The Count of Monte Cristo (1964)

Once feared lost, but recently released on DVD, this fondly remembered BBC adaptation of the Dumas classic was originally screened as a Sunday evening serial in 12 black & white episodes. Each ran about 25 minutes and all work well thanks to amazing feats of compression by writer Anthony Steven, as well as intrepid direction from Peter Hammond. Though obviously limited in budget, the series manages to be both elegant and ambitious, with convincing costumes and small-scale sets lit in the Gothic manner. The cast is uniformly splendid, but Alan Badel in particular is an inspired choice for the title role; at 40 or so he's a little too old for the youthful Edmond Dantes and plays him with a kind of wide-eyed innocence that borders on insouciance - I don't think I saw him blink once in the first three episodes - but as the returned Count of Monte Cristo, he crowds his expression with nods and crosses and sideways glancing blows. He is by no means perfect for the role - in essence his performance is the definitive Monte Cristo, but not the definitive Dantes. Perhaps that was his intent.

The plot of The Count of Monte Cristo is probably too famous to bear repeating briefly, but... young ship's mate Edmond Dantes is framed as a Bonapartist and sent to a notorious island prison; after 14 years he escapes and, with the help of a fabulous treasure, wreaks a terrible revenge on those who betrayed him. The keys to the cell being - with the help of a fabulous treasure. Because I never quite went past the notion that the Count of Monte Cristo was just a figment of a mad prisoner's imagination; and that the entire revenge was simply a lot of scribbling on the walls of a cell. It is so intricately plotted, and the frailty of its characters is so marked by correction, that it is always revenge fantasy - the story never escapes the youthful brooding Dantes, no matter how much the Count of Monte Cristo attempts to ameliorate his rage.

And somehow my favourite scene always remains the same no matter which version I see - as Mercedes pleads with Monte Cristo to spare her son's life, and he becomes Dantes again and offers his own life in her son's place. It is Dantes' moment of triumph, but it is also Monte Cristo's defeat. In other versions, and perhaps also in the original novel, that moment feels like a suitable end-point, and I was never quite sure why Dumas ventured far beyond it. But this modest 1964 serial also renders Monte Cristo into the tender affections of Ali Pasha's daughter, Haydee, and it is there he finds... not redemption by any means, but the shared space of prisoners.

Ultimately, the best screen version of this classic, and well worth seeing.

The Gold at the Starbow's End: by Frederik Pohl

It was perhaps inevitable that it fell to an old-timer like Pohl to chart the decline of America following the assassinations of the 1960s and the supreme folly of Vietnam. No other sf story so effectively captures the death of hope at that time, or the subsequent exploitation of conspiracies to fragment and dispel opposition. The latter is a phenomenon which Noam Chomsky has commented upon repeatedly, viewing conspiracy theory as the most ineffective form of political dissent. But where does that leave Pohl, whose story quite perfectly poses a generational conflict which is suddenly thrown into context by a space mission made futile by conspiracy.

In an America wracked by riots and social unrest, the President and his scientific adviser, Dr Knefhausen, announce a mission to Planet Aleph in Alpha Centauri, crewed by the very bravest and best, the cream of the nation's youth. Besides the announced objectives of the mission, they hope the country will rally to the cause, as it did briefly for the moon landings, and that a shared sense of purpose and hope might renew the social contract, or at least consolidate the status quo. The young are duly dispatched into space, and the President collects his kudos. Mission accomplished. Except perhaps for the astronauts. At first they send back regular mission reports which contain personal messages as well as data relating to onboard experiments. They make a number of startling scientific breakthroughs, for which the President is delighted to accept credit. Later the messages become bitter as the astronauts realise the mission is a dupe - they will never reach Alpha Centauri and were never intended to; in disgust they turn to the I Ching and the Tarot and various exotic philosophies for comfort. They practice tantric sex. They start families. One of them dies and is somehow brought back to life. They invent a faster than light drive, but refuse to share the secret because it would be irresponsible. And it is now that the astronauts have turned into space-faring hippies that the President quickly passes blame for the mission onto Knefhausen, who laments the conspiracy of hippies above and hippies below. His execution is not enough to save the President, or even to save the country from civil war. And at any rate it does not matter - nothing matters, because the astronauts are now returning home, armed by their mission rather than for it, and their revenge threatens more than a smoking gun.

There are a lot of rather clever blanks in Starbow's End. Like many a conspiracy we are left to fill in these blanks from imagination; Pohl's only stipulation is that our imaginings must be the most cynical for the story to proceed. The rule of thumb is to assume the worst and then watch the astronauts evolve beyond opposable thumbs. And then assume another worst and watch them evolve beyond that, etc, until evolution is complete, which, ironically enough, may have been Knefhausen's purpose - he was, after all, an ex-Nazi. And this I think is the point - we suspect; we suspect everything, but we can prove nothing.

Pohl later expanded Starbow's End into the novel Lifeburst, a process sometimes known as a fixup.