I took a dip into Spy Thriller territory yesterday - the initial wobbly Frederick Forsyth/John le Carré/Alistair MacLean adaptations. I used to enjoy reading these novels in my early teens.
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The Odessa File - (1974)
I remember reading this a lifetime ago. I also remember cheating in English class by pretending to read it for an assignment when I'd actually already read it, and feeling guilty when the teacher lauded my achievement of roaring my way to the halfway point of the novel while I was actually only pretending to read it for the first time having recently already read it. I thought to myself "I'm probably pretending to read this too fast." It really didn't matter, because my family were moving to the country before the assignment was due. My conversation with the teacher probably went something like this :
"So, you going to finish reading
The Odessa File?"
"Yeah. I'm going...it's great...it's a great....yeah, I'm going to read it..."
"You seem to have been roaring through that. I thought you'd finish it in
days, but since then you've slowed down considerably."
"Yeah. I mean it was really...I had a...lately...."
"Anyway, make sure you finish it! It has a great ending."
"Oh yeah. That's a....I mean it really....I'm loving it...."
Awkward guilty conversations still haven't improved for me.
But the movie! The movie is only a little bit boring in places - there's an investigative phase where you don't really feel Peter Miller's (Jon Voight - with a German accent) life is in danger, but he does a lot of travelling around and questioning person after person - I feel like the adaptation is nearly too faithful to the book, and that an action scene or two could have been invented - this runs 130 minutes, and we have to wade through a feature's worth of investigation before the life-risking and exciting stuff starts to up the ante. (The poster hints at the film's most famous moment, half way through when Miller is pushed in front of a subway train.) It's dogged and faithful in ways that don't translate really well to cinema, but it redeems itself somewhat with a really satisfying ending (Maximilian Schell really kills it as an unapologetic former SS officer trying to claim Germany's economic successes are somehow related to the killing off of inferior Germans during Hitler's reign - slimy and calculating while Miller holds a certain ace up his sleeve.) I liked it okay enough.
6/10
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The Looking Glass War - (1970)
Just look at that slightly tarnished poster for
The Looking Glass War - how many original intact posters are out there? I mean, it's pretty obscure, right? Anyway, this movie had moments where it
soared, but unfortunately as a whole it's a little clunky. America's answer to Alain Delon, Christopher Jones, features as lead character Leiser - A Polish misfit recruited and forcefully molded into a spy for a shadowy group of British spooks. One of them, John Avery, is played by a young Anthony Hopkins. This doesn't play the whole spy genre straight and instead delights in unusual scenes where characters do things you'd never expect them to do - especially Leiser, who unravels as soon as he crosses the border into Soviet-dominated East Germany. I'd love to rate it solely on it's great moments - but the overall package is disjointed. There no sense of rhythm or pace, or sense of a satisfying whole. Despite that, I really enjoyed my time with
The Looking Glass War. Hopkins is really good in this. Christopher Jones looks great - and it's a shame he quit acting on the cusp of superstardom (some say part of the reason for that was the murder of close friend Sharon Tate.)
6/10
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When Eight Bells Toll - (1971)
Okay,
When Eight Bells Toll sucked. All the more amazing to think that this was meant to knock James Bond off his perch immediately after the retirement of Sean Connery from his iconic role. Yes -
Philip Calvert (played gamely by Anthony Hopkins) was supposed to supersede James Bond. Producers Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin were so sure they were onto a winner that they commissioned more Calvert novels from Alistair MacLean (my DVD is telling me it's Alistaire MacLain - but it's not - who was in charge of designing
that DVD cover?) Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like James Bond - Philip Calvert. "The name's Calvert?
Philip Calvert?" Care for a brandy old chap? Anyway, he's a superspy sent to find out where a bunch of pirated ships with gold bullion on them went - and I don't know if he has a license to kill, but he does kill
so many people before declaring "This is the only logical place to purposely sink a ship!" and by Jove, he's right somehow. So he kills everybody except for the luscious big-breasted baddie who he amazingly gives a bar of gold to and sends on her way. Hey - if you do Philip Calvert you get concessions. He's having to compete with James Bond - he needs all of the sexual help he can get. What really makes this a third-rate James Bond rip-off is the
horrible location we're stuck with for the duration - a cloudy, rock-strewn ugly Scottish coast with nothing remotely cinematic to wow us with. In the meantime Calvert breaks necks, shoots, stabs, drowns and rams his boat into as many people as he can in-between bouts of bedding the lady with the big boobs who he knows is a baddie but can't resist. No quips - just Hopkins and his curt "I don't have dandruff!" which may have become Philip Calvert's famous catchphrase.
4/10
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