By Richard Winters
My Rating: 5 out of 10
4-Word Review: Agent’s son is kidnapped.
Michael Caine plays Major John Tarrant, a British Intelligence Officer, whose young son David (Paul Moss) gets kidnapped by an underground criminal organization headed by McKee (John Vernon). McKee is aware of John’s profession and insists that to get his son back he must fork-over some uncut diamonds, which had already been purchased to fund another operation. John informs his supervisor, Harper (Donald Pleasance), about their demands, but Harper begins to suspect that John may have orchestrated the kidnapping himself and thus refuses to go along with the turnover of the diamonds. Frustrated John decides to deliver them himself, but finds that he’s put himself into a perilous situation that he might not be able to get out of.
The film is based on the novel ‘Seven Days to a Killing’ by Clive Egleton and directed by Don Siegal who’s most notable for having done Dirty Harry. On the technical end it’s masterful. The lighting and editing are pristine and shot on-location in England in many scenic spots including the historic, but now closed Aldwych underground train station and the Shepherd’s Bush station as well as the climactic sequence, which takes place at the Clayton Windmills, known as Jack and Jill with Jill being built in 1821 and Jack in 1866. There’s also a terrific supporting performance by Pleasance who plays this uppity agent who won’t allow smoking in his office, nervously fiddles with his mustache, and is shocked by the forwardness of one of the other elderly agent’s younger wife, played by Catherine Schell. In fact his eye brow raising expression during his visit with her is one of the more amusing moments in the film.
The story seems a bit pedestrian with elements stolen from other better spy films including a Q-like moment where a researcher shows Harper and John how they’ve come-up with a new invention, which is a briefcase that can shoot bullets just like a gun. Another segment has John being followed by a bad guy while hopping onto the subway, which looks like it was taken straight out of The French Connection, though much better done there.
There’s also the part where John, upset with Harper’s refusal to deliver the diamonds, breaks into Harper’s office and steals the key to the bank safe that has the diamonds in it, but this seems much too easy. You’d think an operation that has lights on top of the office doors, with green to be allowed in and red to be locked, would have a better contraption to stop someone from breaking in like burglar alarms to sound when somebody trespasses, or laser beams that would trip off and sound alarm on a mobile device carried by a security guard. Yet John is able to break-in with hardly any effort and the way he tries to disguise his voice to sound like Harper is pathetic and should’ve been enough to alert the bank manager that something fishy was going on. Also, you’d think Harper would have his eye on John, or had someone else keep tabs on him since he’d most likely be angry over the news that the agency wasn’t going to help him and thus already be predicting that he’d make an effort to steal the key before it actually happened.
The biggest issue though is that John is not emotional. His stoic nature makes him seem almost inhuman and like he may not actually care about his son’s safety at all. Supposedly this is because he’d been trained as an agent to hide his feelings, but the viewer still needs to see his softer side at some point, so we know he’s suffering inner turmoil about what’s going on and the fact that this is never shown makes it hard for us to side with him. It also gives Caine one of the flattest performances I’ve ever seen and is so stone cold it could’ve been done by a robot and you’d never know the difference.
The kid is far more engaging and if the movie had shown him more it might’ve worked better, or at least shown John and the boy together, we only see a fleeting few seconds of a photo of them, but we should’ve viewed them in a fun activity before the kidnapping, so we could feel the bond that is otherwise quite hollow. John’s relationship with his wife, played by Janet Suzman, doesn’t gel either. They’re already separated apparently because John put his career ahead of the family, but there needed to be more of an arc to make it interesting like having them bitterly at odds at the beginning only to realize they must put their animosities behind them in order to work together to find their son, but here there isn’t enough dramatic friction between the two, so seeing them rekindle things near the end packs no punch at all and like with everything else here emotionally vanquished for the audience.
My Rating: 5 out of 10
Released: May 17, 1974
Runtime: 1 Hour 46 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Don Siegel
Studio: Universal Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray
Scopophilia 