Action of the Tiger

Action of the Tiger is a very ordinary anti-Communist film that benefits from a location shoot in Greece (filling in for nearby Albania). The woefully miscast Van Johnson plays Carson, an amoral American smuggler who agrees to help blonde bombshell Martine Carol rescue her brother from the bondage of Enver Hoxha and company. Herbert Lom and Sean Connery provide assistance for Johnson, whose part really should have gone to someone with a little more gravitas, perhaps Sterling Hayden or Richard Widmark. Instead, our lead tries to prove his masculinity by wearing sweaters that are much too tight, a less than pretty sight. Desmond Dickinson's cinematography is uniformly good, especially in exterior setups, but the script is undercooked and ultimately unbelievable, as our heroes end up rescuing a motley assortment of Greek children and outwitting those dumb commies. Action of the Tiger is also of minor interest for Connery fans, as the Scots actor would reunite with director Terence Young for a little film called Dr. No five years later.

This movie by Terence Young is the typical adventure-movie of the fifties. The action in Albania is well described with the Albanian resistance against communism and the double-spy colonel Stendho. The battles - horses against jeeps - are realistic and the Albanian family-life and the Countess Valona is also realistic with the remembrance of the past (Italians, Geeks). Martine Carol is wonderful and she does everything to save the children and her brother. Captain Carson is the typical American smuggler of the Mediterranean Sea and he falls in love with Tracy Malvoisie (Carol). Good script, good family-movie.

A woman (Martine Carol) hires an American smuggler (Van Johnson) to try and rescue her brother (Gustavo Rojo) from a political prison in Albania. They end up escorting a group of refugee kids, as well, as they struggle to make it across the border into Greece.

I liked Carol, an actress I wasnt familiar with, and Herbert Lom has fun as the lusty leader of a group bandits on horseback. Johnson tries, and while he isn't awful, I would have preferred someone else in his role. Connery plays Johnson's second mate aboard his small boat, and the future James Bond gets to drunkenly paw at Ms. Carol. Speaking of Bond, 5 years later Connery would shoot Anthony Dawson (here playing an Albanian military officer) in the first Bond film Dr. No, which incidentally was also directed by this film's Terence Young.

The screenplay is fairly mediocre but is given no help by the leading actors. Johnson,who is miscast,seems to be doing a Bogart impression,with a lot of "sweethearts". Carol looks like she has just walked out of Maxims,rather been travelling in a dusty and dirty environment.

If for nothing else, this film is memorable for a scene in which the heroine is chased around the hero's boat by the mate, Mike, played by Sean Connery, as obvious prelude to rape, while said hero, a particularly grubby-looking Van Johnson (who had seen better days in Santa Fe Trail and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers) looks on indifferently. Somehow or other she gets out of this, but the idea that having escaped the clutches of Connery she would subsequently fall hard for Van Johnson give cinema one of it great "huh?" moments. Otherwise, the movie lacks much interest or originality despite the Albanian background which certainly could have been better exploited, as Albania was known during its Communist era as the last surviving medieval society in Europe, and attracted a goodly share of antiquarian tourists.