The List of Adrian Messenger
1963 Directed by John Huston
Synopsis
A writer named Adrian Messenger (John Merivale) believes a series of apparently unrelated "accidental" deaths are actually linked murders. He asks his friend Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott), recently retired from MI5, to help clear up the mystery. However, Messenger's plane is bombed while he is en route to collect evidence to confirm his suspicions and, with his dying breath, he tries to tell a fellow passenger the key to the mystery.
Cast
Recent reviews
More-
Certainly very entertaining, and the addition of celebrity cameos at the end was a nice touch on a light film that never really achieves anything special. My full thoughts here: www.everyjohnhustonmovie.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-list-of-adrian-messenger-1963.html
-
What could have been a great murder mystery film, turns out to be just average. George C Scott and Kirk Douglas do good jobs, as does Robert Mitchum and most of the supporting casts, but the other three cameos are both largely wasted and potentially not even real cameos.
A good murder mystery has everything; clues, performances, narrative and especially suspense building to a scene at the end of the film where the key piece of the puzzle is revealed. That doesn't happen here. Instead the final half an hour or so seems largely a waste and dare I say it, a gimmick. Such a shame!
-
Could have been much much better. Especially if Huston had actually used Lancaster, Curtis, Mitchum, and Sinatra in important roles instead of a gimmick that left me literally smfh.
-
Gimmicky thriller that puts a gaggle of stars – including Mitchum, Sinatra and Tony Curtis – under elaborate make-up, as George C. Scott wanders around Britain trying to work out why Kirk Douglas keeps killing people from a lengthy list. It starts off intriguingly, promising plenty, and Scott is very good indeed, but the film goes completely off the rails in the second half, with a coincidence-heavy plot and lots of boring footage of fox hunting. Added to that, the film’s USP sounds fun, but doesn’t really work at all. According to Lee Server, of those disguised, only Mitchum and Douglas actually filmed their parts in full, with Sinatra and Curtis just turning up for the reveal. The supporting cast includes two stiff Englishman of the Golden Age – the excellent Herbert Marshall and the often less excellent Clive Brook (though get a load of his performance in the silent gangster classic Underworld – wowsers) – along with Dana Wynter.
-
Mildly distracting murder mystery, I was hoping for more though.
-
Odd murder mystery, featuring George C. Scott as a former British Intelligence agent trying to figure out why the people on a list given him by his newly-dead friend are being killed. Also has the strange gimmick of having several big-name stars appear in small roles, but in heavy make-up. Can you spot them?
-
Disguisey fun.
-
When a series of seemingly unrelated murders occurs, British colonel Anthony Gethryn is enlisted by a friend who suspects he’s next to uncover the identity of the killer. When his friend’s theory proves correct, Gethryn takes it upon himself to track down each of the victims and eventually discovers their connection: They were all prisoners in Burma during World War II. Gethryn realizes that the killer was a traitor and is now murdering his way to the inheritance of the Marquis of Gleneyre. Gethryn uncovers the killer’s identity just as the man himself arrives on Gleneyre’s estate, and it becomes a race against time for Gethryn to prove the culprit’s guilt before he murders the last remaining link in his…