RW>RN> You may be right.  I haven't seen the movie in a long time, but if
RW>RN> they show it again, I'm going to record it.
 
RW> Whoever the guy was, spent a lot of time on the pier, studying the ocean,
RW> sun and stars.
 
I tracked down an external review of it which follows, although I am loathe
to print anything over one screen full and try to discourage others from
doing it, but for some sort of accuracy aimed at the edification of our
users here, I have to print the review.  Here it is:
 
In an age where technological marvels are so common they verge on the
blase, it's a particular pleasure to be transported back to an era where
keeping an accurate track of time was a matter of life and death, and
represented a seemingly insurmountable scientific hurdle. The A&E
four-hour telepic "Longitude" tells the story of the creation of
the marine chronometer, what today we most casually refer to as the watch.
In a handsomely mounted, large-scale production based on the book by Dava
Sobel, writer-director Charles Sturridge ("Gulliver's Travels")
provides a remarkably detailed history lesson, and certainly promotes to
hero status one of the great underdog inventors of all time, the
carpenter-cum-clock maker John Harrison.
 
In 1714, a shipwreck caused by faulty navigation claimed the lives of 2,000
British sailors, prompting Parliament to announce a bountiful prize of
œ20,000 to the first man who could solve the problem of calculating
longitude at sea.
 
What was required wasn't much of a mystery: Longitude could be determined
as long as one knew the time on ship and the time at the home port. It
certainly sounds simple enough, but this conundrum puzzled even Isaac
Newton, who considered it a near impossibility.
 
Enter our unlikely hero, a rural carpenter of humble origins with an
affinity for perfect time keeping. As played with nary a false beat by
Michael Gambon ("The Singing Detective"), Harrison is an
enthusiastic craftsman lacking in the polished graces he needs to deal with
the stately, pompous members of the Board of Longitude, who are charged
with overseeing the prize. Composed primarily of astronomers (most
scientists believed they would be the ones to solve the dilemma), the board
is not eager to recognize the accomplishments of the self-educated Harrison
nor do the members have any real idea of the intricacies of his painstaking
work.
 
Over a period of decades, Harrison builds a series of clocks, beginning
with a gorgeously designed piece meant to withstand the vagaries of ocean
travel and keep on ticking. When Harrison goes to sea to test it, though,
he discovers that his monstrously large contraption is not a practical
solution and he immediately begins work on another. Ultimately, he
determines to make a timepiece that can fit in a navigator's hand -- let's
call it the original Palm Pilot.
 
But even when the work seems done, the board throws obstacles in his way,
demanding ever-escalating proof in an effort to keep the carpenter from
outshining them. Sturridge and a fine ensemble of supporting players
including John Wood as Edmund Halley, Brian Cox as Lord Morton, Simon West
as Harrison's arch enemy and competitor Neville Maskelyne, and Nicholas
Rowe as King George manage to make the bureaucratic manipulations dramatic.
 
So many of the members die off along the way that it becomes impossible to
keep track of the wigged characters, but their resilient refusal to
recognize the solution staring at them remains comically consistent. By the
end, Harrison has become a crotchety old man, ceding much of the more
grueling work to his son William (Ian Hart).
 
While Sturridge does an outstanding job of bringing the 18th century world
to life, especially in the scenes at sea, he makes a significant error in
pairing Harrison's story with the tale of Rupert Gould, played by Jeremy
Irons, who rediscovered Harrison's clocks in the 1920s and restored them to
working condition, ultimately becoming a curator at the maritime museum
where the clocks are housed. Gould has an internal struggle of his own,
battling nervous breakdowns and managing to survive a scandalous divorce to
make a name for himself in the early days of TV.
 
Gould was barely a footnote in Sobel's book, but Sturridge gives Gould's
story almost equal weight to Harrison's. While this allows for some
graceful editing by Peter Coulson, the interweaving device never works, and
constantly gives the sense that Sturridge is going for some deep
existential connection between the men that never comes through.
 
Harrison's story is external and driven by a single motivation -- to win
the prize -- and it contains a variety of tones to keep it interesting. But
Gould's is a very internal and muddily plotted story, making an already
lengthy tale a bit more languorous than it needs to be. Even upon
reflection it doesn't add much to Harrison's story, which is the truly
fascinating one.
 
 
Not too much of a conclusion attached to this review, but that fact pales
in comparison to what the A&E network has become.  They used to show
Arts & Entertainment, which is how they got their name, but they are a
far cry from that now.
 
 
Regards,
 
Roger

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