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It was a seismic event for cinemagoers. Although the twinning of cinemas in the U.K. and Europe had already begun – lagging way behind the cineplexes of America – the opening of a triple cinema in Glasgow on 2 October 1970 (where I lived) was groundbreaking in more ways than one. It completely altered the distribution landscape. In one fell swoop it permitted one cinema center in a major British city to run both roadshows and general releases at the same time and to hold onto general releases for far longer than previously.

It wasn’t the first cinema expansion in Glasgow. In 1968, the ABC in Sauchiehall St had split into two. But that was for a different purpose. The second, smaller, cinema was established to offer ABC a city center home for roadshows. Although in the U.S. roadshows might be coming to the end of their viability that wasn’t the case in Europe. The revamped 70mm version of Gone with the Wind ran for 30 weeks at ABC2 while David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter a couple of years later would trump that with a run of more than a year.

In the U.K. twinning and tripling had been tentative. In London’s West End, for example, there wasn’t a single twin or triple except at the tiny Cinecenta which had barely 600 seats spread over four screens and primarily operated as a second run or specialist house.

The Odeon in Glasgow – the biggest cinemagoing city by capita in the whole of Britain – was a much bolder initiative. At a cost of £450,000 – (the equivalent to $£6.3 million today) the Rank Organisation turned the existing single-cinema operation into the biggest triple in Europe with seating for 2,500 – not a bad reduction from the original capacity of 2,784. The remodeling took over a year.

Odeon 1 had 1,124 seats including 64 luxurious pullman armchairs and projection facilities for both 35mm and 70mm. Odeon 2 had fewer seats with Odeon 3 limited to 555. The Odeon 1 launched with roadshow Cromwell starring Richard Harris and Alex Guinness. Odeon 2 featured the blockbuster Airport with Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bissett heading the cast. Odeon 3 offered a more modest proposal, The Virgin and the Gypsy with Franco Nero and Joanna Shimkus.

The triplex completely altered city center cinemagoing. The three cinemas could afford to keep movies on for longer than before, even allow them to build an audience, rather than yanking them off screens before word-of-mouth had done its job.

Cromwell ran for nine weeks, Airport for six weeks and The Virgin and the Gypsy for three. But, gradually, the smallest of the three cinemas began to play a more important role in the operation. Roadshows that had question-marks against their potential longevity were able to open in Odeon 3 and be held over for longer than they might have been in Odeon 1.

So musical Song of Norway, celebrating the work of classical composer Grieg but without a single marquee name, completed an 18-week run at the Odeon 3 while historical drama Franklin J. Schaffner’s three-hour epic Nicholas and Alexandra, again without a significant marquee names, managed 21 and Charles Jarrott’s Mary, Queen of Scots – at least with actors worthy of top billing in Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson – 16. Launched in the more competitive environment of the larger Odeon 1, none of these would have lasted even a month.

The movies could also drop through the gears.Previously, a hit might have had to be pulled to accommodate a new booking in the bigger cinema. But now it could be shifted down to the Odeon 3. Ralph Neslon’s bloody revisionist western Soldier Blue starring Candice Bergen ran for 10 weeks in Odeon and another four in Odeon 3. Both Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery’s brief return to James Bond, and Norman Jewison’s musical Fiddler on the Roof played for 12 weeks, in Odeon 2 and Odeon 1 respectively.

There was even room for sleepers, Stanley Long’s purported documentary Naughty! ran for seven weeks in Odeon 3; Anthony Hopkins in Alistair MacLean actioner When Eight Bells Toll notched up six weeks in Odeon 2 and a reissue of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia was good for four weeks in Odeon 3.

The ability of the triplex to absorb a hit was no better demonstrated in 1976 when Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest starring Jack Nicholson racked up a record run of 24 weeks at the complex. But this was spread over the three cinemas. It broke down into 14 weeks at Odeon 1, six weeks at Odeon 2 and four weeks at Odeon 3.

For cinemagoers like me it was game-changer. In the past it was very rare for a movie to run even three weeks at the Odeon. If you missed it first time round, you had to scour the papers to see when it might end up in second run or your local nabe. Even then, you might be talking it remaining in cinemas for a total of three or four weeks.

Now, you could count of having two or three months to catch a big new film at the Odeon. This was a more leisurely approach to cinemagoing. And, roughly speaking, it’s what happens today.

Contemporary audiences will be accustomed to studios playing fast and loose with a successful  IP, all sorts of tricks to keep a series alive; although maybe the most famous occurred in TV soap Dallas when the death of a major character turned out to be only a dream.

Still, British studio Hammer, in its pre-horror days, takes some beating when it relocates Alan Ladd’s Whispering Smith (1948) 70 years into the future, and from the American Wild West of the 19^th century to London in the 1950s and deletes the character’s, railroad detection, in favor of ordinary murder.

