Jack Higgins' Confessional (1989)

George White

Anyone seen this?

Trying to find a copy, but found a detailed trailer.

It looks insane.

ITV-Granada miniseries from 1989 - Jack Higgins' Confessional, based on one of the sequel novels to the Eagle has Landed. Here, retconned so Liam Devlin is now a younger man and an Irish-Bostonian (Keith Carradine) to avoid Carradine doing Sutherland's accent. And the assassin is changed from being his Civil War buddy's son to a contemporary played by Robert Lindsay - a KGB sleeper who is also an Irish priest, Lindsay doing a wobbly accent. The thing looks mental - basically the IRA and British Intelligence team up to stop this mysterious Irish-Russian assassin from killing the Pope (Sir Anthony Quayle) on his tour of the UK.

The other mad thing is the casting. Higgins would often use real, contemporary figures in his books (for example - in the book, the Pope is explicitly John Paul II), and one of the key supporting characters in the book/series is the IRA Chief. Here, the character is played by Niall Toibin, but in the original novel, it's explicitly 'the legendary Martin McGuinness'. Of course, Toibin was a great bit older than McGuinness, but they probably shifted the age dynamic considering in the book, Devlin is at least seventy and McGuinness in his early thirties.

George White

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZBQNcAHZLM

Hangdogroad

This ones new to me.

George White

Review by George White  ★★★★★

The greatest bit of Troublesploitation ever made.

As insane and overwrought as the plot makes out. Though here Keith Carradine's Liam Devlin is Irish-American, Robert Lindsay's Titus Welliver-in-Sons of Anarchy accent takes the award for Bad Irish Accent (though it might be genius considering he's half-Russian).

When it was revealed that the opening's location of a shitehole Northern Irish town was really a KGB-built replica of a shitehole Northern Irish town in 'the Ukraine, in Russia' (as characters state), populated by captured dissident Soviet actors doing shockingly convincing Northern Irish accents (because they're played by actual Irishmen, while Robert Lindsay as a supposed half-Irishman isn't), I thought, 'Yes, this is what I want'.

Blessed with a decent cast (Sir Anthony Quayle, Niall Toibin, Robert Lang, Mark Kingston, Simon Chandler, Arthur Brauss, David de Keyser, Daragh O'Malley, Sorcha Cusack, Des McAleer), and ably adapted from the Jack Higgins novel by Callan creator James Mitchell, and well-directed by Gordon Flemyng, it is almost up there with Taffin in a mix of 80s Ireland (DARTs at Pearse Station, Indo-reading pub landlords) and bombastic action cliches, with a last-minute swerve to Manchester resulting in Keith Carradine engaging in Granadaland macho action like he's in a Cliff Twemlow film.

After seeing the earlier Pope-assassination romp Death in the Vatican (1981), which was a disappointment, I thought, 'Surely, this can't be that bad'. It isn't. A fine chunk of Europudding too (in association with Harmony Gold and Silvio Berlusconi).

Oh, and because it is set in the near-future of 1990, it's technically telefantasy.