Sharpe’s Peril. TV/DVD review.

Shown on UK ITV as two episodes each of 90 minutes including advert breaks and credits. Total running time probably a little over 2.5 hours without breaks.

Set in India in 1818, Sharpe’s Peril is a TV movie very loosely based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels featuring Richard Sharpe, rifleman hero of the Napoleonic Wars, in India. Cornwell’s novels were set during Sharpe’s early career, before the Peninsular War, but Sean Bean would now be too old to play a young Sharpe so the TV movie is set after Waterloo.

Colonel Sharpe and Sergeant Patrick Harper are travelling through India on their way to Madras, when Sharpe is asked to escort a beautiful French blonde to the next hill station where she is to meet her fiance, Major Joubert. As a notorious bandit called Chitu is raiding in the area, Sharpe is glad to fall in with an East India Company supply convoy. He was hoping to leave the blonde with them and ride on alone, but when the convoy is attacked by bandits Sharpe is the only officer able to take effective command. When they reach the hillfort they find the garrison slaughtered and Major Joubert missing, along with the Company record books. Sharpe now has to shepherd the column through 300 miles of hostile territory, battling against bandit raids from without and treachery within. What nefarious business is going on and what has opium got to do with it? Is the seemingly heroic Company cavalry commander Colonel Dragomirov all he appears? What has happened to the French blonde’s fiance? Of course all is not what it seems, and Sharpe has ample opportunity to prove his heroism in a desperate journey and a still more desperate last stand.

So far, so classic Sharpe. Lots of action, a pretty woman, some dubious double-dealing to give the plot some unlikely twists, and impressive photography among India’s spectacular landscapes. Unfortunately, the film reminded me of nothing so much as Eric Morecambe’s piano technique, “I’m playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order!”.

It seemed to be a loosely connected series of exotic scenes strung on a gossamer-thin thread of plot. A snake pit. Bandit raids. A beautiful blonde with the sort of bosom one normally associates with Andrew Davies adaptations, who insists on riding off alone in bandit country and duly having to be rescued. Fight scenes. Senior officers who are incompetent and/or corrupt. A surly, mutinous and corrupt Sergeant. More fight scenes. A shiny young ensign who really didn’t deserve his fate. A scene in an Indian palace where the beautiful blonde is dressed up in scanty Indian costume (reminiscent of the banquet scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but without the comedy). Sharpe getting seriously wounded and having to be tended by the beautiful blonde, but apparently completely healed by the next fight scene. Nefarious wheeler-dealing by a posh officer. Did I mention the fight scenes?

Some events seemed to defy logic completely. Faced with a deep river to ford, Sharpe decides to turn all the baggage elephants and horses loose and cross it on foot. Um, wouldn’t it have been more sensible to ferry everybody across on the elephants and then abandon the animals once everyone was safely on the other side? (But that would have deprived the audience of Sharpe in a wet shirt and the beautiful blonde in a clinging wet dress.) Is it really likely that a French army officer would have been trusted with an East India Company hill station after England and France had been fighting each other across Europe for a decade? Why did the film have a beautiful Indian princess who apparently played no role whatsoever, not even as eye candy? And the ending was not so much a deus ex machina as a rabbit out of a hat.

I wonder if the film was edited down to a shorter running time in a hurry. If it had originally been intended for, say, three or three and a half hours and then had to be cut to fit the available slot, that could account for some of the cart-sized holes in the plot, and the apparently unemployed Indian princess if her storyline ended up on the cutting room floor.

Sean Bean was as moody and truculent a Sharpe as ever, and Patrick Harper provided a welcome note of humour. The other characters were rather flat in comparison. The beautiful blonde in particular would have qualified for a TSTL* award in a romance novel, going out for a ride on her own in hostile country having just been warned that there were bandits about. I hoped she was going to turn out to be a double agent, which would have been an interesting and rational explanation for her behaviour.