The first Frank H. Spearman western was published in 1908, triggering an extensive series. The four silent versions, Alan Ladd effort and a TV series in 1961 stuck to the original concept. British screenwriter John Gilling attempted to anglicize the idea, and though Smith remained a Yank there was no sign of railroad detection.

William Hinds founded Hammer in 1934 but the project was short-lived, going bankrupt three years later. However, in 1935 he formed Exclusive, a distribution company, with Enrique Carreras and that survived. The principals’ two sons, Michael Carreras and Anthony Hinds, were recruited, and Hammer was revived Post-War, embarking on low-cost crime pictures. As part of a deal with American outfit Lippert, Hammer cast Americans in leading roles. The company was still rooted in crime until its first horror venture in 1953.

Richard Carlson fitted the category of rising star rather than marquee name when hired for Whispering Smith Hits London. Though he had written for Collier’s magazine and written and directed plays, this as the actor’s first top-billed role and paved the way for him to become a leading figure in the 1950s sci fi cycle – It Came from Outer Space (1953) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).

Norwegian Greta Gynt was not as established a star as you might have expected, after a failed attempt by Rank to market her as the next Jean Harlow and following parts like the female lead in such British films as The Dark Eyes of London/The Human Monster (1939) opposite Bela Lugosi and Tomorrow We Live (1943). She had revived a failing career with the female lead in MGM’s Soldiers Three (1951) starring David Niven and Stewart Granger.

Herbert Lom also had another string to his bow, as co-editor of the magazine Clubman. He had been steadily rising up the supporting actor ranks, receiving good notices for State Secret (1950), Cage of Gold (1950) and Hell Is Sold Out (1951). Scot Rona Anderson was married to fellow actor Gordon Jackson.

John Gilling had five directorial credits – in the 1960s he specialized in horror most notably Shadow of the Cat (1961) – when he began work on the screenplay of Whispering Smith, envisaging this as the first in a series.

The Pressbook was typical for the period, four pages A4 with a color cover and one page in spot color. As far as B-picture British Pressbooks went, this was a step up – often they were only a double-sided A4 or four-page A5 and minus any colour. Unlike bigger budgeted productions there was little excess when it came to advertising and promotion.

There was only one tagline – “America’s Ace Detective in Britain’s Greatest Mystery” (the American distributor was a bit more adventurous in the tagline department – “Murder Nobody Can Prove…A Body Nobody Can Find” and “Mad Killers Stalk Yank Sleuth”).

And in terms of the advert, beyond Carlson puffing on a cigarette and a hint of the tunnel sequence, audiences were given very little to go on. Whether any moviegoers recalled the Alan Ladd version of four years previously and wondered at the change in style and locale is unknown. Unlike other Pressbooks, there was no attempt to offer cinema managers any advice in how to promote the movie.

One page of the Pressbook is devoted to a detailed synopsis, another shows six ads, all in the same style but in different sizes (that a cinema manager would cut out and take down to the local newspaper to make up an advert), and the final page  is given over to star biographies.

Sign of the times in that Greta Gynt confesses that her favorite hobby is “looking after her hobby” although Rona Anderson’s favored activity is “lazing in the sun.”

Turns out this Pressbook is something of a highly sought-after item, the combination of the names Hammer and Exclusive apparently the cause.

We tend to view movie marketing as the business of selling movies to the general public. What we forget is that in order for a cinemagoer to attend a showing of an individual film in a particular cinema, that the movie has to be rented by said cinema and before that can happen someone has to convince the cinema manager to take on the picture.

The most common method of selling movies to exhibitors was via the Pressbook/Campaign Manual. But this had three drawbacks. In the first place cinemas were flooded with Pressbooks that might arrive in the post at the rate of 10-15 a week. The other downside was that such items were generally only useful once a cinema had signed on to screen a particular movie and manager would turn to the Pressbook for hints on publicizing the movie and for the advertising blocks required to run a campaign in a local newspaper. The final problem was that Pressbooks appeared fairly close to a film’s launch so not that helpful in driving up interest.

So the studios turned to the trade magazines. They might embark on a well-planned long-term campaign running upwards of a year. It would kick off with an advert announcing a movie was being made or close to completion – Universal placed a four-page bound insert for Isadora in June 1968, five months prior to the world premiere. Then it would produce some artwork that was close to the posters being prepared for public consumption.

Then it would generate more material that explained how confident the studio was in the picture, demonstrating that money that had been spent on promotion in newspapers, magazines and television, and various tie-ins. The back page of a four-page ad for The Green Berets (1968) was devoted to the promotional activities surrounding its immediate upcoming launch. The sameheld true for Barbarella (1968).

