Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.
At my grandmother’s house, the bookshelves were stocked with books which, if I had to pick just one word, could neatly be described as ‘respectable’ and which were surprisingly rich pickings for a very young bookworm. These shelves were probably the cause of my abiding love for the Queens of Crime: Sayers, Allingham, Marsh, Christie, et al. But amongst these were also books by Mary Stewart. Currently she is probably best known for her historical fiction series about Merlin, but she was famous in her day for romance thrillers. The kind in which a competent, plucky heroine becomes captivated by a mysterious man, and has to untangle the plot in order to find love. This description probably sells her a little bit short. Her language is beautiful, she sets her books in interesting places, and – importantly for a very young female reader decades after these books were first published – her heroines are compelling.
The Moonspinners is one of these books. A plucky young traveller is given a ride by some American friends to the outskirts of Greece. This bit of good fortune gives her a full day more than she had initially planned on in her chosen destination, and on a whim she takes a walk around the beautiful, yet forbidding countryside. Out of nowhere a stranger threatens her with a knife and brings her to a little shack in which a man is lying in bed. He is, this is immediately apparent, desperately ill. And since, in books such as these, the English apparently stick together even under the most inauspicious of circumstances, she tries to help him. This sets off a course of events in which love, a lost treasure and the beautiful country of Greece conspire towards the inevitable happy ending.
When Disney decided that, of all her books, this was the one they ought to film: they thought, for some reason, that it would be a good idea to gear it towards the young adult set (as we would call the genre nowadays). Our heroine Nikky (Hayley Mills), far from embarking on her own adventure, tags along with her aunt (Joan Greenwood) to the outskirts of Greece, in order to record traditional folk songs. She is nearly sick on the bus, courtesy of a very ripe fish that is also being transported. Not at all like the chipper and self-sufficient woman from the book. They finally reach the inn “The Moon-Spinners”, only to be told no rooms are being let. To anyone. After some determination, they are given a room after all, and that evening we meet our mysterious male, “Mark” (Peter McEnery), who will be the object of our protagonist’s infatuation. Alan already mentioned Disney producing an “awful lot of dross” last week, and this film is among those. It is okay, as far as very dated little thrillers aimed at a teenage crowd go. But it is hard to escape the discomfort of a very young girl (Mills was 18 at the time), setting her sights on a rather older man (McEnery was a mature 24), and in her infatuation follows him into actual danger. The romance is handled very chastely, as far as I could see there is only one kiss and it is both brief and unromantic. But consequently, the chemistry between our leads is, perhaps mercifully, also non-existent. According to Disney lore, this was Mills’ very first kiss, which only serves to make the romance more discomfiting, as do the marketing stills.
If there is any reason at all to see it, it is because of the cast. This was Pola Negri’s last role, and for reasons which I do not quite understand, she came out of a retirement that had lasted decades, to act in this film. She has one meaty monologue but is otherwise reduced to swanning about being fabulous and bejewelled. Eli Wallach, as the smouldering Greek villain, valiantly tries to avoid further hamming up an already hoary part. Peter McEnery and Hayley Mills play the would-be romantic couple gamely, all things considered, and John Le Mesurier has some of the film’s few real laughs as Antony Gamble, the unexpected baddie.
If romantic mysteries appeal, and after all why would they not, perhaps it is Stewart’s books that deserve a revisit, rather than this film. Though inevitably rather dated, a few of the later ones still count as favourites of mine. And if a Mary Stewart film appeals, one of her books which was actually aimed at children: The Little Broomstick, has been made into a charming and visually stunning anime directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, called Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017). Either way, Mary Stewart (née Rainbow, one half-wishes she’d kept her maiden name) deserves better than Disney’s ham-fisted attempts to infantilise her prose, and likewise the cast richly deserves a much better film to act in.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 
2
I