Fri 28 May 2010
A TV Review by Curt Evans: FOYLE’S WAR “The White Feather.”
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV mysteries[4] Comments
FOYLE’S WAR. ITV (UK), PBS (US). “The White Feather.” Season 1, Episode 2. 03 November 2002 (UK date). Michael Kitchen, Honeysuckle Weeks, Anthony Howell; Lisa Ellis, Charles Dance, Maggie Steed, Paul Brook, Tobias Menzies, Mali Harries, Ed Waters. Series creator: Anthony Horowitz.
The second episode of Foyle’s War pits Detective Superintendent Foyle against a group of despicable British Nazi sympathizers. Germany is on the march through the Netherlands and Belgium and into France and the British Expeditionary Force looks doomed.
The Nazi sympathizers meeting at the appropriately named White Feather Inn welcome the German invasion that they think is right around the corner. Then one of them, the inn owner, is murdered, shot during their meeting.
But was she the intended target, or was it the group’s noxious leader, Guy Spencer (played by the splendidly villainous Charles Dance, who also played the awful Mr. Tulkinghorn of Bleak House)? Foyle’s on the job!
I thought the mystery plot in “The White Feather” was quite strong, though the overall story was not as compelling as that in the first episode, “The German Woman” (reviewed here ). There are actually two mysteries in the film, who murdered the inn owner and the whereabouts of a purloined paper, the publicizing of which would greatly embarrass the British government at this critical time. Both are nicely handled.
Viewers should probably be able to guess the murderer (I did!), but the exact mechanics of the crime are very nice indeed, surprisingly more reminiscent of an R. Austin Freeman or John Rhode story than Agatha Christie.
Though I enjoyed the mystery, I was not as drawn into “The White Feather” as I was “The German Woman.” Much of the time is spent with the repulsive Nazi sympathizers, who let us know they are Nazi sympathizers mainly by disparaging Jews at every opportunity. One gets tired of their company very quickly.
There are a couple pf lower class characters we are supposed to sympathize with, a maid and her fisherman boyfriend, but these rather dim characters never make much of an impression, unlike their counterparts, the pub serving girl and shop assistant, in “The German Woman.” Only the thwarted intellectual son of the inn owners really drew my sympathetic attention.
Scripter Anthony Horowitz links the plot to the Dunkirk evacuation, but this almost feels like another film and I didn’t feel like it came off too convincingly. We also meet for the first time Sergeant Milner’s wife, Jane, who tells him she doesn’t want to even see his prothesis leg in their bedroom!
Personally, forced to choose between Jane Milner and the Nazi sympathizers, I might rather spend time with the latter. What a horrid woman. This marriage will not last, I hazard to guess.
Once again the aristocratic types come off rather badly. After the first two episodes in the series, one might conclude that the British aristocracy spent most of its time getting their German wives exempted from internment regulations, when not actually attempting to help facilitate a Nazi invasion.
In real life, while there were Nazi sympathizers among the aristocracy, there were plenty others who weren’t and gave their lives to the fight against the Nazis. Historically, the British aristocracy as a class has served the state in its many wars in large numbers.
This may sound like a lot of carping, but I did enjoy “The White Feather” and would recommend it. It was not up to the top-flight level of “The German Woman,” in my opinion, but it certainly maintained my interest in the series and made me want to see what will happen next!
May 29th, 2010 at 9:53 am
This is yet another good example of the strengths and weaknesses of this series.
The aristocracy in England and the US was hardly the only class to support the Nazi’s, with Sir Oswald Moseley’s infamous black shirts drawing from the middle and lower classes as well, as did the Nazi American Bund, but perhaps that’s too nuanced for television. Inconvenient truths.
Actually a number of aristocrats and others even posed as Nazi sympathizers before the war and even during it gathering intelligence and serving quite bravely.
When Hitler’s number two man Rudolf Hess flew to England he believed he was meeting with British aristocrats who would join him in convincing the British government to join the Nazi’s in a crusade against the Soviet Union. What he didn’t know was that the aristocrats he was to meet were put there by Ian Fleming and British intelligence. Unfortunately the whole thing became something of an embarrassment thanks to Hess knowledge of the involvement of the Duke of Windsor with the Nazi’s and some of Stalin’s deals with Hitler — which is why Hess spent the rest of his life in Spandau being kept silent, though it did get Hitler’s number two man, Hess, out of the way.
Noel Coward famously volunteered to pose as a Nazi sympathizer but it was decided he could have greater value as a National symbol and entertainer. Just as well, his song ‘A Nightingale Sings in Berkley Square’ became a national theme song during the Blitz, and his IN WHICH WE SERVE was one of the best films of the war.
But this was a good mystery, and perhaps more forgivable than some. I just think the series could probably benefit if Horowitz would delve a little deeper into the byways of the history of the war he uncovers.
May 29th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
In the latest of ongoing series of posts on Jane Haddam’s blog, prompted by my review of CHEATING AT SOLITAIRE, she takes up my statement that “a detective story should be ‘about’ a detective.”
http://blog.janehaddam.com/2010/05/29/a-loaf-of-bread-a-jug-of-whine-and-thou/
My exact words were that in my review I “expressed my displeasure with the lack of actual detection that went on in what I assumed to be a book about a detective.”
A more wider context (or that is, what I was hoping I was saying) is that I was was unhappy that the book had a detective in it but in my opinion he didn’t do much in the way of detecting. (Observing, yes, very much so, but not detecting.) I also went on to say that “detection” was not likely to be one of the reasons readers keep coming back to her books.
But I said what I said, not that I’m retracting it, but what caught Jane’s eye was the phrase “a book about a detective.”
To which Jane’s earlier response was: “It’s here, I think, I take issue — a detective novel may be a book about a detective, OR it may be a book about the detection itself OR it may be a book about the suspects in a crime.”
And in her latest post, both lengthy and very interesting, she follows up on this.
Which is a long-winded way of getting to the point, and why this point is hidden in a comment dealing with Christopher Foyle and FOYLE’S WAR.
Two of the examples she uses to illustrate the concept of books (or TV shows) about detectives are House (of the TV show of the same name) and Foyle.
I’m still waiting to see what she has to say about Sarah Palin and hometown values, but so far at least, I think she and I agree on Sarah Palin.
— Steve
May 29th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
I’m still not sure I see her point here. Granted you can do a novel about a detective that isn’t a detective novel because the hero does no detection, but in both the case of HOUSE and FOYLE the main characters do act as formal detectives (HOUSE famously even lives on Baker Street)even though HOUSE isn’t solving crimes.
A few mainstream novels have been attemtped that pushed the boundary of the detective story. Stanley Ellin’s THE EIGHTH CIRCLE is a good example and John Gardner (the American one) was working on a mainstream novel about a detective at his death. Joyce Carol Oates wrote at least one novel, THE MYSTERIES OF WINTERTHURN, that features a turn of the 20th Century detective, that even features crime and detection, but which is not a detective story.
But to some extent I do think if your main character is a detective and you package it as a detective story, it probably is one even if the detective only observes. As a reader I might not find that as satisfying, but sometimes it is a duck even if it doesn’t quack.
May 29th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Yes, I agree that she hasn’t come up with a response that squares up to what my displeasure was, which you’ve summed up nicely in your last paragraph, David, but her reply was still very interesting.
And of course the synchronicity was what struck me the most — that she used Foyle as one of her examples, and here we are talking about him on this blog, and inside out and backwards too!
— Steve