Cyril Frankel (1975)
Adapted by Robin Estridge from his own novel, this is a stupid, dull international thriller – with ‘adult’ overtones. A cool but basically terrified killer sets out to assassinate an exiled political leader, who’s attempting to return to his (unnamed) native land. The would-be assassin is meant to display incredible flair and insight – he’s a cross between Che Guevara and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – but Bekim Fehmiu, who plays him, looks just ill and tired. Dirk Bogarde is unappealingly expert in the main role. (He says he made this film as light relief after Death in Venice and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.) Bogarde’s means of suggesting bitter, introspective seediness are so perfectly economical that he can make a character out of no more than a fastidious hand movement. He’s so quietly, icily forbidding, however, that he isn’t convincing as someone who could fool five supposedly intelligent people into believing he’s an avuncular MI5 man. Timothy Dalton continues to look like a promising actor: you wish he could be given opportunities to deliver on the promise. After Bogarde, Dalton is much better than anyone else in the cast but his role, as a cynical Foreign Office employee, is repellent: the script sees this character, because he’s homosexual and posh, as the devil incarnate. Dalton affects (with aplomb) sinister, ever-so-clipped diction to underline what lies behind his pretty boy looks. (Like Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served?, Dalton’s character is ravenously unselective. He talks ad nauseam about beefcake.) The AA certificate is explained by Cyril Frankel’s throwing in a couple of nude scenes for one of the actresses (Nicole Calfan) and sniggering bad language – or the implication of bad language. Desultorily attempting a crossword puzzle, Dalton tosses a clue to Bogarde: ‘Paranoid policeman with delusions of grandeur. Four letters – C-blank-blank-T ….’ (Clot?) With Ava Gardner (atrocious) and Frederic Forrest, who plays a brashly heroic American journalist. His character is established by his saying things like ‘The hell we did’ and ‘Let’s go!’ After the honourable exile’s eventual assassination at Vienna airport, Forrest is also required to ask, ‘What sort of people are we?’, and to burst into manly tears.
[1970s]