After that it would harness the fact that the film was opening simultaneously in an exclusive number of first run houses in the major cities or that it was scheduled for a huge number of cinemas again simultaneously. These were intended to show that other exhibitors had demonstrated faith in the product, suggesting you had better get in line quick. The final avenue was advertising the box office figures that usually suggested the film was breaking some record or another.

Not all campaigns took all of these steps. In fact, most selected just two or three of them. And they were not always presented in the same fashion. The box office ads tended to be just printed on the same kind of paper as usual, perhaps with color or spot-color (i.e. some part of the ad picked out in blue or red and the rest in black-and-white).

But the ads used in the general build-up would be of a more expensive material. These would employ thicker glossier paper. They would usually be specially designed. They might run to four- six- or eight-pages and they might have some version of a gatefold (not just opening horizontally but potentially vertically). These adverts were printed separately and then inserted into the magazine at the production stage so were known as “bound inserts” meaning they weren’t loose inside the pages but part of the magazine.

There was a major, immediate, bonus from going down this route. I’ve got a massive collection of trade magazines and I always know the moment I pick up an issue whether it contains a bound insert. Not only does the magazine feel heavier but it automatically opens at the insert.

Sometimes, smaller distributors just stuck an entire Pressbook inside a magazine – The Devil’s 8 (1969) a gangster version of The Dirty Dozen (1967) – was promoted in this fashion and the 8-page insert for Doctor Zhivago (1965) contained nothing but promotional ideas and details of tie-ins.

Sometimes adverts that appeared in the trades were try-outs for the kind of poster ideas being considered by the marketing department for public distribution, the illustrations shown here for Tony Rome (1968) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) a good example.

Other times studios got it into their heads that, just as had occurred in the Hollywood Golden Age, that the studio name was somehow an imprimatur for good business and that if you stuck with MGM, for example, you couldn’t go wrong and to prove its point it would cross-reference in one advert films as disparate as Doctor Zhivago, Blow-Up (1966) and Grand Prix (1966).

It was pretty obvious to keen observers that studios sometimes placed movies in cinemas with smaller seating capacities in the hope that demand would outstrip supply and consequently they could crow about the box office. Often, studios chose specific outlets deliberately as a guide to other cinemas which were similar. But, mostly, it was just to have something to give a movie a boost.

You might have needed an adding machine (calculators not a thing then) to calculate from figures presented just how well a film was doing, but even just presenting the box office was seen as a sign of studio confidence and exhibitors, presented with a set of box office figures in a trade advertisement, tended not to question their validity.

The one shown for The Sand Pebbles (1966) was also in the nature of a teaser – here’s what’s it done in selected openings, guess what it’ll do for you – whereas for Divorce, American Style (1967) the range was much wider, suggesting the movie would do just as well in cinemas around your way, whether playing in first run or simultaneously in suburban showcase.

Occasionally, there would be more strategic purpose involved. When, in 1965, Twentieth Century Fox got ahead of the game in terms of television promotion and wanted to show exhibitors they were committed to this kind of advance, that was what dominated their 4-page insert in Box Office magazine’s “anniversary issue.” The studio claimed it was “pioneering a new era” promising to use network television (i.e. the “Big Three” of CBS, ABC and NBC) on a year-round basis.

It had committed to purchasing 189 one-minute commercials that would cumulatively attract nearly 800 million “viewer impressions” in 191 cities nationwide. Just to make sure cinema owners exhibitors were in no doubt about the importance of this development in their favor, the studio pointed out it was “the kind of continuing deep-sell no other company in the industry offers exhibitors

One of the most appealing features of Box Office trade magazine was that once a fortnight it cut out the baloney, ignored all the glossy ads trumpeting a studio’s next big hit and the editorial that promised a golden future, and got down to the nitty-gritty of how movies performed once they were way down the food release chain, far removed from the big city first run houses where they premiered.

While critics pontificated and effectively told their readers what worthy movies to head for and while studios spent their advertising bucks trying to persuade the public trying to do the same (though often the films chosen by critics were not those backed by the studios), exhibitors were caught in the middle. They were the bottom line. This was where the golden buck of promise stopped – and sometimes died.

The exhibitors who fessed up in the “Exhibitor Has His Say” section were the kind of movie theaters that you’d see in The Last Picture Show, the thousands that serviced small towns well away from the big cities and which might be playing new films many months after they were first shown in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Of the cinemas features in the March 13, 1967, edition of weekly trade magazine Box Office, only one serviced a population of more than 2,500, and even then it was only 6,000.

