorkindale is in sloppy boating kit. Once aboard the sailboat, nothing has changed. The conversation is scant. The host doesn't offer the guest a drink or anything, and when York asks if it's possible to get anything to eat -- since he's been on the train for twelve hours at his host's request -- MacCorkindale answers nervously but eagerly that he thinks he has some cold tongue. The entire scene lasts about five minutes and is an almost perfect embodiment of the concept of "awkwardness." Two old friends who hardly know each other.

pawebster It's great that someone decided to film the book. It is not an easy one to manage. Others have noted how well the sailing scenes are done. Simon MacCorkindale is excellent and convinces as an enthusiastic and athletic amateur yachtsman. Michael York is stiff and is the same as he has been elsewhere. The first half of the film is quite good.That was the good news. On the negative side, the 1970s show through too much. The men's hair is a bit too long and the beards look as if they came out of the dressing-up box.Worst of all, no attempt is made to get the German right. There are German actors, who, of course speak correctly. However, it was a disastrous move to leave undubbed the atrocious accents of the non-German actors. I could go on.In the second half of the film, we seem suddenly to be the world of the Famous Five, or, at best, an old episode of the Saint or Danger Man. The fight scenes are laughable. The baddies are awful, especially the Kaiser. How Alan Badel strayed into this farrago, I do not know.Less seriously, much of the filming was done in Holland, and it shows. Holland is not really like North Germany and we never quite get the unique atmosphere of the German Frisian islands or coastline.

Andrew Goss As a long-time fan of the book I went to see the film with some trepidation, afraid it would have been mangled into an Edwardian James Bond parody. I need not have worried, for all but the last minutes - seconds even - this is as good a rendition as I could hope for. Fans of the book though, be warned (not a spoiler!), the ending, which I always believed would translate most effectively to film, has been replaced by a scene so crass that I cannot believe it was made by the same team as the rest of the film, but probably at the insistence of the producers. Otherwise this might well rate as my second favourite film of all time after The Third Man.

L. Denis Brown Although Erskine Childers 1903 book The Riddle of the Sands is now more than a century old, it remains for me the finest espionage novel ever written. This is no doubt partly because I was myself a yachtsman familiar with sailing among the North Sea sandbanks and mudflats, so the descriptions of dramatic battles with falling tides remain very real to me. But apart from this it is a real pleasure to read a genuine spy thriller free of the usual code breaking sequences or a plethora of violent deaths. And it must be remembered that this book is reputed to have drawn attention to an unrecognised threat to the U.K. so effectively that it led to changes in British national defence policies prior to World War I. Few other books have ever been able to point to such a dramatic significance. SPOILER AHEAD - It is amazing that this book was never filmed until 1979, and remains incredible to me that the film is still so little appreciated it has never been released in the form of a DVD. Even at the level of a travelogue, the muted colours and atmospheric rendering of the yachting scenes in the Fresian Islands make it well worth watching. Beyond this the story of two young yachtsmen who stumble on the plans being prepared for a German invasion of largely undefended stretches of low lying English coastline in East Anglia is a real thriller, and the characterisation in the film does not fall too far behind that which made the original novel so famous. The photography is also almost impeccable. The key chapter of the book "Blindfold to Memmert" describes an incredible feat of navigation with two oarsmen piloting their dinghy about 13 miles across drying sandbanks through a thick fog. A thick fog does not make for a very dramatic picture and transcribing this chapter onto celluloid as a gripping story was a remarkable feat which has not always been appreciated; but I tremble to think about what might have been produced with a less understanding Director and cameramen. Unlike many movies based on espionage novels, this film is reasonably true to the text, and still more true to the spirit, of the original book; even though the final sequences have been spiced up a little to make the film more exciting. Amazon.com still list this cracker in the form of a videotape, but it is more than time for us to be able to purchase it as a DVD.