Now, action movies aren’t required to be realistic. They depend on a certain amount of larger-than-life Romance, in the older sense of the word. But turning a stream of unlikely events into a narrative that’s so much fun that you’re glued to it even though you know it’s pure hokum, is a rare and precious skill. The better James Bond films have it, as does Cornwell himself in (most of) his novels . I’m afraid Sharpe’s Peril isn’t in that league.

AA Gill in the Times noted that HarperCollins were credited as co-producers and wondered if the idea was to make you turn off the TV and pick up a book. I wouldn’t be quite that harsh, although if you’re new to Sharpe don’t judge the character or the books by this film. I’d categorise it as a pleasant and undemanding glossy action flick, designed to be watched for the fight scenes, the girl and the bit where the hero takes his shirt off.




*Too Stupid To Live

The Beckoning Silence. TV/DVD review

Even seen from a safe distance on a benign summer day, the North Face of the Eiger (the great dark rock face on the left of the photo) has a sinister look. In Switzerland’s Berner Oberland, this was last of the great North Faces of the Alps to be climbed, and the attempts on it gave the mountain a legendary status. Officially named the Eigerwand (Eiger Wall) or Nordwand (North Wall), newspapers of the 1930s took to calling it by the ghoulish pun of Mordwand (Murder Wall). Even now, in these days of high-tech gear and helicopter rescue, the North Face retains its brooding aura of peril. Here be, if not dragons, 6000 feet of near-vertical rock and ice, subject to rockfall, avalanche and sudden fierce storms, sufficient to test the skill, nerve and luck of any climber.

In this 90-minute documentary film, climber Joe Simpson tells the moving story of the four young Austrian and German climbers who attempted the Eigerwand in July 1936. Joe Simpson is best known for his astonishing feat of self-rescue in the Peruvian Andes in 1985, when he survived a 100-foot fall into a crevasse and crawled for three days across a glacier with a badly shattered leg to reach safety. The episode is recounted in his book Touching the Void. Aspects of his Peruvian experience have some eerie parallels with the 1936 Eigerwand expedition, making Joe Simpson uniquely well-placed to tell the story.

The documentary has three main strands:

• Re-enacting the 1936 climb, with four young Swiss mountain guides playing the four climbers;


• Joe Simpson demonstrating key parts of the climb at the exact locations on the Eigerwand;


• Joe Simpson’s personal reflections on climbing and why people do it.

The photography is superb. Even if you’re not interested in mountaineering, you could watch the film for the breathtaking scenery alone. But it’s the insights into mountaineers and mountaineering that lift the film above spectacular travelogue.

The whole tone of the documentary is refreshingly understated, with none of the breathless high-adrenaline commentary that can be so irritating. This seems to me to suit the subject matter admirably – the straight facts of the 1936 expedition are dramatic enough to require no embellishment whatsoever.

Joe Simpson’s technical demonstrations of the crucial sections, using modern equipment, are an excellent way of bringing home the extraordinary technical skill required for the climb. I had read about the Hinterstoisser Traverse, a 100-foot section of ice-polished rock wall above a 2000-foot drop, but understood it far better after seeing it for real with an expert explaining the difficulties. Simpson’s personal reflections on his own experiences give some insights into the lure of the high mountains and probably come as close as you’re ever likely to get to explaining why people – usually, but not always, young men – risk their lives for such an ephemeral and irrational goal.

All this is seriously worth watching, but the real star of the show is the reconstruction of the 1936 climb. I defy even a non-mountaineer not to get drawn in to the gripping story of Andreas Hinterstoisser, Toni Kurz, Willi Angerer and Edi Rainer battling rock, ice, frostbite, rockfall, avalanche and storm first for glory and then for their lives on five fateful days in July 1936. I’m not going to tell you what happens – you could Google for it easily enough anyway – though in truth I think the story is so moving and so well-told that it would have you on the edge of your seat even if you did know the end. I knew the outcome and I was still hooked from start to finish.

Heinrich Harrer said of his successful 1938 ascent of the Eigerwand, “We had entered another world, and we had come back.” This powerful documentary brings a glimpse of that other world into your living room. If you have even the slightest curiosity about high mountains and the strange breed of people who climb them, don’t miss it.

Has anyone else seen the film? Or read the book?