L'émissaire

My review was written in August 1989 after watching the film on Virgin Vision video cassette.

"The Emissary" is an okay political nail-biter, unusual among scores of recent South African-mad features aimed at an international audience by not hiding its locale. Pic is a direct-to-video release Stateside.

Espionage tale concerns the U. S. assistant secretary of state for Africa (Ted LePlat), whom the KGB tries to get under control through his wife Caroline (Terry Norton). Filmmaker Jan Scholtz' screenplay cleverly employs several interesting gambits by which the baddies blackmail her, including drugging her and staging incriminating sex photos as well as exploiting her old flame.

The marital discord between LePlat and Norton adds some dramatic meat to standard spy stuff, though pic never develops the kind of memorable moral ambiguity present in Hitchcock's "Notorious", for example. LePlat is effective in a John Glover-type role, while Norton triumphs over a shaky American accent to make a forceful impression. Robert Vaughn, who's made numerous pics in South Africa in recent years, pops up briefly as the U. S. ambassador.

This South African production, filmed for the most part in Cape Town before that nation was plunged into raw anarchy, offers much for which it may be recommended, including top-flight sound engineering, creative cinematography and able direction, but the script by director Jan Scholtz gradually loses its impact. The work features Terry Norton in her first credited role, and an auspicious performance it surely is, since she is on screen during the majority of the footage as Caroline, wife of a U.S. Assistant Secretary (Ted Leplat) whose diplomatic career is in jeopardy as she is being blackmailed by the KGB, successfully offsetting her every attempt at delivering herself from her imbroglio. Caroline's husband Jack is serving as courier in possession of a computer disc that the U.S.S.R. desperately desires to garner as their possession of it would allow a breach of all American mainframe security caches, and her history of infidelity is employed to force her into obtaining and then delivering the disc to the KGB, while her reluctance to directly involve her husband in the matter plays into the hands of the Soviet intelligence agency. The initial two-thirds of this film are engrossing as the intricate storyline benefits from some good acting, dialogue and camera-work, combining to keep viewers on edge, but Scholtz clearly cannot keep from losing his way so that the conclusive scenes are clichéd and somewhat absurd, undoing what he had achieved. Norton creates her challenging part well and there are good turns also from Andre Jacobs and Patrick Mynhardt as the principal KGB operatives while the sound is faultlessly crafted by Leon Nel; Johan Scheepers and Johan Lategan, respectively, handle their cinematographic and editing responsibilities with polish.