Ahead of Conclave’s release, here are five other films adapted from Robert Harris novels. All are worth your time.
Edward Berger’s adaptation of Conclave is being talked up as one of the best films of 2024, and is even in line for Oscar contention. The source material comes from Robert Harris, a BBC political reporter turned novelist who’ s been churning out a successful litany of books since the early 1990s.
Following the 1986 non-fiction book Selling Hitler, about the faking of the fascist leader’s diaries (adapted into a successful TV series in 1991, starring Jonathan Pryce and Alexei Sayle), Harris wrote 1994’s Fatherland. This too was adapted for TV with Rutger Hauer (it’s set to be remade again soon, starring Luke Evans), and was set in a speculative 1960s where Germany won the Second World War. It’s a fascinating story that set Harris on his course of finding thrilling, human stories in broader historical events.
Many of his novels have been adapted for the big and small screen, and as Conclave emerges – a film that could be the most successful of them all – it’s worth glancing back at some of the cinematic adaptations of Harris’ work, a few of which are perhaps unduly under-discussed by critics and fans.
Enigma (2001)
Michael Apted, best known for the Up documentary series and latterly Bond movie The World Is Not Enough, tackled Harris’ Enigma in 2001. Set during WWII in and around Bletchley Park, best known as where tormented genius codebreaker Alan Turing and his team invented the technology that helped crack encrypted German communications.
Apted’s film doesn’t include Turing, much to the consternation of historians at the time. Instead, he focuses on a similar fictional creation from Harris, Tom Jericho, played by Dougray Scott, who returns to Bletchley and his ex-lover co-worker Claire (Kate Winslet), whose subsequent disappearance sparks a mystery as a U-boat crisis looms in the background.
With a script from noted playwright Tom Stoppard, not to mention a typically luscious score by John Barry, Enigma might be historically questionable. But with two popular stars of the time, a fine supporting cast and elegant framing from Apted, this is a more than decent war drama that approaches the conflict from a rarely-seen angle.
Archangel (2005)
A pre-Bond Daniel Craig took the starring role in a BBC TV movie adaptation of Harris’ second novel, Archangel, playing ‘Fluke’ Kelso, a historian who while in Moscow learns that Joseph Stalin had a secret diary which conceals a startling secret.
It’s a compelling but chilly novel, adapted as such by skilled scribes Dick Clement and Ian le Frenais (better known for comedy but proficient big screen writers), with Craig flanked by a quality cast of largely Russian or Eastern European performers who help bring the requisite atmosphere of Harris’ novel. This one deserved to exist as a big screen adaptation.
The Ghost (2010)
The first of two collaborations directly between Harris, as screenwriter of his own novel, and controversial director Roman Polanski. This one was made more directly for a Hollywood audience, boasting talent including Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, in one of Harris’ rarer contemporary political thrillers around his sojourns into history.
Published in 2007, just two years after the end of the Iraq War, The Ghost (or The Ghost Writer in some territories), sees Brosnan play Tony Blair-alike ex-Prime Minister Adam Lang, whose ghostwriter dies in mysterious circumstances. This leads him to be replaced by the unnamed McGregor to complete the job, one which soon begins to reveal dark secrets about Lang’s involvement in potential war crimes.
Bolstered by an excellent supporting cast including Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson and even Eli Wallach, Polanski’s film moves like an espionage thriller while not shying away from the shadow of the War on Terror. Critically successful, it saw Polanski receive plaudits for his direction (in Europe), and would arguably be considered the better of his two Harris collaborations.
An Officer And A Spy (2019)
A much better novel than The Ghost, this might be the best of all of Harris’s adapted works discussed so far. It tells the story of the infamous Dreyfus Affair in French society and politics at the turn of the 20th century – arguably the biggest espionage scandal until the Cambridge spies some 60 years later.
Polanski’s long term fascination with the story inspired Harris to pen the novel and later a screenplay, which took some time to reach screens. Pressure on Polanski and American efforts to extradite him for his outstanding rape charge since the late 1970s had intensified, and the fallout from the #MeToo movement saw the filmmaker struggle to attract bankable stars as he had done for The Ghost.
An Office And A Spy ended up with, appropriately perhaps, a primarily French cast including Jean Dujardin, Mathieu Amalric and Polanski’s wife and frequent co-star Emmanuelle Seigner. Feted again by European award bodies but a box office bomb, it nonetheless serves as a faithful adaptation of Harris’ compelling historical thriller, exposing one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in French legal history.
Munich: The Edge Of War (2021)
In later years, Harris has often veered between explorations of WWII (and indeed the Great War in his most recent Precipice) and historical or speculative fiction pieces (such as the intriguing The Second Sleep). One of the better books of the former is Munich, released in 2017.
The film adaptation, Harris’ first book to be made by Netflix, was directed by Christian Schwochow. It faithfully adapts the story revolving around Neville Chamberlain’s famous attempt to broker peace in 1938 with Nazi Germany – an act which, in part, emboldened Hitler’s invasion of Poland a year later. Harris’ thriller pivots around two Oxford university friends, Hugh Legat (George Mackay) and Paul Von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner), who both end up in opposite diplomatic corps but covertly work together to try and prevent the onset of war.
Though Harris condenses the timeframe to establish a greater sense of tension and threat, flashbacks flesh out the Legat and Von Hartmann friendship well, allowing a story of comradeship across divides to ground a story with global implications that rippled through history. With Jeremy Irons on form as a milquetoast Chamberlain, this is a well staged version of a terrific Harris novel.
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The entire Harris canon deserves adaptation, ultimately – particularly his ancient Rome trilogy, which sees writer and diplomat Cicero at the centre of imperial power struggles. Harris’s take on the Pompeii disaster in a book of the same name, set in a similar era, was at one stage going to be adapted into a film in 2007 (by Polanski again) but this ultimately fell apart.
If Conclave is the success it looks like it’s going to be, then we might yet see even more Robert Harris books transition to a big screen and wide release. As my favourite author for many years standing, we can only hope.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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