Le Secret de la liste rouge

There are no real portuguese people in the movie, and to make it worse, the ones pretending to be portuguese don't even know how to say things in portuguese. When the actors pretending to be portuguese try to speak portuguese, they speak in spanish or very badly. Not just that, but some words are not even portuguese words... "Señorita" is a spanish word... "Senhorita" is a portuguese word.

The cars have license plates from the city of Beira in Mozambique, but the scenes look nothing like Beira. The only city mentioned is Lourenço Marques (Maputo), yet no place in the movie looks like anywhere in Mozambique. The only real place that the movie has is Victoria Falls, and it is not in Mozambique. There was no portuguese advisor for this movie. Sad. Triste.

Furthermore, the fighting scenes are unrealistic, and some scenes are too stretched.

I am a portuguese man in Mozambique, and this movie only has one part that I like... The part where big letters appear and it is written "The end".

Steve Cochran is a pilot stranded in Lisbon without a job. He crashed a plane, and although he was held blameless, no one wants to hire him. Then a one-way ticket to Lourenço Marques, (now Maputo) in Mozambique shows up, so he takes a Lufthansa(?) flight. His prospective employer is dead, but the organization is still active, and its current head, Martin Benson, takes him on, while he fights with widow Hildegarde Neff for control. Cochran soon discovers that a pilot is needed for flying illegal drugs around, and for smuggling. After an hour, there's a corpse to deal with.

Martin Curtis' camerawork is excellent, but the movie is wrecked by the editor, Peter Boita. The pacing is glacial, with Cochran needing twenty minutes to get out of Portugal. The movie times in at a hundred minutes, but it might have been a zippy seventy except that director Robert Lynn likes to show people strolling about, taking them from a car to a hotel's door, or shoot a chase scene with as few cuts as possible, and Boita indulges him in this.

Johnny Douglas' score makes this pace even more evident by the music he uses during what should be exciting scenes: he uses scales on a guitar, single notes taking about a second each.

The film opens with a moidah! A gentleman gets stabbed, and rolls down the steps. Then, we carry on with the story. Brad webster is having a hard time finding work, so he takes an unusual job offer handed to him by a police officer. The pilot job is in mozambique. We know that webster is being used as a pawn by the police investigating a crime. But webster does not! And he quickly makes friends with a young lady who has also been hired as a singer. Then things start to get even more odd. And dangerous. They are both working for high stakes drug runners, and probably would not have taken the jobs if they knew what they were in for ! Can they get away before they are killed? It's pretty good! Interesting locale. A few plot holes here and there. None of the guards seem to be able to hit anyone with their guns or rifles. But moving on... directed by robert lynn. Sadly, the lead, steve cochran, died of a lung infection shortly after filming this movie. He made one more film, but apparently didn't live to see it released. Quite young, at 48. Van den bergh, as the arab, also died young at 47.

This is an excellent movie! I just watched it as a blu ray dvd, it looks great! Made in 1964, it is one of those older films, where the viewer needs to have some patience as the story develops. The script is outstanding, it is by Peter Yeldham, who wrote many fine movies. All the cast are very good.

What makes this movie different than many films, is that it is about a 50/50 combination of adventure and mystery. That means there aren't as many big-action type scenes as in a pure adventure film. This is not an imitation James Bond type movie. There's very good character development. Steve Cochran is likeable as the world-weary American pilot who steps up when needed. Vivi Bach and Hildegard Knef are very classy. There's a 1960's feel, in a kind of different way than usual. I suspect some viewers don't "get" this movie, because they expected a cheesy Bond knock off. This is not that, at all. Highly recommended, especially on the new blu ray version.

A merry yarn and predictably cheesy in all the right places. The fight scenes are particularly wanting and the dialogue is more than inadequate in places, but one is compelled to hang in there to let the plot unravel. The characters are implausible rather than larger-than-life, especially the Arab contingent, but this was 1965 and the swinging sixties seems an acceptable excuse. As usual, for movies of this period and genre, the hero is sadly old enough to be the father of the damsel in distress, leaving one to wonder: where were all the young, virile men before 1970? Perhaps it's also somewhat surprising that, being a British-made film, there is a distinct lack of black actors and extras, especially as this actually was filmed in Mozambique! Overall, it's not the worst way to kill an hour and a half, unless you have something better to do such as walk the dog.