On L List of Movie Reviews
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The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)
Rate:
4
Viewed:
5/24
5/24:
Talk about a con job that was pulled on me.
On paper, the cast of The List of Adrian Messenger is impressive: George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum,
Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Curtis. So, what happens? Only the first two show up as expected while the third has
a cameo for a few minutes and the rest are purposefully absent until the end when they're all unmasked despite the fact that
some of them never appeared on screen for one second!
Oh, the mystery...it's a mystery, indeed, given everybody had stopped caring about it halfway through or, rather, by the time Kirk
Douglas first showed up without a disguise. Thereafter, the movie is simply thrown away for the sake of über animal abuse, so
John Huston can have his fun with the fox hunting scenes on his estate in Ireland. After George C. Scott gets his man, the only
question that needs to be asked is: what do everybody else who are heavily disguised in make-up, sans Robert Mitchum's character,
have to do with the murders?
The clues are impossible to solve, especially when it comes to the final words uttered by Adrian Messenger at sea ("manuscript"
for "photograph"?). I wondered if John Huston was making fun of Agatha Christie's stories on purpose. Le Borg shows great interest
in Jocelyn (Dana Wynter), but the romance subplot involving these two hardly materializes in the long run. If I thought the boy
was annoying, it turns out to be John Huston's son Tony. In the meantime, I have to say George C. Scott did a good job of
keeping up my interest in spite of the huge stretch to play a supposedly British character.
All in all, although a curio, the tagline of The List of Adrian Messenger should instead be: "The Biggest Waste-Of-Time
Murder Mystery Ever Conceived!"