The movies shown in these houses didn’t run a full week. At best they’d last three days, but sometimes it was only two. These cinemas would change programmes three or four times a week. But the exhibitors who contributed to this section did so on a regular basis, so other exhibitors could compare notes and everyone felt they had a voice.

The biggest participating cinemas was the Star Theatre in St Johnsbury (population 6,000) in Vermont, run by Peter Silloway. He played his big pictures Wednesday through Saturday. He made reports on three. Khartoum starring Charlton Heston was “a pretty good action picture” and based on his experience he reckoned “adults should enjoy the picture very much.” He also had a positive response to William Holden western Alvarez Kelly which he deemed “an excellent outdoor action picture and enjoyed by everyone.” He was less sanguine about Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. “People were very disappointed…they expected to see the mystery that Hitchcock is famous for.”

Another regular contributor was Arthur K. Dame who ran the Scenic Theatre in Pittsfield (pop 2,300) in New Hampshire. The Great Sioux Massacre (playing Fri-Sat) was an “okay western” but his audiences “just won’t buy secret agents here” so that affected The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World (Fri-Sat). Flipper (Sat only) “wears well.”

Terry Axley at the New Theatre in England (pop 2,136) in Arkansas “wouldn’t especially recommend” Cary Grant comedy Walk, Don’t Run (Sun-Mon). There was “fair business” for Elvis Presley musical Spinout (Thu-Sat). How to Steal a Million (Sun-Mon) with the topline cast of Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn had “no appeal,” racking up “one of the lowest grosses in my history of show business” while results for  for Rock Hudson thriller Blindfold (Sun-Mon) were “way off.”

The Calvert Drive-In at Prince Frederick (pop 2,500) in Maryland was run by Don Stott. Steve McQueen number Baby, the Rain Must Fall (Thu-Sat) “did pretty well.” But for How the West Was Won (Thu-Sat) despite the all-star cast and the marketing hullabaloo business was “only average” and the gross was “okay” for anthology The Yellow Rolls-Royce though many people left halfway through and another Steve McQueen picture Nevada Smith proved “not bad at all” and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte was a “sure crowd-pleaser.”

S.T. Jackson of the Jackson Theatre in Flomaton (pop 1,480) in Alabama did “poor business” with the reissue of Butterfield 8 (Sun-Mon) and Glen Hall of the Hall Theatre in Cassville (pop 3,000) in Missouri received “many complaints” over Lady L.

Response to Herman’s Hermits picture Hold On! (Fri-Sat) was so good that Jim Townley of the Silver Hill Theatre in Oshkosh (pop 2,500) in Nebraska “ran an extra show after the basketball game.” For The Great Race (Fri-Sat) he received a “good haul to the bank” and The Singing Nun  “really drew the crowd” so much so that he “might even run it again.”

Bear in mind this is March 1967, so it gives an idea of how far down the queue such cinemas were in the food release chain. Khartoum opened in the United States in June 1966, as did Hold On! with Torn Curtain a month later. The Great Race, The Yellow Rolls-Royce and Baby, the Rain Must Fall dated back to 1965, Flipper to 1963. The Singing Nun opened in April 1966, Nevada Smith the following month. Spinout (three months) and Alvarez Kelly (six months) endured the shortest wait, How the West Was Won the longest, around four years.

SOURCE: Box Office, March 13, 1967, p42.

I’m taking a day off. Someone else is doing the writing. Turns out I was sitting on a scoop, a major story of considerable interest. I was interviewed a week or so ago by the Daily Mail, Britain’s biggest daily newspaper with a massive online audience. The result made headlines in the paper as it was turned into a two-page feature and also went online. So I thought I’d share it with you.

Feel free to post this link elsewhere.

“Unearthed 60 Years On, Thriller King Alistair MacLean’s £1million Pirate Treasure,” By Gavin Madeley, Daily Mail, February 27, 2026

Staring at the words on his computer screen, Brian Hannan felt a heart-stopping jolt bring him up short.

It was like in the movies, when the hero realises they have stumbled across something big.

‘When I saw it, my eyes popped out of my head,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding – how does this even exist? How does nobody know about it?” It’s a Fort Knox of gold, just sitting there waiting for somebody to make something of it.’

For months, the author and film historian had been trawling through an ocean of documents in search of priceless nuggets for his new book about Scots thriller writer Alistair MacLean’s extraordinary Hollywood career.

The vast archive he was mining had belonged to Elliot Kastner, the ebullient American producer who helped transform MacLean the bestselling novelist – of HMS Ulysses, Ice Station Zebra and The Guns of Navarone fame – into MacLean the brilliant screenwriter.

Such was the writer’s international appeal he earned the unprecedented accolade of seeing his name appear above the title of blockbusters such as Where Eagles Dare, When Eight Bells Toll, Breakheart Pass and Fear Is The Key.

