Geheimring Nippon

It could have been good. An attractive cast .Great location photography. Exotic setting . BUT somehow this film is dull dull dull. I'm not sure of the reason. The dialogue is so tedious and stiffly delivered that individual scenes seem to take a century. Then there's the grotesque over acting of, the usually reliable, Edmund O'Brien, who is here reduced to a terrible Bogart impersonation. Like a vampire . Like a Bela Lugosi, jowly vampire, he sucks the life out of every scene he's in. Joan Collins, a beautiful woman, is photographed to look like Queen Elizabeth the second, and Robert Wagner can't project beyond his wavy hair.

Stopover Tokyo from 1957 is a film based on a Mr. Moto story, if you can believe it, and stars Robert Wagner, Joan Collins, Edmond O'Brien, and Larry Keating.

Wagner plays Mark Fannon, who plays an intelligence agent who goes to Tokyo to stop the assassination of the American High Commissioner (Keating) at a ceremony for eternal peace. Joan Collins works as a ticket agent at the airport, and she seems to keep pretty loose hours.

Edmond O'Brien poses as an American businessman, but in reality, he's on the side of the Communists and wants to make sure the assassination takes place.

The film is in beautiful color with wonderful location shots, and let's face it, the stars are pretty dazzling too. However, the film is boring. It seems to have cost some money, but little attention was given to the script.

It is hard for me to believe that Joan Collins was scheduled to play Cleopatra when you realize what 20th Century Fox threw at her, including Sea Wife and The Wayward Bus. However, probably by the time of Cleopatra, her stock had risen somewhat.

You know, I'd say that about the only thing that could've possibly saved this piffling, little, 1957,"soap-opera-of-an-espionage-movie" from sinking under that sheer weight of its stars' inflated egos would've been the crucial appearance of everyone's favorite 50-meter monster, Godzilla.

Yeah. If Godzilla had suddenly shown up on the scene (and, once more, crushed Tokyo, but good, with his big, clumsy feet) that would've been a deliciously perfect way to generate some desperately needed interest for the likes of this utterly dry, drab and thoroughly sappy melodrama.

I would've loved to have seen actors like pretty-boy Robert Wagner, and cute-kittenish Joan Collins, and bored-bloated Edmond O'Brien running for their very lives down the streets of Tokyo while being hotly pursued by good, old Godzilla.

Believe me, Stopover Tokyo really was that bloody boring. And only an appearance by Godzilla could've saved it.

"Mark Fannon" (Robert Wagner) is on his way from San Francisco to Seoul when he is told that he has to stay in Tokyo because he has no Letter of Entry to go any further. At least that is what he wants people to believe. In reality, Mark is a mid-level secret agent who is on an assignment to deliver some coded information concealed in some magazines to another agent named "Mr. Nobika" (Solly Nakamura). It's then that he learns about an assassination plot on an as yet unknown person by communists agents. Not long afterward he is almost killed and a day later Mr. Nokika is shot to death--leaving a young daughter named "Koko" (Reiko Oyama) as an orphan. Needless to say, his first concern is to find a way to take care of Koko while at the same time trying to obtain the magazines that he gave to Mr. Nobika before the communists can get their hands on it. It's at this time that a young woman by the name of "Tina Llewellyn" (Joan Collins) gets involved due to her romantic relationship to another American agent named "Tony Barrett" (Ken Scott) who happens to be a mutual acquaintance of Mark. But with so many things going on it now becomes a race to find out who the communists intend to kill in order to somehow stop the assassination. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a film that definitely had potential due to a reasonably good cast and plot but the lackluster script and the director (Richard L. Breen) simply proved inadequate for the task at hand. Likewise, the lack of chemistry between Robert Wagner and Joan Collins certainly didn't help either. In any case, while I don't necessarily consider this to be a bad movie by any means, it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been and because of that I have rated it accordingly. Average.

It's a 1950s Cinemascope film with Robert Wagner, and it's our first chance to see him in a modern-dress picture since the excellent A Kiss Before Dying. The decor and locations are similarly eye-worthy to Kiss, but the photography is toned down and some sets made to look shopworn to suggest a recovering Japan, at which the film succeeds. The clothes and automobiles more than compensate.

Stopover Tokyo is memorable for being the one that Joan Collins was contractually obligated to appear in after the studio's promise that she would work with Roberto Rossellini fell through. Was anyone expecting genius from a film adapted from a Mr. Moto novel to satisfy another contractual obligation? Just enjoy the ride, its a post-war film as aesthetically satisfying as The Crimson Kimono, without the burden of pretentious auteur direction. (They thought so little of it that they let the screenwriter direct.)

If you want a better Wagner film in Cinemascope, see A Kiss Before Dying. If you want a better Joan Collins role, see Turn the Key Softly. Otherwise, stop blaming everything on Edmond O'Brien.