Here is something bizarre; I watched the film and didn't like it much tho I like Peter O'toole very much. However in the special features of the DVD it has O'tooles biography and it lists that due to his hard living ways he DIED in 2003 after a long illness. Say what? I'd like to see the face of the person who put that little fact on the DVD and then watched him get nominated for an Academy Award last month 4 years after he supposedly died!
shareHa ha ha, that's pretty rich. Perhaps they were thinking of his friend and fellow hard-drinker Richard Harris?
shareThats very funny!
Sure it wasn't an autobiographic feature?
Sounds like his kind of humor :P
my DVD also was very poor quality. wasn't sure if it was just the transfer. bought it as i read an interview with peter o'toole where he chose it as his favourite film he had starred in. i wonder if it's because of the possible 'in joke' re 'Peter O'Toole died in 2003'?
shareI just popped this DVD in this afternoon and went to the Special Features first and discovered that Peter O'Toole died in 2003! He looked alive and well in the movie Venus and at the Academy Awards this year!
shareThe liner notes which proclaim his "death" in 2003 [hilarious... but I'm sure they meant his close friend and drinking buddy Richard Harris, who died in 03] are one thing, but that has nothing to do with this film.
It's actually not awful at all if you put it into context. This was a 1976 TV movie.. so some of the quality or lack of it, is attributable to the poor quality of the print they had to work with, and the lack of money for special effects. In any case, TV special effects from 30+ years ago are nothing like they are today.
The film, and Peter's character, is most interesting in that it's one of the few out of England that make it clear that many of the upper classes had favorable opinions on Hitler and the Nazis. Chamberlin was not alone, many Englishmen felt Hitler should be appeased and even supported. Anti-semitism was rampant among the English upper class of the 1930's.
The book on which this film is based was written in '39, before England went to war, tho the film was slightly updated at the end to reflect the war experience.
O'Toole is portraying a particular type, the upright, upstanding, upperclass, proper sporting Englishman of his day. Many conventions of the type and class permeate the film.
Then we have the references to "going to the ground", ie, as a hunted animal would do, but in this case, it's the hunter, literally living underground as he's hunted by Nazi sympathizers.
Quite an interesting film... a real slice of a very specific period, class and archtype.
They were off by a full 10 years on Mr. O'Toole's passing.
I wouldn't quite say this film was awful because I like anything with O'Toole, but the copy I saw was poor and it was hard to fully appreciate this. 6/10 stars from me.