I saw this on television one Christmas Eve when I was in my teens and it is my favourite ghost story. The story by MR James has been altered with director's licence by Laurence Clark and for once the changes chime in perfectly to make this more than a story of an obsessed academic and it becomes a poignant story of a working class clerk with talent and ambition to become an archaeologist. It becomes a story of class conflict and alienation.
Peter Vaughan was at his best in the role of the unemployed man who looks for and finds treasure that professionals have been looking for in vain. The setting in Victorian Norfolk is accurate and atmospheric and it gains from the involvement of another man who is a guest, perhaps not initially drawn to the clerk but forced in the course of the story to act through sympathy and later horror.
Peter Vaughan was at his best in the role of the unemployed man who looks for and finds treasure that professionals have been looking for in vain. The setting in Victorian Norfolk is accurate and atmospheric and it gains from the involvement of another man who is a guest, perhaps not initially drawn to the clerk but forced in the course of the story to act through sympathy and later horror.