I have read the book, and it is still, rather surprisingly, not as well known as some of the lesser output of Alastair MacLean or Hammond Innes, for example, despite its being of the very highest order.
This adaptation does slightly change the plot but not to the detriment of the pace or the characterisation. This is not a jolly hockeysticks pre-War John Buchan world that these characters inhabit. The protagonist, never named in the novel, is emotionally stunted by virtue of his aristocratic upbringing and the grieving process for his one true love, whom we can guess at being either a Czech, or a Pole from Danzig/Memel. In a gesture of futile resistance the lord decides to hunt down the great dictator, in a spirit of cold vengeance and sporting curiosity. He is caught and tortured and having expended much inexplicable violence upon him the Gestapo decide to fake his death as a fall from a cliff in order to explain his injuries, having satisfied themselves that his actions were not instigated by the British government. He survives this ill use and then begins one of the most stirring manhunts in literature as he attempts to return to England without embarrassing his former circles.
However, when he returns to England he finds that not all is well back in the sceptred isle.......
O' Toole is on fabulous form. The lead villain is all you would expect from a Fascist sympathiser, polished, virile and an emetic upon right-thinking people. the celebration of countryside and sport is not lost upon the director as the motor for the political beliefs espoused by both sides as Milord strives to survive and the German Foreign Service seek to make political capital out of his predicament once they have his admission of acting under orders wrung out of him. It is a beautifully paced evocation of a rustic idyll that no longer exists as a result of the chancre, which it, itself, has spawned.
This adaptation does slightly change the plot but not to the detriment of the pace or the characterisation. This is not a jolly hockeysticks pre-War John Buchan world that these characters inhabit. The protagonist, never named in the novel, is emotionally stunted by virtue of his aristocratic upbringing and the grieving process for his one true love, whom we can guess at being either a Czech, or a Pole from Danzig/Memel. In a gesture of futile resistance the lord decides to hunt down the great dictator, in a spirit of cold vengeance and sporting curiosity. He is caught and tortured and having expended much inexplicable violence upon him the Gestapo decide to fake his death as a fall from a cliff in order to explain his injuries, having satisfied themselves that his actions were not instigated by the British government. He survives this ill use and then begins one of the most stirring manhunts in literature as he attempts to return to England without embarrassing his former circles.
However, when he returns to England he finds that not all is well back in the sceptred isle.......
O' Toole is on fabulous form. The lead villain is all you would expect from a Fascist sympathiser, polished, virile and an emetic upon right-thinking people. the celebration of countryside and sport is not lost upon the director as the motor for the political beliefs espoused by both sides as Milord strives to survive and the German Foreign Service seek to make political capital out of his predicament once they have his admission of acting under orders wrung out of him. It is a beautifully paced evocation of a rustic idyll that no longer exists as a result of the chancre, which it, itself, has spawned.