Poppies Are Also Flowers

The Poppy Is Also A Flower is an odd movie of great interest to film and trivia buffs primarily for having the coolest, if not largest, international all-star cast, including Yul Brynner, Omar Sharif, Trevor Howard, Gilbert Roland, Angie Dickinson, Rita Hayworth, E.G. Marshall, Stephen Boyd, Anthony Quayle, Marcello Mastroianni, Eli Wallach, Trini Lopez, and Grace Kelly, just to name those I can recall. The film concerns UN investigators tracing irradiated drugs from the poppy fields in Iran through the entire process of smuggling, refining, and sale. E.G. Marshall and Trevor Howard are the main protagonists on the trail of the drugs, which leads through the Mediterranean to Italy and Monte Carlo. Gilbert Roland is interestingly cast as a Mafia boss. Unfortunately the film isn't very effective, almost dull, in spite of super stars in exotic locations, in the first half, until one of the protagonists is caught by the bad guys. Sometimes it seems as if the dialog is dubbed or the soundtrack misaligned, or the acting just a bit stilted, though some is very good, especially Anthony Quayle as a cockney sea captain - he sounds like Cary Grant and looks like Victor McLaglen. The film has a few sights you wouldn't expect to find in any movie: E.G. Marshall hiding under Angie Dickinson's bed; Gilbert Roland watching Trini Lopez sing La Bomba; and Rita Hayworth playing a drug addict. So I'd recommend it if you're interested in the trivia aspects, but not for escapist entertainment.

Poppies Are Also Flowers is an all star amalgamation of two previous films on the narcotics trade. Sharp eyed fans of the cinema will spot plot elements from those two Forties era films, To The Ends Of The Earth and Port of New York. Of course both those films were infinitely better.

Still a whole bunch of international stars lent their names and got a fat paycheck for this muddled episodic film which tries to make E.G. Marshall an action star. Talk about ridiculous.

Best in the film by far are Yul Brynner as an Iranian general and Rita Hayworth as the dope addicted wife of Gilbert Roland who is one of the villains. Roland plays it rather straight and that ever present twinkle that I love in him is missing.

The filming was done on actual locations including some of the harder to reach regions of Iran. Of course that was back in the day of the Shah's pro-western government and you can see photographs of the Shah in some of the shots. I also liked Hugh Griffith as I always do with those wild eyes of his, the wildest this side of Jack Elam. Griffith just dusts off his Sheik Ilderim portrayal from Ben-Hur and hams it up to beat the band. There wasn't much else the man could do, he knew he was in a Thanksgiving special.

I really don't care that the majority of people didn't enjoy this film. I thought it was a very watchable escapism film. Nothing complicated or confusing. I think the appeal is more for the 60+ crowd who grew up with the many international stars appearing. The sexy Angie Dickinson was in a featured role. I can't think of a better bad man than Harold Sakata (Goldfinger fame). The international locations and seeing Iran as it use to be.

The version I have runs a tad over 84 mins. The VHS picture quality is quite good. When I first saw this film on the big screen, it ran longer. From my fading memory, the original film had an excellent female mud wrestling scene, something I had never seen before. Well, that scene is gone, not fitting for TV around 1970. Much like the gypsy fight scene in From Russia With Love is mostly cut for TV.

During the film, the UN investigators spiked the opium with a radioactive dose to help follow the shipment. What happens to the ultimate users who ingest this cocktail? Never explained in the film.

At any rate, for us oldsters, seeing all of these stars in one film is a treasure. If you are too young to know these people, then take a pass. This is not a high brow boring film. Just check your brain at the door and enjoy.

The opening dose of earnest monologue from Princess Grace of Monaco gives us a clue as to what we might be in for here. It's a clunkily stitched together series of cameos built around the process of identifying and stopping those bent on exporting opium from Iran to, ultimately via Europe, the United States. Yul Brynner ("Col. Salem") starts off the process working with the Imperial authorities in Iran where poppy farming is completely outlawed. Needless to say, though, if the money was right then there were those who would bend the rules and here we can look "Salah Khan" (Hugh Griffiths - a performance straight out of "Ben Hur"). The police, though, have devised a plan to inject his resin with a radioactive isotope enabling it to be tracked and them to destroy the distribution network. Helping the colonel with his task is the doughty "Sam Lincoln" (Trevor Howard) and as they follow the trail we are introduced to a cast of dozens of famous faces adding their visage, if little else, to the potency of the message set out by HSH at the top of the film. It's quite an interesting theory, the journey is well documented as are the difficulties faced by those trying to thwart this most lucrative of trades, but the style of presentation is so very disjointed and the narrative spends just a little too much time pontificating and not enough time engaging the audience. After about forty minutes I had the gist and the baddie firmly in my sights - the remainder delivered little better than an half-baked "007" adventure (Ian Fleming was involved here too). It is not without it's tragedies - this is not a sterile depiction and characters do get bumped off to illustrate just how ruthless these dealers are - but none of that really enlivened what is essentially rather a dull drama.

I'm not sure if this came up on a recent discussion of the three United Nations-produced 20th-anniversary movies, but I'd always been curious to see it since coming across descriptions way back in TV Guide. I'd remembered clicking onto the beginning years ago as a kid, with the informative "educational" prologue by Grace Kelly, and thought the entire movie was a public-service documentary on the UN's efforts to stop international drug trade.

Nope--The producers had hired Ian Fleming to write the screen story, Terence "From Russia With Love" Young as director, and a host of charity-benefit stars (who were reportedly paid $1 each for services rendered), and if that sounds like they were setting out to do a faux do it yourself 007 Bond film, they succeeded. There were a lot of bad international Bond-knockoffs at the height of its 60's mania, but this one got the right ingredients, and captures Young's exact feel for the first three Sean Connery 007's, which were as much about the procedural investigation and globe-trotting locales as the car chases.