The story is a typically romantic mystery tale by du Maurier, of two men who meet by chance one night and realize that they look exactly like one another. He is not someone you would notice when walking past him on the street, but he is arresting when in action on the screen, and here he does an excellent job of playing two entirely different characters who happen to be identical doppelgängers (or one might today say clones) of one another.

A very clever choice for the double-lead was the actor Matthew Rhys.

Therefore, the changes made to the story for this screen adaptation are, I believe, entirely successful. The scene where the entire family sit, with their servants standing behind them, watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, is impeccably authentic and evocative, as indeed the whole film is. Another innovation in the story is the amusing sub-plot of the insertion into the grand mansion of a newfangled electronic device known as a television, received and treated with great ceremony. In this version, the setting of the story is shifted from France to the England of 1952/3, which is an effective change, and enabled Sturridge (best known for directing the original TV series of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, 1981), to exploit his familiarity with aristocratic English settings of the early to mid 20th century. We are all used to remakes being inferior, and groaning when we hear there is going to be another one (for instance, no remake of du Maurier's classic REBECCA has ever been anything but a travesty of Hitchcock's original film with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine), but in this case, everyone can be proud of the result. This remake by the talented director Charles Sturridge, who also wrote the screenplay, is in my opinion superior to the original film.

One thing she told me about Alec Guinness, who played the double-lead roles, was that he became fond of her during the filming and remained in affectionate contact with her for the rest of his life, which says a great deal about his character. I have read the original novel by Daphne du Maurier and seen the earlier film version (1959) three times, most recently in order to remind myself of what our very dear friend Annabel Bartlett looked like as a child (she played the little girl, her only film role).

The scapegoat du maurier