Robert Donat was a fine actor who went on to win our hearts with Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. People often forget that he was slated to play the lead in the Sabatini novel, Captain Blood, which went to Errol Flynn, thus establishing his career and mark on Hollywood (and what a mark!). Donat, according to his biographers, detested Hollywood and made several films in Great Britain. His role in the Hitchcock 39 steps is legend. This film, which is a slightly more faithful adaptation of the Dumas book than the one only recently (1/02) released, is superior to its predecessor in several ways. Alas, the other reviewer here is likely too young to have seen in its original B/W but it is a fine film. the lovely Elissa Landi plays Mercedes and Sidney Blackmer, Donat's betrayer. The character actor, O.P. Heggie plays the priest and fellow prisoner of Dantes. Veteran Louis Calhern, here youthful, plays the other betrayer and villain. There's no video or DVD, so if this shows up on the late show, by all means, check it out.

There's a sentence but no trial to make your case, those you trust have had you interred at great haste, you've lost your love and future wife, must live in conflict and in strife, to wither in a cell while being laid to waste. But there's hope when you find out you're not alone, as a pair you set to work removing stone, excavating day and night, searching for the sight of light, until a tragedy, and your future is resewn. You inherit your dead partners wealth and riches, it allows you to acquire the finest britches, plus a title and some land, now revenge can be well planned, all because of nimble hands and threaded stitches.

A perpetually enduring tale, magnificently performed and presented, albeit with poetic license.

The good news is that this turns out to be, as I hoped it might, my "long-lost Monte Cristo" -- the film I once caught the end of, thanks to the BBC, on holiday twenty years ago, and have never been able to find again since. The bad news is that, alas, the part I missed then isn't actually nearly so good as the remainder...

The Reliance Pictures production of "Count of Monte Cristo" is a queer mixture of success and banality; of studio polish and poverty-row shortcuts; of efficient editing and crass musical indirection; of genuine emotional power and thumping cliché; of briskly-moving adaptation and bizarre moments of staging (revolving witness-box, anybody?) A literal version of Dumas it is not -- one would not expect it from any film spectacular of this period -- but many of the changes made are entertaining or effective, and the happy ending provided works at least as well as Dumas' rather unsatisfactory version. The meandering original is reduced to a bare two hours' running time by dint of concise scripting and cutting out most of the sub-plots involving the de Villefort and Morrel families, an attempt which is by and large successful. It works less well at the beginning, where there are simply too many unidentified characters popping up and scheming without any of them really being established properly, particularly as Morrel and de Villefort's father are then pruned from the plot, never to appear again. And de Villefort's downfall as presented here really doesn't work for me: lacking the damning evidence of infanticide, the script doesn't seem to come up with any terribly convincing alternative to turn the tables on the prosecutor. On the other hand, introduced material such as Mercedes' (completely uncanonical) aristocratic snob of a mother, or the tableaux in praise of Fernand at which Haydee accuses him, works very well.

Ironically -- given the Hollywood studio's doubts as to their unknown English import's ability to pull off anything but a fresh-faced lead -- Robert Donat shines mainly in the latter half of the picture as the older, embittered and sophisticated Monte Cristo. His guileless Dantes makes little impression, for it could be any generic juvenile lead role -- the character as written is not so much naive as uninteresting. Donat fares better where he can give a sense of some hidden depths to the part, and his best features are his strong eyes and brows rather than his cheery grin. As Monte Cristo, however, he is both debonair and dangerous, an intelligent schemer with a dry wit at his enemies' unknowing expense, and he is supported ably by both Douglas Walton as the young Albert and Elissa Landi as Mercedes.

It was Miss Landi's performance with which I was truly impressed here; she ages with utter conviction from the wilful girl to the resolute mother, and lends her scenes opposite Donat the real impact that is lacking from so much of the film. In a plot that has been re-angled to concentrate far more closely on the Edmond/Mercedes relationship, her role is vital, and her character provides most of the emotional engagement of the story, from light-hearted charm to heartbreak (Valentine de Villefort, here paired off with Albert, is a mere cypher in comparison).

The film starts off in outright formulaic guise, from Napoleon's appearance (in full uniform and cocked hat, with his hand duly thrust in his breast 'like that') to the standard storm-at-sea sequence with water poured across the screen. It continues to suffer from crude musical underlining more or less throughout, almost sabotaging for example Donat's scene with the dying Abbe Faria, which he otherwise pulls off with conviction, while certain characters, such as Morrel and the mute Nubian Ali, appear to have been retained despite the loss of the plot elements which actually involved them (possibly as a result of cuts to the script later in filming?) Overall, however, the adaptation does a pretty good job of conveying information quickly and concisely -- Albert's entire Italian adventure is dealt with effectively in a matter of a few minutes with none of the essentials lost, and Haydee's brief role introduced without any seeming contrivance. It borrows little in practice from Dumas' wordy original save the bare outlines of its plot, and sometimes not even those; but as an initially uninspired Hollywood screen adaptation it improves considerably as it goes on. Literary fidelity isn't everything, and if it were not let down by certain sections I would have rated it considerably higher; alas, this production remains an odd mixture of the powerful and the pedestrian.