HotToastyRag John Merivale, in the title role, has a very useful friend in George C. Scott. He's a retired British agent with an incredibly sharp mind, so when John hands George a list of ten names asking him to "find out if they're still living at those addresses", George knows there's a deeper meaning behind the list. When John is killed in an airplane bombing, George recruits Jacques Roux and Dana Wynter to help in solving the mystery. And what a mystery! Several times while watching The List of Adrian Messenger, I said, "I'm glad I'm not watching this alone!" It was so spooky, I made sure to leave all the lights on in the house when I went to bed that night. The plot moves very quickly, so you'll have to keep up—or press pause and discuss it with your friends. It's spooky, thrilling, suspenseful, and a great addition to your Halloween movie line-up this year.The greatest tragedy of the film is the lack of a Best Makeup Oscar awarded to it. There was no such Oscar at that time, an error only rectified the year after The Elephant Man went unrewarded. Bud Westmore created such incredible makeup designs, executed by John Chambers, David Grayson, and Nick Marcellino, that it's baffling why the Academy didn't create the award in 1964 to honor them. Disguises were designed for several actors, making them absolutely unrecognizable to the audience. I won't spoil anything because it's fun to guess, but be on the lookout for Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum.

ma-cortes This enjoyable suspenser contains intriguing events , emotion , and plot twists . A former intelligence officer called Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott) is tasked by the heir to the Gleneyre estate to investigate the unusual deaths of a disparate group of eleven men on a list . Later on , a mysterious stranger (Kirk Douglas) visiting an English state whose owner is a Lord , Marquis of Gleneyre (Clive Brook) , and the puzzling series of killings that coincide with his arrival . As retired MI-5 officer has to figure out the unusual deaths of a varied group of eleven men on a list , each seems to have died in mysterious circumstances . Working with a survivor from a airplane disaster, Raoul Le Borg (Jacques Roux) he discovers weird clues until an unexpected conclusion . The main question is the following : Someone committed killings . Can you guess who's behind the disguise?This whodunit packs crisp performance , intrigue , thrilling scenes , suspense , twists and turns . The main gimmick results to be the all-star-cast are all heavily disguised in the character roles . This is a family film made by John Huston , as it was partially filmed on John Huston's own estate in Ireland and played by Huston's friends as well as his son . The best scenes turned to be when the stars appeared at end of the film in unmasking sequence where they peeled off makeup . Highlights of the movie result to be the fox chase scenes under an impressive soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith . Very good support cast such Robert Mitchum , Tony Curtis , Frank Sinatra , Herbert Marshall , Gladys Cooper , Marcel Dalio , Bernard Fox , being the fourth of seven films that Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster made together and final film of Clive Brook . And cameo by John Huston , who was an avid rider and hunter, appeared in a small role as Lord Ashton in a short dialogue scene in the last hunt . The filmmaker's child Tony , billed as Anthony Waller Huston plays Dana Winter's son . Evocative as well as atmospheric cinematography in black and white by Joseph MacDonald . Thrilling and suspenseful musical score by the great Jerry Goldsmith . The motion picture well produced by Edward Lewis was stunningly by the great John Huston at his best , its tense filmmaking makes this crackerjack entertainment . The picture was made in a good time of the 60s , 70s and 80s when Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City, (1972), The man who would be king (1975) and Wise blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Honor of Prizzi (1985) and Dublineses (1987). Rating : Above average , this is one of John Huston's best films , a model of his kind , definitely a must see if you are aficionado to suspense films . Huston broke a new ground with this landmark movie , providing classic scenes and agreeable dialogs . Rating : Above average , as the intrigue is entertaining on its own .

kmoh-1 There has been much discussion about the accents in the movie. For the record, George C. Scott's English is nearly OK but very variable - no Englishman would say 'dah-ta' for 'data'. Jacques Roux is barely comprehensible. But the worst performance is that of Tony Huston, his first and mercifully final film performance, as Derek. No English nobleman would be called Derek - even Kevin or Trevor would be more plausible names. And his attempt at English is lamentable; it makes Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins seem like Sir C. Aubrey Smith. Young Derek is possibly the most murderable child actor in the history of cinema.But strangely, the duff Englishisms add to the film's sense of an end-of-term pantomime. It is great fun, not serious, and not worth taking seriously.

jzappa John Huston displays an indiscreet lack of subtlety, taxing our tolerance with a somewhat modern English whodunit with an extra publicity stunt: Numerous major Hollywood actors are announced to appear in the film, but are all thickly concealed in John Chambers' make-up design: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis as an organ-grinder, Burt Lancaster as an old woman, Frank Sinatra as a gypsy horse-trader. Their identities are exposed to the audience at the very end of the film, when each star strips off his masquerade. Actually, only Douglas (by far the most interesting performance) and Mitchum do any real acting beneath their heaps of collodion and crepe hair. The others just walk on to shoot their brief, tacked-on unveilings at a salary of $75,000 each, while being doubled in the film itself. The film even further cheats by often dubbing their voices with that of voice-over actor Paul Frees!The vehicle for this cash-in is a plot wherein the eponymous writer believes a succession of ostensibly isolated "accidental" deaths are really related murders. He asks his friend George C. Scott, just retired from MI5, to help resolve the obscurity, but Messenger's plane is sabotaged while he's on the way to gather data to corroborate his fears and, with his last lungful of air, he struggles to impart to a fellow passenger a crucial clue. What do you know, the passenger just so happens to be the sole survivor and…just so happens to be Scott's old WWII Resistance comrade. They collaborate to probe Messenger's inventory of names, and decipher his puzzling last gasps. Aside from the ones that insult us, more than a few story aspects in the film are akin to The Hound of the Baskervilles, like hounds, the intentions of the killer, the allusions to Canada, and the exposure of the killer using a hoax.While we discover rather soon who the killer is, the obscurity of his intentions and the anticipation of his capture are enough to keep going, even if not gripped by genuine tension or suspense. Burdened with a rasping, implausible plot, maybe this lockstep adventure should've been set in Victorian times to oblige its villain with an infatuation with costumes, its Edwardian-style consulting sleuth in a bowler hat, and its foul play in a misty Thames Path.There is something I quite liked, maybe because it took the edge off, made me relax and enjoy the kitsch. Before the haunting trumpet solos of Chinatown, the strange and threatening cues of Alien or the atmospheric strings of Basic Instinct, a comparatively green-horned Jerry Goldsmith shaped an evocative, and purely '60s-kitsch, ambiance out of an instrumental jumble incorporating saxophone, electric guitar, tuba, harp and the definitive eerie UFO-suggestive electronic whistle that creates nostalgic vibes as when we hear it in The Lost Weekend, Spellbound and BBC's Midsomer Murders.