Saturday, April 7, 2012

Foreign to the Concept of Intrigue

You know how you're sometimes just in the mood for Robert Mitchum? It was the Movie Morlocks article "The Man with the Immoral Face" that got us thinking about him. And since I had Foreign Intrigue in my queue...

A reclusive millionaire suddenly dies in his French Riviera mansion. His private secretary, Mitchum, finds him just before he expires. And everyone wants to know , "Did he say anything before he died?"

Mitchum and the widow, Genevieve Page, don't know where the dead man's money came from or what he did. So Mitchum decided to look into it, following his trail to Vienna and Stockholm.

To step back a bit, this is a "Sheldon Reynolds" production. Who? Exactly. Mr. Reynolds also produced a TV series of the same name, and not much else. He seems to have a talent for lead-footed, thumb-fingered direction. The Riviera and Stockholm locations are real and look charming. The Vienna sets are cheesy and look sad. The plot starts out promising, then slowly gets dumber, then a little weird - if you can stay awake that long.

Reynolds is clearly going for a kind of Graham Greene/Orson Welles suspense and doesn't quite know how to do it. But he does have Mitchum, who looks great in the noir lighting in his trenchcoat. The widow Page and the mother and daughter from Stockholm, Ingrid Thulin and Inga Tidblad, are pleasant enough as well.

So, not a masterpiece. In fact, another Netflix streaming disappointment.

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