La lista de Adrian Messenger

An annoyingly smug mystery which isn't a tenth as clever as it seems to think it is. A "master of disguise" (who always looks exactly like the famous star portraying him no matter how much makeup he's under) is killing persons whose names appear on a secret list. It's up to dapper detective George C. Scott to solve the case, a task made relatively easy by a script filled with shameless contrivance and jaw dropping leaps of logic reminiscent of the way Adam West used to solve the Riddler's clues on Batman. In an attempt to lure audiences to this artificial, parlor-game excrement, the film-makers included the gimmick of having 4 other famous stars appear in cameos under heavy makeup and daring the viewer to identify them. The only one who speaks in his own voice is instantly recognizable, while two others cheat by being dubbed and one simply keeps his mouth shut. When the whole mess has come to a merciful end, the stars rip off their bad latex Halloween mask makeup and wink at the camera as if to say, "Wasn't that clever?" If you're still awake, your answer will be, "No."

When you take into account the enormous amount of talent involved on both sides of the camera, this is surely one of the most inexcusably bad films of all time.

The handful of top-notch films directed by John Huston, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to Prizzi's Honor in 1986, has always been evened out by more than his share of clunkers -- mediocre material half-heartedly helmed (The Bible, In This Our Life, Judge Roy Bean, Annie). But what was his thinking behind The List of Adrian Messenger? A modestly entertaining murder mystery of the fusty old English school, it's trumped up with foolish gimmickry that's irrelevant to the movie but was vital to its marketing. A starry cast -- Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra -- wanders around under false-faces for, with one exception, no discernible reason (they all end up looking like late Sean Connery). So sitting through it is to join the celebrity hunt (preferable, at any rate, to the fox hunts which eat up the film footage).

The plot proper concerns a series of fatal "accidents" that leads George C. Scott, sans mask and makeup, to uncover a betrayal in wartime Burma and the scion of an aristocratic family long vanished into the Canadian west. But Huston loses interest in the puzzle with unseemly haste -- as do we. Stifling yawns, we wait for the "stars" -- most of whom contribute little more than walk-ons -- to peel off their disguises, winking and smirking insufferably at the camera.

I wanted to say something in praise of the masked star gimmick - something I haven't seen anyone else mention.

Rather than viewing the various "heavily made-up" characters as a spot the star contest, look at it from the other side and, suddenly, the gimmick becomes an ingenious way of covering up the killer - hiding him from the audience. Since the filmmakers knew they couldn't find a way to make a full head latex "invisible" to the audience, (and presumably didn't want to go with a completely other actor) they went the Purloined Letter route and threw in a bunch of such "spottable" characters to keep the audience from guessing which one was the killer.

Much like the movie The Spanish Prisoner - where every person seems somehow fakey UNTIL you watch from the viewpoint of "spot the scam" and realize the EVERYONE sounds fake (i.e., like they're scamming someone) so you CAN'T spot the con artists.

Brilliant, really. In both cases.

(There are Spoilers) Visiting his good friend novelist Adrian Messanger, John Merivale, former WWII British intelligence officer and member of the secretive MI5 agency Anthony Gerthryn, George C. Scott, is puzzled by Messengers' somewhat cryptic sheet of paper that he gave him to investigate. The paper has ten names on it all seemingly having nothing to do with each other.

It's not long afterword that when Messenger goes on a business flight to Canada that things begin to get a bit clearer for Gerthryn when the plane that Messenger is on suddenly explodes, from a time bomb that was secretly placed on it, in mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean. It just happened that Messenger survived the airplane crash by shearing a raft with another passenger of the doomed flight WWII ace French intelligence man Raoul La Borg, Jacques Roux. La Borg who took down, in his photographic mind, the dying mans last words that reveal, if deciphered, the truth about his list and the person who's not only responsible for his impending death but the deaths of all the persons, some who at the time were still alive, on it!

Despite its novelty of guessing just who are the actors, Burt Lancaster Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis etc. etc., playing in the movie with them having very obvious disguises. It's only Kirk Douglas as George Brougham, together with some half dozen other disguises, and Robert Mitchum as James Slattery who had any real role in the movies plot line. Instead of just showing up in the end and, when the film was finally over, taking off their disguise revealing to the startled viewers just who they were playing.

