From AwardAnnals
Results of the Edgar Allan Poe Award® in the year 1980. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
The Great Train Robbery
Michael Crichton
Best-selling novelist Michael Crichton had already directed
Westworld and
Coma when he tackled the ambitious production of
The Great Train Robbery in 1978. Adapting his own novel (which was inspired by the facts of the first known train robbery), Crichton sets this attractive, highly enjoyable film in London in 1855, where Edward Pierce (Sean Connery) and Agar (Donald Sutherland) plot to steal £25,000 in gold that is being transported by train to pay British troops in the Crimean War. Lesley-Anne Down plays Miriam, Pierce’s sophisticated…
Murder By Decree
Bob Clark
Murder by Decree has the distinction of being not only one of the best Sherlock Holmes films, but one of the best pastiches (i.e., a Holmes fiction created by someone other than author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) featuring the late-Victorian Era detective. Christopher Plummer is very good as Holmes, and James Mason redeems the many mishandled screen portrayals of Dr. John Watson with a rare, insightful performance. The story may not be unique in post-Doyle Holmes adventures—the private investigator pursues Jack the Ripper during the latter’s reign of monstrous…
Time After Time
Nicholas Meyer
In this clever speculative tale, story collaborators Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes and screenwriter-director Nicholas Meyer (
Star Trek II and
VI) send two famous historical figures ahead in time. In late 19th century England, writer H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) unwittingly includes Jack the Ripper (David Warner) in his social circle. When one of Wells’s dinner parties is crashed by the police looking for the Ripper, Jack uses the author’s time machine to escape. But there’s one catch—after it has been used, the machine returns to Wells’s time.…
