Le voyage de la peur

In this pretty crummy adventure flick, Sam Waterston stars as an American who becomes the target of an assassination when he discovers oil in Turkey. It's a remake of the 1943 Orson Welles movie, but you're far better off sticking with the original. Sam comes across as remarkably awkward as he runs for his life. He saunters around in wide open spaces, then seems surprised when bad guys start shooting at him. And worst of all, he trusts everyone! Someone around him has to be a bad guy, right? Either Yvette Mimieux, his beautiful and unlikely love interest who doesn't mind his ineptness; Zero Mostel, his guide from the Turkish embassy, Vincent Price, an art aficionado, Shelley Winters, who's basically playing a five-second stereotype of her character in The Poseidon Adventure, Donald Pleasance, Ian McShane, Stanley Holloway, or Jackie Cooper. Someone has to be out to get him, or else why is his life in danger?

If you're the type of person who likes to watch bad movies and chuckle, you might like this one. But if you're looking for a quality thriller or on-location adventure flick, stick with Death on the Nile. For me, the best part of the movie was seeing Vincent Price act out his real-life persona of appreciating great art.

This is one of those thrillers from back in the day which tried to incorporate various European locales into the plotline to inject a bit of colour and variety. To that end, the story of this one begins in Turkey, fires over to Greece and then takes a boat to Genoa. Its constantly on the move, as we progress from car to train to boat to running around. This may sound pretty fluid stuff but, unfortunately, in practice it's really none-too-thrilling. The basic storyline is one of the issues - a petroleum geologist discovers a major oil field in Turkey leading to rival oil people hiring assassins to silence him, so they can move in and get the black gold themselves. Oil deals are not the most interesting ideas to base a thriller around to be perfectly honest, so the filmmakers had their work cut out right from the start to make this one involving. But to make matters worse, the direction is flat as a pancake as well, meaning that the whole enterprise never really gets out of third gear at any point. The best thing about this one is its cast. I am a big fan of Vincent Price and Donald Pleasence, who appear here improbably as respectively a Turk and an Arab! But even the best efforts of those two stalwarts can only do so much with the material and it did seem like they were going through the motions in this one.

I saw this movie when it first showed on TV in 1975 and watch it now and then. The story of the "man with endless lives" never gets old. Many people try and kill him but he just escapes every time. It tries hard to be a tense thriller but just ambles along with one exciting sequence after another. When I saw it for the first time, Jose tells Sam, as he is trying to PIMP her off to him, "Yvette Mimieux has smelt a lot of balls". I distinctly remember that line in the 1975 showing but it seems to have been cut from all the recent releases. Maybe the Blu-Ray, (yes, there is a Blu-Ray coming out), release will include that spicy line. During the end explosion at the gas station, the man in the front seat of the car is Nello Pazzafini, star of many Italian action movies in the 1960s. You name it, he was in it. Click on his name and be amazed by the list of credits he has raked up. Watch this great suspense movie if you get a chance. The ship captain keeps taunting Sam with his "bang bang, you're dead" line. Someone should have made him dead.

An American geologist Mr. Graham, played by Sam Waterston accidentally discovers oil in Turkey. Several assassins are sent to eliminate him, but they all fail. He eventually boards a passenger boat to try to escape. However, one of the passengers is an undercover assassin.

Movie has a great cast with an extremely young Ian McShane (DEADWOOD) as Banat the hitman who does not have a single line in the movie but carries menace like Aldo Ray's character in WELCOME TO HARD TIMES. Vincent Price makes a great turn as Banat's employer named Dervos. Donald Pleasance plays Turkish undercover officer Kuvetli , posing as a Turkish cigarette salesman who does not smoke and works for a company no one has ever heard of. Yvette Mimieux plays Josette who is being pimped out by her husband Jose played by Scott Marlowe. She is the love interest or bait for the Sam Waterston character Mr. Graham. Joseph Wiseman plays Colonel Haki who is trying to protect Mr. Graham from getting killed. Stanley Holloway and Shelly Winters play a married couple. Shelly plays a racist gossipy woman named Mrs. Mathews and Stanley Holloway in his final movie appearance plays her kindly husband Mr. Mathews.

Movie has super exciting opening and start, it kind of bogs down in the middle then jumps back into action towards the end.

Ripe for a remake.

Top-notch cast, nice scenery (in Turkey, Greece and Italy), a dazzling car stunt at the very start and a memorable dispatching of the final villain are the main virtues of this otherwise pedestrian chase yarn which plays like an elongated episode of a TV series of its time. There is very little story - just the pretext of a McGuffin (everybody is after Sam Waterston for some "information" he has - which we never learn what it is). Vincent Price and Ian McShane fare best in the name-packed cast; Waterston is a rather bland lead, Zero Mostel is annoying as a "Turkish" agent, and Yvette Mimieux gets to show us her washboard abs, which are a definite plus, but has little else to do. *1/2 out of 4.