The popular novels of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, pre-published in the form of serials at the bottom of the last page of the daily press, made the beautiful evenings of a television still in black and white.
The pioneer directors of the small screen reached a very wide audience by adapting
Rocambole
by Ponson du Terrail,
Rouletabille
by Gaston Leroux or
Belphégor
, written in 1927 by Arthur Bernède.
In the mid-1970s, Marcel Cravenne added his name to the list of these directors by filming
The Bloody Doll
and
The Murder Machine .
after Gaston Leroux.
He entrusts the adaptation to Robert Scipion, a journalist-writer, who is also a verbicrucist whose grids are published in several daily newspapers.
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The six 52-minute episodes were broadcast from September 17, 1976. Success was immediate.
At the end of the year, the leaders of the second channel ask Cravenne and Scipion to do it again with an equally fantastic story.
This is how they propose
The Island of Thirty Coffins
by Maurice Leblanc.
It is, originally, an adventure of Arsène Lupine like no other.
It appears only in the second part of a novel published in 1919, in the form of a serial, before being published, three years later, in two volumes:
Véronique
and
La pierre miraculouse
.
Critics claim that it is "the
most violent, the darkest,
At the end of a particularly dramatic chapter, he manages, not without difficulty, to save Véronique.
Cravenne and Scipio begin by wondering about this final twist which seems to have been imagined with the sole aim of justifying the presence of a gentleman burglar, very popular with readers.
Preferring to play the fantasy card, the adapters decide to change the ending: Lupine will not intervene to help the heroine, Véronique d'Hergemont in her fight against Count Vorski, a dangerous mythomaniac whom she had the misfortune of marry.
Having gone in search of a father and a son whom she believed to be dead, she finds herself in Brittany on the island of Sarek, which the inhabitants of the region call "The island of thirty coffins".
"French Survival"
Thus begins a nightmare that will live, in turn, the viewers.
Those who were then teenagers have kept, in a corner of their memory, the fear provided by the six episodes of what we would today call a “French survival”.
The choice of performers, carefully established by Marcel Cravenne, has particularly contributed to the success of this mini-series.
Count Vorski, played by Jean-Paul Zehnecker, already present in
The Bloody Doll
, confronts Claude Jade whose name immediately imposed itself.
The purity of the face, the innocence of the gaze of the muse of François Truffaut, will give birth to a character with a weak appearance, who, over the twists and turns, will prove to be particularly tenacious.
She wants to know the secret of the island, even if it means losing her life there.
Madelen offers you to discover or rediscover this soap opera where the tension never drops, thanks to a perfectly constructed story by Robert Scipion, is an example of writing and staging that today's authors and directors cannot should be sure to follow.
Forty years after its first adaptation for television, it is the subject of a new reading on France2, with Virginie Ledoyen and Charles Berling.
