The Times We Lived In: Opening night at ‘The Riddle of the Sands’

Published: March 3rd, 1979

For a movie premiere, it’s pretty low-key. It actually looks a bit funereal: all those dark-toned clothes; the oversized bouquet of flowers; the figures hanging around somewhat awkwardly in the background . . .

In fact our photo was taken at the Savoy Cinema in Dublin in March 1979, at the premiere of the film The Riddle of the Sands. It shows Rita Childers, widow of the former president Erskine Childers, talking to Jenny Agutter, who plays Clara Dolman in the big-screen version of the father of all spy novels, written by the president’s father.

Despite the luminous presence of Agutter, the handsome young actors Michael York and Simon Corkindale, a fistful of glorious locations on the Frisian Islands in the North Sea and – sporting one of the most jaw-dropping sets of mutton-chop whiskers you’ll ever see – Ronald Markham as the butler Withers, the film was greeted as something of a damp squib.

Those of us who love the novel would beg to disagree. The Riddle of the Sands is well worth a watch. (For old-movie heaven, make it a double bill with Nic Roeg’s genius Australian outback film Walkabout, starring a very, very young Agutter).

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Lit in more-than-slightly spectral black and white, our photo sets an appropriately spooky scene. In best spy-caper tradition, it also raises far more questions than it answers. Who is the bespectacled man at the cash desk, trying to pretend he’s an ordinary, soft-drink-quaffing punter, when he’s quite clearly armed with a pen and a sheaf of dastardly dog-eared notes? What can the woman on the right of the frame possibly have said to the man just behind Jenny Agutter’s left shoulder to provoke his “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” expression?

And why is Agutter herself done up to look like something out of Riverdance?

We’ll never know. And that, folks, is why it’s a riddle.

Arminta Wallace