For a period of time, it seemed everything he wrote flew straight off his typewriter and into movie theatres around the world.

A total of 14 movies and four films-for-television were made from his books and the MacLean brand was pure box office – except for the one time the magic formula failed.

Mr Hannan stumbled upon it by chance after Kastner’s son, Dillon, heard about his project and emailed over his father’s entire store of papers, in the hope it might offer up something new.

There, buried in an innocuous file marked ‘Pirates’ which Mr Hannan had ignored for weeks, he found treasure – a high seas adventure filled with swashbuckling heroes and buccaneering brigands written at the peak of his powers by the ‘king of the action thrillers’.

He said: ‘It is a genuine lost manuscript by Alistair MacLean and, as far as I’m aware, nobody else knows it exists, which means it could be extremely valuable.

‘MacLean died in 1987 so this could be his first work in at least 40 years.

‘Anyone familiar with MacLean’s work can see his hand. It’s just unbelievable to get your hands on raw material by someone of his stature which no-one has ever seen before.

‘But such is the continuing popularity of MacLean around the world, the script could easily be worth £1 million if it was novelised into a hardback book and another £1 million for the paperback.

‘It could make a beautiful film. You would have to add some proper sword fights but the story is great and it could make a commercially viable film.

‘It’s got a light tone and a lot of humour – like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and they are making another of those – so it’s not as if there isn’t an appetite for pirate movies. The female character is terrific, someone with smarts who can deal with the man on her own terms.

‘Sandra Bullock, in her younger days, or someone like Sydney Sweeney would be perfect for the role.’

Mr Hannan said it had become common for famous authors such as Wilbur Smith, Dick Francis and Lee Child to keep their names to the fore by having someone else write their books.

Last year, he wrote to Child asking if he would be interested in novelising the script. ‘He said it was fantastic but he was retired and that was that,’ he said.

‘I know James Paterson finished off a Michael Crichton novel so it has been done and if you put someone like that and MacLean together, it would be terrific.’

The unlikely story of how MacLean came to write about pirates is revealed in Mr Hannan’s new book – King of the Action Thriller: Films from the Mind of Alistair MacLean.

In it, he explains the key role played by Kastner, an American agent who moved to the UK with ambitions to be a leading movie producer.

Kastner was familiar with MacLean’s books and was desperate to make a movie with him. The only problem was that the film rights to every book he had written were already sold.

Born the third of four sons of a Church of Scotland minister on April 21, 1922, in Glasgow, MacLean grew up to be a literary sensation.

Raised in a manse at Daviot, near Inverness, he spoke only Gaelic until the age of six.

After studying English at Glasgow University, he initially worked as a teacher in Rutherglen but found his voice after winning a newspaper short story competition in March 1954. That led to Scottish publisher William Collins offering a £1,000 advance for his first novel.

MacLean duly obliged and battered out a book, drawing vividly on his wartime service in the Arctic Convoys. The book, HMS Ulysses, proved a word-of-mouth sensation, shifting 250,000 hardback copies in the UK alone and outselling Gone With The Wind by five to one. He was an instant hit.

His next book, The Guns of Navarone, was another bestseller and, at MacLean’s peak in the 1960s, one of his tales was snapped up every 18 seconds, every day of the year.

Below: An article that appeared in The Dubrovnik Times.

“Lost Alistair MacLean Screenplay Discovered — Thriller Legend Once Called Dubrovnik Home” by Mark Thomas, Dubrovnik Times, March 9, 2026

In time, he would outsell Ian Fleming and, for a season, even Agatha Christie. It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling.

‘He wrote books very fast. The actual writing would take four or five weeks and all the books he wrote were sold to the movies as soon as he wrote them as they were cinematic and he told great stories,’ said Mr Hannan.

That might have put a dent in Kastner’s hopes of working with MacLean. Undaunted, he doorstepped MacLean in October 1965 and persuaded him to write him an original screenplay.

‘He said to MacLean, “I want a film like The Guns of Navarone, I want women in it, and I want action”,’ said Mr Hannan.

‘MacLean said, “I’ll write you a screenplay on one condition – you pay me for the screenplay and I keep the rights to novelise it afterwards”.’

Normally the producer would keep those rights, but wily MacLean changed the system, cutting out the publisher. Mr Kastner struck the deal, giving MacLean $200,000, a half-share of the profits and the book rights.

Within weeks, MacLean brought him a screenplay. It bore the rather insipid title of The Eagle’s Castle (soon changed to Where Eagles Dare), but the script packed a real punch.

‘Pretty much what he wrote appeared on screen with a few minor cuts,’ said Mr Hannan. ‘MacLean grasped the art of screenwriting very quickly.’

