WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL (1971) ** James Bond lite,without the humour. The arch-villain can't even think of anything better to do than try and steal gold bullion. Alistair MacLean does a good job of translating the feel of his novels (I haven't read this one, but I enjoyed the ones I read in high school--my friend never managed to convince me that they were any more intellectual than the slapstick I liked better) into a screenplay, and that can't be easy. That hectic sense of assuming that the reader is trying to lose interest. Fulfilment of the formulaic sex expectation. Anthony Hopkins is good, and my main problem isn't even that he's willing to kill so many people in defense of gold. Hell, the bad guys would probably figure out how to kill even more once they got ahold of it. Anthony just doesn't strike me as a guy who could play this hard in this league, he's probably tough enough but there just isn't enough desperado to him. Robert Morley isn't quite convincing billowing bureaucratic aristocratic blather either, but he's even more entertaining than if he were.
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