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Down in the German bunker and up in the New York skyscraper and sideways in the Geneva ferry, five minutes in and the John Frankenheimer-George Axelrod reunion is already in full swing. Brandy and bullets establish the MacGuffin at the end of the war, four decades later it is dropped in the lap of the bewildered architect (Michael Caine), "foreign-born American citizen" and sudden heir to a few billions. Intergenerational amends on a globe-trotting mission bump up against a potential new Reich, with exposition by Michael Lonsdale so smooth that a bloody Hitchcockian sleight-of-hand barely fazes him ("The world is full of lunatics shooting at each other"). The Manchurian Candidate humorously recomposed in London and Berlin, down to Victoria Tennant stepping out of the red-light district as a dead-ringer for Janet Leigh. Canted angles on slippery identities, it could be Reed's Vienna from The Third Man but for Neo-Nazis and sex clubs—Weimar decadence transmuted into a merry celebration of the patron-saint of prostitutes, Frankenheimer seizes it to move the hero through a series of ribald chases. "Assumption, Mr. Holcroft, is, as they say in my profession, the mother of fuck-up." Action profuse and dynamic, plus plenty of aperçus along the way: Lilli Palmer in poignant farewell to point up the link to Lang's Cloak and Dagger, Mario Adorf in sweaty Beethoven shag, above all Anthony Andrews revealing the Hitlerine megalomania under the mustached blandness. Horse-riding after hours and the pistol that improves one's eloquence, throughout an air of Robbe-Grillet. "Please, do not attempt anything too vividly cinematic." Hotel room and rainy night set the stage for the emotional pain of spy games, just a tilted camera and Caine's eyes. With Bernard Hepton, Richard Münch, Alexander Kerst, and Carl Rigg.
--- Fernando F. Croce |