CROWHURST SEASON: wrap-up

When StudioCanal acquired Simon Rumley’s ‘Crowhurst’ – even though they were already distributing higher-budgeted rival film ‘The Mercy’ – there was speculation that they were protecting their interests as regards the latter and that Rumley’s film would effectively be quashed. StudioCanal nonetheless announced that ‘Crowhurst would open “four to six weeks” after ‘The Mercy’.

Well, those four to six weeks have disappeared over the horizon and although ‘Crowhurst’ has received a couple of (complimentary) reviews in the broadsheets, there’s been neither sight nor sound of it at any cinema anywhere near your humble blogger. So my objective of wrapping up Crowhurst season on The Agitation of the Mind with an in-depth review of Rumley’s take on the enigmatic story of Donald Crowhurst is basically bollocksed.

Nor did I manage to track down a copy of Christian de Chalonge’s ‘Les quarantièmes rugissants’ (‘The Roaring Forties’) or the BBC documentary ‘Donald Crowhurst: Sponsored for Heroism’. I found Nikita Orlov’s ‘Gonka Veka’ (‘The Race of the Century’) online, but in a print that wasn’t subtitled, and while it was a solidly made piece of work that seemed to focus on the sponsorship/business aspect of the story to make an anti-capitalist point, I wasn’t confident in attempting a review.

Whilst kicking my heels waiting for ‘Crowhurst’ to open – and delaying a number of other reviews in the process – I read Peter Nichols’ ‘A Voyage for Madmen’, which tells the story of all of the Golden Globe participants and delivers its meticulously researched narrative with all the verve and immediacy of a thriller; and Donald Finkel’s book-length narrative poem ‘The Wake of the Electron’, in which Finkel imaginatively sympathises with Crowhurst, taking prompts from his final log book and from Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ (Crowhurst’s less-than-light-reading during the voyage) and wrestles them into poetry.

I have yet to source copies of Tomalin and Hall’s ‘The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst’ and Chris Eakin’s ‘A Race Too Far’ (acclaimed by ‘The Mercy’ star Colin Firth), but I can highly recommend Nichols and Finkel: their approaches are vastly different but their contributions to the Crowhurst canon are invaluable.