Peter Hyams

With some justice, this late-seventies film is little-remembered today. The best description might be 'unconvincing'. Christopher Plummer is an unconvincing director of a British operation which drops agents into WWII France; Harrison Ford is the slightly more convincing American bomber pilot; and Lesley-Anne Down is the middle-class hospital auxilary married to Plummer who meets Ford during a bombing raid on London. Her main function is to look decorative with those big blue eyes, and struggle, not too hard, to resist Ford's manly advances.
The locations are unconvincing – Christmas 1944 with trees in full leaf; daffodils out in 'France' in January; Lyon, one of France's largest cities, looking like a scruffy market town and so on.
The script is unconvincing – how can Plummer badly sprain his ankle through incompetence but be running at high speed from German soldiers with Ford 24 hours later? Why would the daring pair return to the farm they originally holed up in when they have been told by the plucky resistance daughter that her farmer father is a collaborator? How does the brave wife know where her husband's boss has his top-secret office? Why do no German guards notice that Ford has amazingly long hair when he insouciantly goes into the German HQ dressed as a German sargeant? Why is there no exploration of the tension and lack of fulfilment which is said to be at the heart of the married couple's problems? Too hard to do?
There are also plenty of cliches – German stereotypes, East End safecracker, adorable eight year old daughter. It is a pity that one of these cliches – the wise-cracking bomb-aimer who is part of Ford's crew - is the most convincing character in the film.… (more)

Much like he did in The Lost Worlds of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke explores the process of adapting one of his novels to film in The Odyssey File. Rather than feature early treatments, script rewrites, and short stories/sequences, Clark presents this process as a dialogue between himself and director Peter Hyams. The most unique aspect was that conflicting schedules and geography required the two to use email in the early 1980s.
Clarke is magnanimous about any changes that Hyams wants, offering suggestions for ways to incorporate the changes and even the names of people on whom Hyams could call as technical advisers. Hyams, for his part, displays the nervousness of a man entrusted with adapting the sequel to one of the greatest films, regardless of genre, of the twentieth century. While the book does offer insight into the film-making process, it is not a complete "making of" or "behind the scenes" book, though Clarke explains that this was due to the need to get the book to press in time for the film's release.
The book's appendices feature an essay by Steven Jongeward, a production assistant on 2010, that describes the changes from book to film and how the change in medium necessitated Hyams' alterations. The second appendix describes the process for sending an email in 1983 using the technology of the time.
The book will likely not attract as wide an audience as Clarke's fiction, but will appeal to film scholars, devoted fans of Clarke, and those interested in the early days of the technology that became the Internet.… (more)