She Fell Among Thieves

Based on a 1935 adventure novel by Dornford Yates, the 1978 BBC telefilm She Fell Among Thieves was the premiere entry in the PBS-aired Mystery series. Malcolm McDowell stars as a very proper Englishman named Richard Chandos, who is drawn into a mystery involving an aging femme fatale called Vanity Fair (Eileen Atkins) while traveling through the Pyrenees. Along with a group of wicked assistants, Vanity Fair is set on manipulating her beautiful but unwilling stepdaughter into a forced marriage in order to secure a fortune for herself. After accidentally stumbling onto the plot, Chandos is enlisted by a British agent (Michael Jayston) to help derail the scheme and rescue the damsel in distress (naturally, romance follows). An extremely old-fashioned tale redolent of the era of decaying British imperialism, She Fell Among Thieves suffers from ridiculously arch performances (Atkins positively exudes malevolent hauteur, while McDowell exhibits a snobbish sense of natural superiority), with much of the action consisting of people in tweeds and tuxedos scampering up and down the hills surrounding Vanity Fair's mountain redoubt. Granted, the film does retain a certain moldy charm, but three decades later this feels more like a campy curiosity than an entertaining mystery. Optional. (F. Swietek)