The Snow Goose

Richard Harris - Philip Rhayadar
Jenny Agutter - Frith

Based upon Paul Gallico’s delicate novel, Patrick Garland’s Golden Globe winning The Snow Goose is a stark and hauntingly beautiful drama set amongst the striking scenery of the Essex salt marshes during the early years of WWII. A bearded Richard Harris leads the modest cast with his sensitive portrayal of tormented soul Philip Rhayader, a lonely misshapen man shunned by society but with a great love of life; Harris isn’t overly bitter of his treatment and expresses his compassion through his paintings and love of the waterfowl that surround him. Harris is ably supported by the waiflike Jenny Agutter as Frith, who radiates the requisite amount of youthful innocence and naivety, and won a best supporting actress Emmy Award for her performance.

Set during the late 1930s, Philip Rhayadar (Richard Harris) is a disfigured recluse living in a disused lighthouse on Essex’s Great Marsh. Rhayadar is a conservationist who loves the marsh wildfowl and whilst out walking one day encounters Frith (Jenny Agutter), an orphan girl embracing an injured Canadian goose shot by hunters.

Rhayadar takes the injured bird back to his lighthouse where they tend to the animals injuries. He informs Frith that she is the first visitor to his home in years and she replies that the locals warn people off visiting him – and thus an unlikely friendship is formed. Soon, winter has passed and the by the spring the fit again goose migrates north leaving behind a heartbroken Frith. For two years Rhayadar saw neither Frith or the goose and loneliness once again descended on his life.

Soon news reaches Rhayadar that the German’s have invaded Poland and that we are at war; he quickly sends off a letter to the local civil defence offering his services to the Observer Corps but is reprehensibly rejected. Meanwhile, after three years of solitude both Frith and the snow goose return to Rhayadar’s life and bring him a short spell of contentment and happiness, but when the news breaks that the British Expeditionary Force are trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, Rhayadar seizes his chance to prove himself.