Kastner shrewdly bought up When Eight Bells Toll, which was his next book, pre- publication and commissioned two more screenplays.

One was ostensibly a Western, Breakheart Pass, and the other was a pirate-themed script, then known only as Caribbean. However, these slightly leftfield choices put him at odds with his publisher.

‘Because MacLean was known for writing a certain type of thriller, Collins weren’t keen on him writing Westerns or pirate films.’

For MacLean it was not so unusual, said Mr Hannan, as he liked to find inspiration in unusual settings. ‘He always wanted to try something new.

‘All his books are set in what in those days might be considered strange locales. Not like Graham Greene, who goes and finds a trouble zone, there’s no trouble zone in the Arctic unless MacLean creates one in Ice Station Zebra.

‘He tended to look for places which were different, where he could bring something new to the table – and I think that’s what he was doing with Breakheart Pass and Caribbean.’

Collins passed on Breakheart Pass, too, at least until Kastner put together the movie starring Charles Bronson more or less a decade later. The publisher then released a novelised version which became a huge bestseller.

But the same never happened for Caribbean, which MacLean twice refined, tightened and shortened.

Despite his endeavours, none of the studios bit and nor did Collins.

‘I’m sure at the time I would have had the same reaction as Collins, “You’ve got to be kidding”,’ said Mr Hannan.

‘But I knew Breakheart Pass had worked as a Western as I had seen it at the movies.

‘When I started reading this one, there was lots of clever stuff and it has all the hallmarks of a MacLean – there is always somebody who is being blackmailed, or someone who goes undercover and so on. It’s such a brilliant story I would love to see it as a book and a film.’

Caribbean follows the familiar MacLean template with the heroes battling huge odds, betrayals, breakneck plot twists and ending with a vast explosion, damnation for the baddies and sweet resolution for the good guys. To some extent the film world’s reluctance to touch Caribbean was a surprise, given the author’s global appeal.

‘MacLean had cracked something most people didn’t realise and his sales abroad were just phenomenal. It was reckoned if you had Alistair MacLean’s name on a film, people would come and see it regardless of who was in it or what genre it was,’ said Mr Hannan.

‘Film-makers started putting MacLean’s name above the title, and in huge letters, which was unheard of for a screenwriter to get that kind of billing. They used MacLean’s name to advertise his next film, using the tag, “From the mind of Alistair MacLean”.’

The project’s timing was also a problem as Hollywood entered a period of financial turmoil in the late-1960s. ‘They just couldn’t get the money. This was around 1969-70 and the movie industry was in incredible trouble, and nobody was really wanting to finance a big-budget pirate picture.

‘They hadn’t made any since the heyday of Burt Lancaster.’

When Kastner’s film rights lapsed, others tried their hand at churning out a swashbuckling feature. A succession of other screenwriters – including a young Robert Ludlum – tried their hand at fashioning a script and a weird mishmash of a movie limped onto the big screen in 1976.

Swashbuckler, starring Robert Shaw, was completely unrecognisable from the film envisaged by MacLean, whose name was, understandably, nowhere near it. It amounted to an act of movie-making piracy, said Mr Hannan. ‘It was garbage – done as a kind of spoof and it didn’t work at all. All MacLean’s clever stuff had gone.’

It was a rare blip in the MacLean conveyor belt of successes, although privately he was already suffering from the pressure of producing endless bestsellers.

It manifested itself in heavy drinking, which would eventually end his life.

Twice-divorced, he had reconciled with his first wife, Gisela, and was splitting his time between homes in Dubrovnik and Switzerland.

In 1985, health scares had prompted MacLean to give up drinking but, in January 1987, he relapsed and went on a bender with an Irish hotel porter which triggered several strokes.

He lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke.

‘He was an alcoholic,’ said Mr Hannan. ‘I think he started drinking heavily early in his career. It’s a very sore subject with his family.’

So much so, Mr Hannan has had little cooperation from them in his quest to promote MacLean’s lost manuscript. ‘It means nobody knows this script exists, apart from me and those I have chosen to tell. Maybe someday soon, someone will come knocking on my door and ask, “Can you show us what you’ve found?”

‘Well, what I found was a million-pound manuscript.

‘It’s like if somebody found a lost novel by Graham Greene, or Boris Pasternak. Similarly, this would rocket off the shelves without question.’

A lost MacLean manuscript may be a moneyspinner, but for whom? MacLean’s surviving relatives? Kastner’s family? MacLean’s publisher? Mr Hannan? Ultimately, this mystery thriller may well end in a courtroom drama, where intellectual property lawyers cross swords for a cut of the prize.

‘It’s not really clear who has ownership of the manuscript, but someone could be sitting on a multi-million-pound bounty,’ said Mr Hannan.

