Think
of it as the inverse opposite of Robert Altman’s The Player. The gimmick for this larky noir was the unrecognizable
presence of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars playing minor roles under heavy
make-up. It is the sort of in-joke that would appeal to its legendary director,
John Huston. Best of all, the Hemingwayesque auteur had the chance to get in
some fox-hunting during the production of The
List of Adrian Messenger, which screens during the John Huston retrospective
at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Sort
of, but not really retired MI5 agent Anthony Gethryn is enjoying his new quasi-emeritus
status with his friends, Lady Jocelyn Bruttenholm and her family, when her
cousin, Adrian Messenger takes him into his confidence. He believes a sinister
villain has been knocking off all the names on his titular list, for nefarious
reasons he suspects, but does not care to reveal without proof. Tragically,
before Gethryn can begin his inquiries regarding the individual names,
Messenger is killed in plane bombing.
Obviously,
Gethryn concludes Messenger was in fact the final name on his list of death.
However, as luck would have it, there was a sole survivor of the bombing, who
happened to hear Messenger’s dying words. Gethryn even knows him—at least his
voice. He and Raoul Le Borg often communicated via shortwave during WWII as
French Resistance and British Intelligence counterparts, so they inevitably
team up to track down the killer.
Frankly,
it is no secret who the killer is. It’s Kirk Douglas in various disguises. He
even plays the nefarious George Brougham in his own, unaltered, cleft-jawed
features. Playing against type, Douglas is an eerily charming sociopath, but
his terrific villainous turn was overshadowed by the stunt cameos from Tony
Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum (who really isn’t
that hard to spot, possibly because he looked pretty much as he would in real
life thirty years later).
George
C. Scott is appealingly world-weary and cerebral as Gethryn, the
spook-turned-sleuth. In fact, one of the greatest pleasures of the film is the
sophisticated men-of-the-world buddy chemistry he forges with Jacques Roux’s Le
Borg, who in turn develops some rather engagingly chaste romantic chemistry
with the alluring yet ever so proper Lady Jocelyn, nicely played by Dana Wynter.
