La trahison

I watched "Permission to Kill" because I have long thought Dirk Bogarde is one of the finest actors of his age. Sadly, however, the plot and slow pacing made this more an endurance contest as opposed for a showcase for his immense talents.

Alan Curtis (Bogarde) is a master manipulator. During the initial part of the story, he entraps a variety of people in order to force him in his latest project--to stop a dissident from returning to his home country. However, they resent him and it's doubtful that the plan will come off as Curtis has planned.

The big problem is that the film took forever for anything significant to happen. Instead, it was talky and ponderous...moving at a glacial pace and providing little in the way of fun or entertainment.

Intended as a political movie (shades of Costa-Gavras' "Z"),"permission to kill" is a mess ,not only the "political " background remains very vague ,not to say simplistic but the plot is so confusing it's sometimes difficult to understand the characters' motives;a cosmopolitan cast does not help: Americans (Forrest),English (Bogarde who surprises Timothy Dalton in bed with another man ,and not an "honest "man to be precise ,French (Nicole Calfan ,not really convincing as the "hitwoman",who appears twice in the nude and a brat who has nothing to say)plus Albanian Bekim Fehmiu who died a few months ago.The ending is the perfect cliché of the political assassination.

It was the second time Bogarde had teamed up with Ava Gardner after " the angel wore red" (1961),and once again they made the bad choice.Ava Gardner,although aging,was still fascinating and the reason why I did not give up watching before the end.

I rarely give up on a film half way through but I did on the one.The film is boring.Nothing of Interest happens.The music gives the impression that there are sinister happenings but this is just a mirage.Neither Bogarde or Gardener can bring any life to the corpse that is this film.

I don't know why, but I always confound this film with another one: THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, also a British spying film speaking of Cold War and I remember speaking of a close topic too. Also made in the seventies. This is sensitive, brilliant, rather a bit complex, as any other espionage movie, but that's not THE KREMLIN LETTER either. And what an awesome Dick Bogarde in a delicious nasty manipulator, the kind of character whom you wish to kill by smashing your TV set.

This movie is a classic spying movie, but with the "kitsch" touch of the 70's. It mixes a lot of elements that can disturb the main link of the script, but at the last moment it resolves very well the meaning of the movements of the characters. Dirk Bogarde is splendourous, such as always and the rest of the actors makes me feel that the movie is happening actually.