Perhaps one day, it will lead to a new film hitting our screens with Alistair MacLean’s name above the title? ‘Or my name,’ he laughs, ‘Brian Hannan’s version of Alistair MacLean’s Caribbean!’

■ King of the Action Thrillers: Films from the Mind of Alistair MacLean by Brian Hannan is out now, priced £28/$39.

SOURCES: Gavin Madeley, “Unearthed 60 years on, thriller king Alistair MacLean’s £1million pirate treasure,” Daily Mail, February 27, 2026; Brian Hannan, King of the Action Thriller (McFarland, 2026).

I’m delighted to announce that Munro Films has reissued Zulu Dawn on the big screen in a stunning 4K restoration.

Dates for UK showings you can find here:

https://www.munrofilmservices.co.uk/movie/zulu-dawn

Check out my review here:

https://themagnificent60s.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=32360&action=edit

He was the world’s best-selling author. He was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. He didn’t learn to speak English until he was six.

“I’m a businessman, not a writer,” claimed the self-effacing Alistair MacLean. While his narrative skills acquired readers in the millions, his understanding of the publishing and entertainment business made him the most business-savvy author since Charles Dickens invented the cliffhanging chapter ending and the author tour. MacLean had an instinctive understanding of synergy.

 In Hollywood, “property” was king. This was real estate of a different commercial kind, an item on which many fates depended, and which could be used to raise the millions of dollars required to make a movie. And, virtually alone among authors of his generation, and certainly unique among screenwriters, his name acquired marquee status, carrying above-the-credit status, often billed above actors involved, ensuring that  movies could be marketed as Alistair MacLean pictures, promising to deliver as certain an experience akin as those who embraced a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Alistair MacLean was unique among the authors who rose to bestselling prominence in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s in that his books were translated onto the screen at a startling rate, eighteen in total making the transition. Many became the biggest blockbusters of the day – The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) for example – while others like Puppet on a Chain (1970) and Fear Is the Key (1972) not only attracted a cult following but reinvented the chase picture. His books spanned World War Two and the Cold War, espionage often a consideration, but his gift for authenticity ensured he was as at home in the Wild West or a race track. 

A number of elements made him stand out from the other big-time bestsellers of the day. For a start, he didn’t rely like Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers) on sex, nor a retelling of history in the vein of James Michener (Hawaii), nor reliant in exploring institutions in the manner of Arthur Hailey (Hotel). He wasn’t interested in contemporary issues. He didn’t have a series character like James Bond, which allowed his thrillers to be cherry-picked by a far wider range of producers and Hollywood studios. Although his main characters were loners, often with a disfigurement or major flaw, they were sufficiently different to be interpreted by a very diverse number of actors.

You could argue that he re-purposed the thriller and invented the mission war novel. By the late 1950s the former was polarised between the critically-acclaimed novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and the sexed-up pulp of Mickey Spillane. MacLean narratives were defined by serious purpose, dedicated professionals rather than amateurs stumbling onto a conspiracy. The aftermath of the Second World War saw the advent of many mission pictures, which, mostly based on real events, were documentary or gung-ho in style. The Guns of Navarone ushered in a new type of mission book/film, short on exposition and training and overloaded with tension.

Authors rarely become brand names. They may become bestsellers, well-known to readers and within the book trade, perhaps appreciated by critics, and yet their fame rarely extends beyond the publication arena. Dickensian, Chandleresque, Shakespearian, Tolkienesque, as well as being shorthand for describing a type of character or a fictional world are, in fact, the biggest accolade that can be bestowed upon an author, that their work has transcended the specific arena of publishing and entered the vocabulary. You can be a multi-million-selling author and still the impact of your work will be limited – nobody has created adjectives around the door-stopping sagas of Leon Uris and James Michener or the thrillers of Lee Child. The contemporary ancillary opportunities available to the likes of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling have ensured they have become brands, their names above the titles of movies made from their novels promising a certain kind of experience and, in broader terms, creating a marketing goldmine.

For over two decades Alistair MacLean was a brand name. The only author whose sales came close was Agatha Christie and yet her mysteries, stewing away in an impossibly English landscape, lacked the full international penetration of the harder-edged thrillers of MacLean. Her two most famous characters, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, barely made a dent in her lifetime on the big screen. But the pull of MacLean was such that his name was not just above the title of the movies but emblazoned across the posters, as if that was all the marquee an audience required.

As Elliott Kastner, producer of Where Eagles Dare, put it, “Alistair MacLean is the first bestselling author equally talented as novelist and screenwriter,” said producer Elliott Kastner, “This puts him astride the entertainment industry like a golden colossus.” Peter Snell, producer of Bear Island (1979), concurred, “He’s simply an author everyone knows. The films have a guaranteed audience and that’s hard to beat, knowing you have an audience before you begin.”

