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East of Elephant Rock

Catalog Number
3003
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VHS | N/A | Slipcase
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East of Elephant Rock (1976)

Additional Information

Additional Information
A young secretary (John Hurt) for the British Embassy in the Orient becomes involved with a plantation owner's wife (Judi Bowker).East of Elephant Rock is a 1977 British independent drama film directed by Don Boyd and starring John Hurt, Jeremy Kemp and Judi Bowker. It was Boyd's second feature film following his little-noticed 1975 Intimate Reflections.[1][2] Like William Somerset Maugham's 1927 play The Letter and two subsequent film adaptations, its narrative content depended on the 1911 Ethel Proudlock murder in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which became a cause célèbre scandalising British colonial society and which had been featured in a Sunday Observer article as recently as the year before.[3][4] Boyd, drawing in part on his own experience of growing up in an increasingly dysfunctional family in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion, wanted to tell a story about the decline of the Empire and the surrender of responsibility.[5][6] In the event his project was for the most part ridiculed but the film did draw warm support from the film director Bryan Forbes.

The film received an extraordinarily hostile UK press and there were suggestions that Boyd had 'ripped-off' William Wyler's classic film noir The Letter. Boyd responded, not implausibly, that he simply hadn't seen Wyler's film but he certainly knew of the Proudlock affair.

Philip French, writing in The Times, commented:[7]

The writer-director Don Boyd embellished his tale with some political background .. with not the remotest understanding of colonial politics in the post world-war. Elephant Rock is badly lit, badly edited and badly acted. Typically in the course of a love scene on a railway platform, the station clock moves back half an hour.

while Time Out characterised it as a "depressingly redundant sample of British independent cinema".[8]

Alexander Walker's view was more nuanced. He praises the film's often glorious mise en scène on a limited budget and especially valorises Jeremy Kemp's performance but agrees the story was ineptly handled.[6]

Bryan Forbes came to the film's defence in a letter to The Times [9]

At a time when the British film industry desperately needs sympathetic encouragement, it is sad that such a worthy endeavour by a young director ... should be greeted with such a distorted - and to those who know - unfair reception

later joking that his letter had cost him good reviews for his own films ever since.[6]

John Hurt (Alien, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Judi Bowker (Brother Sun Sister Moon, Clash Of The Titans) star in this sensuous 1977 British film of obsessive love and betrayal in the last days of Empire. When the British Governor of a far-flung Asian colony is brutally murdered by terrorists, Embassy Secretary Nash (John Hurt) is sent up country into the rubber plantations. His mission is to discover whether or not brutal plantation owner Harry Rawlins (Jeremy Kemp) is causing the natives to rebel. Instead, Nash meets the seriously disturbed young society beauty Eve Proudfoot (Judi Bowker) - and embarks on a torrid affair with her while her husband is away. When Rawlins discovers their secret, blackmail and murder follow… Exquisitely filmed on location in Sri Lanka with a strong supporting cast including Christopher Cazenove and Anton Rodgers, and featuring a musical soundtrack by British 1970s pop icon Peter Skellern, East Of Elephant Rock has been digitally restored and remastered for this, its first ever release on UK Blu-ray.

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