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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 26 |
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'FOYLE'S WAR'
The final three episodes of "Foyle's War" are scheduled this way on most PBS stations: "PLAN of ATTACK," Sunday, July 13, at 9 p.m.; "BROKEN SOULS," Sunday, July 20, at 9 p.m., and the series finale, "ALL CLEAR," Sunday, July 27, at 9 p.m. Check your local TV Guide listings for the exact playdates and times for your area. |
One of the all-time best
mystery shows retires
of TheColumnists.com
Prepare to shed a few tears, dear fans of PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery!" After five marveous seasons, peaking with three glorious 90-minute movies in July, "Foyle's War" is going out of business, presumably for good.
I suppose it would have seemed a little strange had the show about crime-solving on the British home front during World War II lasted longer than the war did. But, as far as I'm concerned, it could have gone on forever.
Created by Anthony Horowitz, "Foyle's War" was about the lonely and often thankless task facing Deputy Chief Supt. Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) trying to solve murders and other crimes in the coastal community of Hastings while the nation was waging a war for its very survival against the Axis powers. With most able-bodied Englishmen engaged in combat overseas and England's major cities under constant bombardment by German war planes, it wasn't easy getting British officialdom to cooperate with criminal investigations on the home turf.
And that's what made "Foyle's War" such an offbeat and endlessly fascinating showcase for complex detective stories. No ordinary lawman could cope with the rude interruptions to his detective work and the almost inexhaustible supply of red tape dumped in his path. It required a man like Foyle, doggedly plodding forward in his taciturn way, keeping his voice down to nearly a whisper when he often felt like shouting obscenities and shaking his fist.
Michael Kitchen, who played Foyle to perfection, approached suspects with such an ingratiating manner and such deliberate calm that they seldom felt the noose he was slipping around their necks. When he finally got around to telling them they were being arrested for such and such a crime, they almost always looked astonished. If a suspect pulled a gun as a means of resisting arrest, an American police detective like Kojak might knock the gun away, slam the suspect up against a wall and cuff him. But Foyle usually just wrinkled his brow a bit more than usual and frowned before saying something simple like, "I wouldn't be disagreeable, if I were you."
In the first of the three final episodes, "Plan of Attack," Foyle has already retired and has begun writing his memoirs with the help of Samantha "Sam" Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks), his driver before he stepped down as the chief civilian lawman in Hastings. It's not going so well because Sam isn't much of a clerk-typist and her mind is elsewhere anyway, trying to figure out what she's going to do for a living now that her full-time job with Foyle is done.
If you recall last season's storyline, Foyle was fed up with the bureaucratic nonsense he had to deal with from the police administration. He also had a lot on his mind because he hadn't heard from his son, a flier with the Royal Air Force, since he'd been posted to Malta. With the war beginning to wind down, he decided to chuck it all and go home for the rest of the war.
But all that changes when the man who replaced him is killed by an assassin who may have been trying to kill Sgt. Milner (Anthony Howell) instead. Foyle is asked to return to duty to handle the Hastings office until the war ends, hopefully in just a few more months.
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with his two assistants for the full run of "Foyle's War," Honeysuckle Weeks as Samanta "Sam" Stewart and Anthony Howell as Sgt. Paul Milner. |
Immediately, Foyle finds himself clashing with military authorities because his investigation leads him to a secret government installation where maps are being made for the bombing runs by Allied forces on Nazi Germany. There is also a great deal of local unrest when British soldiers come home from the war and discover German P.O.W.'s from a nearby work camp being used as laborers on their own farms, in close contact with their wives and children.
In the second of three episodes--"Broken Souls"--the presence of Germans in Hastings reaches a breaking point when one returning soldier finds an English-speaking P.O.W. laborer playing with the soldier's little boy and chatting up the soldier's wife as if there had never been a war. Foyle is drawn into the community unrest when a murder is committed.
When the finale, called "All Clear," arrives a number of long-running storylines finally are wrapped up. Foyle is made a member of a committee being set up to guarantee public safety during what everyone expects to be a hard-to-control public celebration when V.E. Day (Victory in Europe) is announced. Also on the committee is an old friend of Foyle's, an American officer who's living with a heavy load of anger over a British mistake that cost the lives of hundreds of American fighting men, and an Austrian doctor who's suffering a great deal of animosity from locals who consider him a German and their enemy. When one of the committee members is murdered, Foyle is deep into an investigation just as peace finally comes to Europe.
There are many more human issues resolved along with the murder case. The broken love affair between Foyle's airman son, Andrew (Julian Ovendun) and Samantha Stewart is finally dealt with in satisfactory fashion. And both Sam and Sgt. Milner realize they must move on to new lives, taking new directions as Foyle breaks up the old team for good.
"Foyle's War" has been one of the all-time best series in the long history of the "Mystery!" program. Producing a regular program requiring so many props and costumes and sets from a period more than 60 years ago must have been challenging, but "Foyle's War" from the start has convinced me I'm looking back in time to the real England of 1940-45.
Michael Kitchen has never been better and the series deserves a special bow for exposing us all to the charming and engaging Honeysuckle Weeks, whose "Sam" Stewart is a character you just don't want to say goodbye to, not ever.
Why are we having to kiss this show goodbye when it still seems to be creatively working well? Rumors persist that the decision to cease production was made by top management at ITV, the British company that produces the show, and that it came as a surprise to creator Anthony Horowitz, who already had several scripts prepared for the 1944 era and had to junk them in order to jump ahead to the end of the war. Top management at ITV has changed since that decision, so there may be a possibility that the show could return in some fashion.
Still, all five seasons of "Foyle's
War" are now available in DVD boxed sets, so, whether or
not the program ever returns, we can settle down with this most
clever of mystery series and see it all again anytime we want
to, which, in my case, will be often.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photos are courtesy of WGBH Boston, PBS and ITV. This column first posted June 30, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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