Has anyone ever told you you have the most beautiful eyes? Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome) flies to Italy to visit her blind sister Mary Ann (Sherry Buchanan) but arrives in Rome to discover she has apparently disappeared, last seen three weeks earlier, putting a concert at the music academy where she trains in jeopardy. Barbara approaches the British Consul for help in this uncharacteristic and worrying situation and Martin Foster(Nicky Henson) assists her. People don’t just disappear. He’s reluctant at first but then thinks a rather louche Italian Enzo Lombardi (Gabriele Tinti) might know of Mary Ann’s whereabouts but Lombardi denies all knowledge and Barbara doesn’t believe him, getting into a scrap on his boat which might turn into something much worse when Martin turns up and rescues her. Local police believe they might have found Mary Ann’s body with eyes gouged out and then when it’s not her, link Mary Ann with another blind woman who is in hospital after a marine accident, found adrift in a dinghy – that’s not her either. It’s suggested that a reclusive rich man called David Malcolm (Jeremy Brett) the owner of a private island between Corsica and Sardinia might hold the answer to the mysterious murder of a series of blind women. When Barbara visits the blind woman in hospital a weird high pitched recording of birds is played in her room and the woman throws herself out of the window while Barbara is hit on the head. She now is apparently blind and introduces herself to Malcolm who has a thing for blind women. Then she visits his island where his disfigured son makes her acquaintance despite the fact that along with Malcolm’s first wife he’s supposedly dead. Malcolm’s wife Carol (Pamela Salem) isn’t too happy at the new arrival on her patch … I don’t know what it is about you but ever since we met I’ve been behaving like James Bond. Once upon a time, the Summer of 1981 to be precise, ITV showed a compelling British-Italian drama miniseries at teatime on Saturday called Seagull Island. And we wanted to see it again. It has cropped up all these years later thanks to the Talking Pictures channel, but in an entirely different form, a feature film, meaning that a couple of hours of drama (actually somewhere in the region of 200 minutes) have been lost to editing antiquity. Barbara is constantly in jeopardy and physically attacked and her situation pivots on Malcolm’s storytelling and behaviour with Brett turning into an expansive and thrillingly evil bad guy and Henson rolling up now and again to save the day. The plot is a lot less clear in this version than in the original series but the generic ancestry is happily in the suspenseful giallo tradition where American actress Buchanan originally made her name with What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974). It’s satisfyingly glamorous, delighting in the setting and the trophies of wealth – speedboats, lovely production design and costuming. There are some very good underwater scenes but there’s also a deal of gore and violence. We know it’s more than forty years since this was made but it’s still rather sad that the four leads (Ransome, Brett, Henson, Tinti) are long departed this earthly realm. Directed by Nestore Ungaro who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeremy Burnham and Augusto Caminito. The score is by Tony Hatch. The island isn’t large enough to make one feel lonely
mondomovies 