Bestsellers had underpinned Hollywood from the outset, studios believing they were a safer bet because resulting films were pre-sold. But as directors became more demanding, their name superseding that of the author of the source material, to the extent that audiences often believe a movie has emerged from the imagination of a director rather than originating elsewhere (Poor Things, 2023, a case in point). So it is Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and Francis Ford’s Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).

But after the first few adaptations of MacLean thrillers, it was never Brian G. Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare or Geoffrey Reeves’s Puppet on a Chain or Don Sharp’s Bear Island. These movies were identified with their author.  From the outset his films attracted variable budgets – very big for The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra (1968), the last two designated 70mm roadshows – but considerably smaller for The Secret Ways (1961) and The Satan Bug (1965).

In later films, it was apparent that the author’s name was as big a draw as any of the stars, and that you could make a film based on one of his books without going to the expense of recruiting a major marquee name – George Maharis, Sven Bertil-Taube, Anthony Hopkins and David Birney were virtual unknowns when cast, respectively, in the leading roles in The Satan Bug, Puppet on a Chain, When Eight Bells Toll and Caravan to Vaccares (1974).

Audiences knew what they were going to get and if a director added more exciting action sequences as with, for example, the speedboat chase through the canals of Amsterdam in Puppet on a Chain or car chase in Fear Is the Key, that was a bonus.

English was a foreign language for MacLean. Though born in Glasgow’s East End, in 1922, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, he was brought up in a small town in the Highlands of Scotland and spoke Gaelic until, aged five, he attended school. Drafted into the Royal Navy at 19 on what proved a five-year stint, seeing action in the North Sea, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and the Far East, these experiences providing authentic material for several books.

Post-war, a schoolteacher in Glasgow, he tried his hand at short stories to generate extra income, and after winning a competition in a national newspaper was encourage to write H.M.S. Ulysses, the tale of  a doomed wartime convoy. A massive bestseller shifting an unprecedented 250,000 copies in hardback, the film rights selling for £30,000, the combined income allowed him to become a full-time writer, his prospects cemented by the publication in 1957 of The Guns of Navarone, 450,000 copies sold in six months and film rights purchased by Carl Foreman who planned a multi-million-dollar star-laden picture for Columbia.

However, the first movie to roll off what would become the MacLean bandwagon was a lesser-known smaller-budgeted affair, The Secret Ways (1961). Thereafter, films based on his works appeared at regular intervals. For an author MacLean was unusually involved in the film-making process. Most writers, perhaps attracted by Hollywood mystique and the hefty sums paid out for film rights, generally entertain some interest, at least initially, in participating in the movie machine, but, equally usually, become quickly disaffected by the ruthlessness of a business where the screenwriter is on the lowest rung of the ladder.

William Goldman is usually held up as the best example of someone who straddled both fields with equal success, but of his original works only Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was a big movie hit, and his fame largely rested on adaptations – Harper (1966), All the President’s Men (1975) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). You could as easily argue that he learned from MacLean to write books that were cinematic and enjoy the financial triple whammy of book sales, selling the film rights and writing the screenplay.

American agent-turned-producer Elliott Kastner (Harper, 1966), who had set up an office in London. Kastner invited the novelist to write an original screenplay. It’s fair to say that MacLean in creating Where Eagles Dare plundered his previous mission opus The Guns of Navarone, but jacked up the suspense and action.  Kastner then signed up for another two original screenplays as well as novels.  

While The Guns of Navarone set MacLean on his way as a hot Hollywood property, it was the experience of Where Eagles Dare that created the legend of an author whose commanded such a global following that audiences were guaranteed to turn up for movies based on his thrillers. Over the space of 18 years, from The Secret Ways in 1961 to Bear Island in 1979, a colossal 13 of his books were turned into movies, an extraordinary strike rate.

These 13 movies plus another five made for big- and small-screen are covered in this book. Each chapter focuses on one film, detailing its production, casting, and filming and then analysing both the film and the changes made to the book. The final chapter is a big surprise, which I won’t reveal here, and there’s a chapter devoted to what happened to the other books bought by studios or producers but never made – such as the involvement of Lord Puttnam in an aborted effort to make HMS Ulysses – and there’s a section on box office.

I’ll be speaking at various book festivals if you want to come along and meet me. The first of these is the Boswell Book Festival at Dumfries House in Scotland which runs May 8-10, 2026.

King of the Action Thriller, Films from the Mind of Alistair MacLean (McFarland Publishing) by Brian Hannan and, as ever, with copious and often rare illustrations, is available from all good bookshops and online via Amazon and other such traders as well as on Kindle.