So at last the deed has been done.
Chance circumstances meant that I had an evening alone at
home so I watched the new film adaptation of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ on DVD, I
was able to prepare myself for this and so I was not disappointed. Everything I
had gleaned from watching that first minute or so previously was confirmed, the
team behind this production had acquired the rights to the book with the
intention of making the film they really had in mind.
The starting point for the production team seems to have
been to make a film that would appeal to children, in their view to do that it
had to include spies, secret documents, guns and almost impossible chase scenes
to top and tail the production (the one in the opening sequence ripping off
nearly every film version of the ‘Thirty-Nine Steps’ in the process.) All of
these additions to appeal to their notion of ‘modern’ children were in the lazy
style of Enid Blyton’s writing – if the plot is flagging just introduce a
totally improbable incident to grab everyone’s attention and hope they keep
watching. This was made worse by taking elements of Ransome’s novel, changing
them slightly, then slotting them in to the production, often out of narrative
sequence, done so as a merely wasted attempt to try and keep the Ransome
purists happy (the meeting by the Swallows with the charcoal burners being the
worst example, the loss of the Amazon’s pocket knife being one of the most
distorted.)
It was interesting that in the DVD ‘extras’ the writer and
director make comments in interviews claiming, in as many words, that they
wanted to be faithful to Ransome’s original. From the very first scene where an
on-screen caption tells us the year is 1935 we can see that this intention of
faithfulness soon got pushed aside by both of them.
Once the pre-credit sequence is over the actual credits use
a cartoon style map of the lake, which topographically is completely wrong in
comparison to Steven Spurrier’s in the book. It also contradicts the
descriptions Ransome gives of where places are in relation to each other, on
which Spurrier based his maps.
The film looks good, mostly, in terms of the cinematography
of the English countryside but then fails when the Swallows reach the island.
Though we know Wild Cat Island is a product of Ransome’s imagination it has its
origins in Peel Island, and as the children walk around trying to find a
suitable campsite it is just too big (in the original novel John swims around
the island, I think even if he is a strong swimmer he would be hard pushed to
do so with this island. Once the Amazons arrive on the island any illusion is
destroyed. The ‘secret harbour’ is revealed and it is just a woeful inaccurate
reconstruction and we are left wondering why they just didn’t film at the real
place as was done for the 1974 film. The secret harbour does actually exist,
possibly the production team had not been told. Many of the scenes involving
buildings, exterior and interior, suffer from over set dressing based on an
idealised form of what 1930s streets and interiors looked like.
The interpretation of the characters created by Ransome are
let down in the film by the casting, characterisation and some poor acting. One
of Ransome’s strengths as a writer, and to an extent illustrator, was his
ability to give the reader a rounded view of even minor characters with very
few words and through his simple black and white line drawings. The makers of
the film seem to have been determined to change the nature of all of them
completely, so for those of us familiar with the book we are constantly having
our mental image of each one challenged and not in a good way. Mrs Walker’s
detailed Australian roots are abandoned in favour of her being a woman brought
up in the Scottish Highlands. Mrs Blackett, one of the few characters we are
actually told little of in the entire series of novels other than as a widow
with her ability to run her household and deal with her servants, is portrayed
as a disorganised Pre-Raphaelite Bohemian individual living in a house that
seems to be the reverse of Doctor Who’s Tardis (we are shown an exterior shot
of Beckfoot, a large house facing the lake, which then cuts to an interior shot
of a cramped dining room you would expect to see in a terraced house of the
day.)
Four of the six children have no resemblance to the
individuals we know through Ransome’s book; both John and Susan are too old for
how Ransome described them (and the ages he gave them when planning the novel.)
John comes across as pompous, overbearing and on occasions totally indifferent
to his siblings and sometimes he is rude and hurtful towards them. Susan, the
prototype ‘domestic goddess’ beloved of many devotees of the books, is shown to
be a domestic ignoramus. Her only other attribute seems to be that she spends
much of her time on screen moaning to John about how he treats her, behaving as
if she is a put upon wife in a crumbling marriage. Nancy, who looks much
younger than John though we know her to be older, and Peggy both come across as
an almost last minute add-on to the plot, with the actors performing as if they
have been brought in at short notice and have no idea what the film is about or
what they are supposed to be doing. They also spend much time bickering with
each other as if one of them has posted something the other didn’t like on
Facebook. Titty and Roger are a different matter.
Before the film was made production details released to the
media created some controversy in the renaming of ‘Titty’ as ‘Tatty’, something
I commented on my first post here, yet strangely the portrayal of the character
is almost a homage to the way Sophie Neville played Titty in the 1974 film
except, unfortunately, there are scenes where she screams and screams like a
spoilt brat (or more accurately like the infamous Violet Elizabeth Bott in the
Richmal Crompton ‘William’ books.) Roger, considered by many to be the weakest
casting of the children in the 1974 film, is a slight improvement in this
version but in places, again like Titty, some of his scenes are almost a homage
to that earlier version.
When we come to Jim Turner, Captain Flint, Nancy and Peggy’s
uncle. Of all the characters in Ransome’s novels he is one of the few that we
are giving detailed illustrations and descriptions of – memorably that he is
balding and ‘fat’! In the 1974 film Ronald Fraser had his weaknesses in his
portrayal, but he did actually look more like the character Ransome intended.
Similarly, it was the intention of the film makers to make use of the
relatively recent revelation that Ransome was a spy in Russia, but of course by
1935 he had left all this behind him and was making a living through journalism
with the intention one day to write a novel that would appeal to children,
though not specifically for them.
The script on occasions uses lines verbatim from the
original novel, as comforting as this might be for those of us that know the
book they are often put in to the mouths of other people for no obvious reason.
When the Swallows find the Beckfoot boathouse with intention of capturing the
Amazon’s boat only to find it not there, in the book John comments that this is
‘It’s an old pirate trick…’, in the film this is now spoken by Roger who only
moments before been frightened, out of all proportion, by the two dummies left
in another boat by the Amazons (an invented addition to the scene.)
There were parts of the film where, if I pushed aside in my
mind all my knowledge of the original book, it was quite enjoyable but even
then some aspect of the modern day, particularly language or character’s
behaviour, would spring up and remind me I was watching a travesty of an
adaptation of one of the great works of children’s fiction.