Gethryn and Borg who both worked together in WWII against the Nazis team up to get to the bottom of what the late Adrian Messenger meant in his list of names and as the two check out the names one at a time.It turns out that all of them, with he exception of James Slattery, died mysteriously over the last five years. Trying to get to Slattery before the killer did the nutty and paranoid rummy gave the two the run around. Claiming that he's James brother Joe, who doesn't exist not who he really is James. Which in the end, with Gethryn & Borg giving up on him, lead to his death when the killer pushed him, wheelchair and all, off the docks and into the bay where he drowned.

The killer***SPOILERS***finally reveals himself at a fox-hunt at the estate of the Marquis of Gleneyre, Clive Brook, as his long dead brothers son George Brougham. And gaining his confidence and being excepted by the Marquis as a member of the family he then manically plans to do him in on the next fox-hunt. Where Brougham sets a trap for the old man, who's expected to be riding on the lead, at the end of hunt.

It now becomes crystal clear that the reason that the murderous George Brougham had murdered all the people on Messengers' list, as well as Messenger himself. In that they all knew about Bougham's treachery toward his fellow POW's whom they all happened to be. The one thing that all the men on Messengers' list had in common in being POW's in a brutal Japanese prison camp in Burma during WWII. With having them gotten out of the way Bougham is now trying to murder the Maquis of Gleneyer and make it look like an accident so he, as his nephew, can inherited his estate and all the riches and royalties that goes along with it. But there's one or two things that he never figured on and thats Gethryn & Borg and that in the end would be his undoing.

John Huston displays an indiscreet lack of subtlety, taxing our tolerance with a somewhat modern English whodunit with an extra publicity stunt: Numerous major Hollywood actors are announced to appear in the film, but are all thickly concealed in John Chambers' make-up design: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis as an organ-grinder, Burt Lancaster as an old woman, Frank Sinatra as a gypsy horse-trader. Their identities are exposed to the audience at the very end of the film, when each star strips off his masquerade. Actually, only Douglas (by far the most interesting performance) and Mitchum do any real acting beneath their heaps of collodion and crepe hair. The others just walk on to shoot their brief, tacked-on unveilings at a salary of $75,000 each, while being doubled in the film itself. The film even further cheats by often dubbing their voices with that of voice-over actor Paul Frees!

The vehicle for this cash-in is a plot wherein the eponymous writer believes a succession of ostensibly isolated "accidental" deaths are really related murders. He asks his friend George C. Scott, just retired from MI5, to help resolve the obscurity, but Messenger's plane is sabotaged while he's on the way to gather data to corroborate his fears and, with his last lungful of air, he struggles to impart to a fellow passenger a crucial clue. What do you know, the passenger just so happens to be the sole survivor and…just so happens to be Scott's old WWII Resistance comrade. They collaborate to probe Messenger's inventory of names, and decipher his puzzling last gasps. Aside from the ones that insult us, more than a few story aspects in the film are akin to The Hound of the Baskervilles, like hounds, the intentions of the killer, the allusions to Canada, and the exposure of the killer using a hoax.

While we discover rather soon who the killer is, the obscurity of his intentions and the anticipation of his capture are enough to keep going, even if not gripped by genuine tension or suspense. Burdened with a rasping, implausible plot, maybe this lockstep adventure should've been set in Victorian times to oblige its villain with an infatuation with costumes, its Edwardian-style consulting sleuth in a bowler hat, and its foul play in a misty Thames Path.

There is something I quite liked, maybe because it took the edge off, made me relax and enjoy the kitsch. Before the haunting trumpet solos of Chinatown, the strange and threatening cues of Alien or the atmospheric strings of Basic Instinct, a comparatively green-horned Jerry Goldsmith shaped an evocative, and purely '60s-kitsch, ambiance out of an instrumental jumble incorporating saxophone, electric guitar, tuba, harp and the definitive eerie UFO-suggestive electronic whistle that creates nostalgic vibes as when we hear it in The Lost Weekend, Spellbound and BBC's Midsomer Murders.