I finally watched the DVD of The Good Soldier the other week. This is an adaptation of the 1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford, much admired for the unreliability of its narrator. My partner is not altogether a fan of the book, but she enjoyed this as much as I did. We both thought it was really excellent. Everything just seemed to come together to produce an adaptation that was faithful to the feel of the book.
It is quite rare that you have an ensemble piece like this where the actors playing the main characters are all perfect for their roles, but in this the four principals were all dead right. Jeremy Brett, Susan Fleetwood, Robin Ellis and Vickery Turner all seemed to be the characters from the book as I remember them.
The locations were dead right, too. I think they may have used the actual German spa town, Bad Nauheim, in which the early part of the book takes place. These parts of the film had the same sense of leisured ease, with nobody in too much of a hurry, that comes across in the film of Death in Venice.
The screenplay adaptation was a masterclass, really, in how to take quite a complex, literary novel and make it work on screen. It’s a long time since I read the book, but I think the major change was the flashback structure. We knew from the beginning that Ashburnham was going to be dead at the end, and this worked really well.
Scenes were repeated, as the both the audience and the character Dowell gained more knowledge about what had really been going on. The look on Dowell’s (Robin Ellis’) face when Leonora told him that Flora and Edward had been having an affair was quite something. These repetitions gave the film something of a Nicolas Roeg feel.
Jeremy Brett was magnificent as Ashburnham, perhaps the best thing he ever did on screen, even better than his Max de Winter. I always thought he was a bit wasted as Sherlock Holmes. I have the feeling that Susan Fleetwood was sometimes a bit hard to cast, because she seemed to radiate strength of personality all the time and that wasn’t always what was called for, but here it was exactly right.
Going back to the screenplay, it was of course by Julian Mitchell and quite the equal of Pinter’s scripts for the Losey films, I thought. The only thing I can say against this film is that it is in need of a good restoration and clean up; the print on the Network DVD is a bit faded. I suppose it is not well-known enough to get the full digital upgrade treatment, which is a great pity.
I was unaware that this film had been made until I found it on DVD. I had seen the text of a stage adaptation, so I assume that is derived from his screenplay. I can’t think how I managed to miss this. It was first broadcast in 1981, at around the time Granada were making some really good TV drama. It may be that I had not actually read the book at that point and therefore did not notice it in the schedule.
It is a great pity that it was not released in the cinema first, like the films that Channel 4 made later in the 1980s. I think that, if it had been, it would quite rightly be regarded as a classic today. It is not for nothing that Robin Ellis has devoted a whole section on his website to this film. And of course, the highest compliment I can pay is that it has made me want to read the book again. I read a fascinating piece online that suggested that John Dowell is not quite the innocent he portrays himself as. I shall have to read it once more to find out.
The Good Reader 