'The Riddle of the Sands' (1979) – Tony Maylam.

Tony 'The Burning' Maylam's exquisitely wrought WW1 espionage thriller is based on Erskine Childers popular spy novel and is successfully brought to vivid cinematic life with consummate skill by gifted visually astute director Maylam, and his no less exemplary cast and crew. Two Oxford chums, Expert sailor and rugged adventurer Arthur Davies (Simon MacCorkindale) and well-manicured foreign office official Charles Carruthers (Michael York)soon find themselves quite literally at sea in Arthur's make-shift Yacht 'Dulcibella', not only navigating the exceedingly tempestuous Frisian coastland but having to unravel the altogether singular machinations of the mysterious Herr Dollman (Alan Badel),to all appearances acts as a successful, finely-garbed businessman on a boat trip with his cold dipso wife and charmingly gregarious daughter (Jenny Agutter), but his frequently furtive, testy demeanour, and shadowy dealings with Kaiser Wilhelm II's demonstratively shifty henchman Böhm (Michael Sheard) strongly suggest that Charles and Arthur's escalating suspicions and their subsequent covert investigations not only starkly contradict Dollman's haughty bourgeois affectations, but very soon threaten to expose his deep involvement in a diabolical conspiracy far more terrible than they might ever have previously imagined! Tony Maylam's cryptically fascinating 'The Riddle of The Sands' is an exceptionally engrossing wartime-set nautical cutical-gnawingly taut, excitingly performed black-hatted thriller that is guaranteed to put the wind back into your sails!