Reviews

I also watch this when I was about 12 along with the whole family and we made sure we caught up with every episode.

The theme music was haunting, the Willow Song which you can find on YouTube. My recollection is that it was followed by some other Francis Durbridge serials, starring Donal Pleasance. One had another haunting theme, The Girl From Corsica.

Would love to know if Tim Fraser is available on the internet or DVD. I see that Jack Headley died recently.

As I wrote on another site, I don't understand why this film was not more popular. It has been called "melodramatic" but I suspect by young people and perhaps Americans who are unaware of, or who have forgotten, the sort of events that happened within living memory in Portugal and Spain under the dictators, and indeed in Chile and Argentina. The plot has a number of unexpected developments that held my interest right to the end, including the revelation that explains how the whole sequence of events began. It's a very European film, which is perhaps why it received such bad reviews from US critics. It is also an exercise in style. For example, the Lisbon that is shown is mainly a picturesque, historical Lisbon. This may irritate some, but I think there are reasons for that. There are one or two aspects of the plot that are unconvincing, such as the professor's handling of his time away from work, and the speed with which he decides to drop everything and go to Lisbon. However, these are minor reservations.The quotations from the book which so fascinated the professor are far from trivial, and support the general theme which contrasts the safe lives that most of us live with the lives of those who have faced up to political and moral challenges. The actors are all convincing. I notice that the reviews on IDMB are much more complementary than those from a mainly US audience on other websites. I also agree with the view expressed by several IDMB critics that this may be a film for older viewers, but it would be a pity if young Europeans facing the challenges of right wing political resurgence in EU countries missed it.