Yeh, no, not that The Bourne Identity, but the other one. The original one from 1988 starring Richard Chamberlain as Jason Bourne, in a TV two-parter (three hours without adverts, four with) that also got a theatrical run – so a hit.
This adaptation doesn’t do anything radical with Robert Ludlum’s original story. Man washes up on a beach in the south of France with amnesia and is nursed back to health by an alcoholic local doctor (Denholm Elliott). Neither man has any idea who this mystery person is, but telltale signs start to emerge – the amnesiac’s ability to strip down and re-assemble a gun in seconds, his knowledge of several foreign languages, evidence of plastic surgery, scars where bullets have been removed and so on. When strangers suddenly start trying to kill the new arrival, his survival instinct kicks in and he goes on the run, taking with him – Hitchcock style – an innocent woman who just happened to get into the line of fire.
It’s an ingenious chase plot – the who, what and why of Jason Bourne is something we discover at the same time as he does, though obviously we’re ahead if we’ve already seen Matt Damon doing all this in the Doug Liman film. And, as in the Liman film, a second string plot arrives soon enough, to fill us in on background detail – about the shadowy Treadstone organisation that’s the alma mater of Bourne and agents like him. Though the question remains – has Bourne gone rogue? Is he the bad guy or is it Treadstone?
Without doing a complete compare-and-contrast job, because this is Chamberlain, some fan service must be paid to the legion of ladies who have been following him since he was the dishy doctor in 191 episodes of Dr Kildare in the early 1960s. So explains why Jaclyn Smith, who plays Bourne’s unwilling female companion, runs her fingers through Chamberlain’s chest hair more than seems necessary in an action thriller. As things go slo-mo and soft focus, it’s a good time to grab an ice cream.
Smith, seven years on from the end of Charlie’s Angels, is pretty good as the frightened but capable Marie. So is Chamberlain as the bewildered Jason Bourne. And the film itself cracks along for the first hour or so, bombing about between Marseille, Zurich, Paris and New York. Money has been spent on locations and though there’s the odd unscheduled glimpse of members of the public gawping like heifers at movie stars and camera crews, it’s a slick production under the cool hand of director Roger Young, who’s good with the pacing.
Did Mercedes have a product-placement deal? It looks like it. There are a lot of their cars in this movie. They’re solid and dependable, like – grinding gears on this segway – the support cast of redoubtables, starting with the always welcome Elliott and continuing down the table with the likes of Anthony Quayle, Donald Moffat, Yorgo Voyagis and Peter Vaughan.
At 54, Chamberlain is a good couple of decades older than Matt Damon was when he played Bourne, but he’s in good shape and the action stuff is plausible. Losing an hour of running time did Damon and director Doug Liman a favour, forcing them to streamline the plot, telescope events and up the pace. Here, it takes a long time and too much luck before Chamberlain’s Bourne has finally worked out who he is and why everyone wants him dead. And the plot strand featuring international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, absent in the Liman movie, only slows things down here.
All that said, this is a fine entertainment for a duvet-day afternoon and it’s even available on YouTube, or was when I last looked, though it’s a bit fuzzy and it’s no way to treat the fine cinematography of Tony Pierce-Roberts, the go-to man on all those gorgeous Merchant Ivory productions (A Room with a View, Howards End, etc).
The Bourne Identity – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
