Customer Reviews

Scoop

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This 1987 TV version is largely faithful to Evelyn Waugh's acerbic novel, a sendup of journalism's hapless, competitive reporters on foreign assignment, the assorted power brokers domestic and foreign essential for their journalistic success, and finally the absurd revolutionaries in third world hellholes. who supply the content inquiring minds back home are eager to read about through "scoops."

As the central character William Boot, an initially ineffectual reporter on British countryside flora and fauna in his weekly column called "Lush Places," Michael Maloney is a richly comic figure. Meek and bewildered at the outset, he is sent by mistake as a war correspondent to an African country called Ismaelia where in increasingly droll fashion he operates among power brokers and would-be rebel leaders.

If the production has a weakness, it's one of the sort frequently encountered in earlier Masterpiece Theater sorts of presentations, a kind of plodding pace more suitable to the movement of the novel than to a film version of it. Fortunately, this limitation is absent in the long, last section of the work, where Boot triumphs beyond his and the viewers' wildest imaginations yet at the same time reveals his ambitions to be hilariously those of a rural "downstart." Here, he has been said to bear some resemblance to the real Evelyn Waugh who had a keen nose for big-city corruption and a skill at succeeding without being enmeshed by it. Boot, though, might just as well be considered a winning, coincidental portrait of Waugh's alter ego, George Orwell, the archetypal journalist "downstart."

This TV version deserves to be far better known than it is.

This is a black comedy that doesn't make it. The director thought it enough to hire big-name English actors and have them do droll cameos, but he neglected to make sure that the over-all production was amusing. It isn't. After an hour of being unable to produce a smile, the film just lumbers on and viewers will be wise to look elsewhere for entertainment. A big-budget flop.