I thought, since I ran across my copy of it recently, that I would transcribe the introduction to List of Adrian Messenger that Mark Cousins did for a BBC Moviedrome screening of the film back in 1999. Hopefully it might help to mitigate somewhat for the lack of extras on these releases.domino harvey wrote:I've got it. The transfer is fine (anamorphic, etc) but the film is still a piece of shit. Worth it if you're a fan thoughfdm wrote:There's also a(n incredibly cheap) version of The List Of Adrian Messenger at amazon/uk. (Had it in my basket a while, but never quite pulled the trigger.)
Robert Altman, who directed the similarly star studded Pret-a-Porter (shown on Moviedrome a couple of years ago), hero worshipped the director of tonight's picture, John Huston. There are parallels between the two men: both saw themselves in the mould of Hemmingway; both drank; both were accused of misogyny; left their first wives for the hard life; and both lived in Paris. After being a boxer, reporter and screenwriter Huston debuted as a director with The Maltese Falcon. He joined the army in 1942 and made a pair of brave and intense documentaries which were banned for many years. He won Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and led Hollywood resistance to the McCarthy witchhunts with his friend Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. After making The African Queen he left America in protest at McCarthy and moved to Ireland.
He directed The List of Adrian Messenger in 1963. It came the year after Huston did The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. The story was set in London but he moved part of it, the climax, to Ireland so that he could build in a fox hunt sequence.
Kirk Douglas, whose company Joel produced the film and who played the lead, says that it was this move to Galway which broke the momentum of the filmmaking and weakened the picture. He also takes part of the blame himself because, he says, that he did not have the time to focus on it. But he is underestimating it, I think. As with Altman I've never been a big admirer of Huston. I think he is more interested in ideas than movies and his work is not very visual, but he always knows a good yarn when he hears it, especially a fable with a touch of Kipling.
This one's an old style English whodunnit but with a twist. It was produced by Ed Lewis who came up with this twist: Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum all appear in disguise and only reveal themselves at the end. I cannot think of another movie where this happens, and some people found that it distracted from the mystery element. I think it's fun. It is fairly obvious which one is Mitchum but the others are tougher to guess. Elizabeth Taylor was to play a hairy, old male sailor and Mitchum says that Sinatra did not do his bit at all but just turned up for the unmasking.
Huston himself appears briefly near the end and the boy in the film is his son Tony, who would later write the film The Dead for his father. Tony recalls the filming as one of the few times that his father was physically affectionate with him. Huston gave a key role to Clive Brook, whose last film this was, and who worked with Dietrich in the 30s. He also brought Anthony Veiller who wrote the Lancaster version of The Killers out of retirement from the antiques trade to script it.
It is mostly an old fashioned and very entertaining film I think, though Kirk Douglas's speech about "the evil" is very John Huston and the director's touch of cruelty in the fox hunt, which echoes the horse sequences in The Misfits, gives it a very dark edge.