A movie with more cameos than a cheap jewellery box, "The List Of Adrian Messenger" is John Huston's cheeky take on the olde English whodunit. At the beginning we see a heavily made-up masked man commit murder-by-elevator and then up the stakes considerably by ending the titular Adrian Messenger amongst many others by next planting a bomb on board an aeroplane. Miraculously, you have to say, there's actually a survivor from this crash, a suave, handsome, middle-aged Frenchman who before you know it is up and about practically unscathed and besides wooing Messenger's pretty widowed cousin, actually helping retired detective George C Scott, himself a relation of Adrian's, to interpret the dying Messenger's last words which he somehow manages to do by recreating the exact pitch and speech pattern of the deceased before he drowned. So it is that this rich man's Holmes and Watson set out to track down what turns out to be a long-term serial killer in no special hurry it seems to carry out his grudge slayings.
From there, we get a fair bit of cat and mouse as the murderer continues his spree by sending a wheelchair-bound Irishman off a cliff and then attempting to set up another couple of deaths by horseback, which I wouldn't have thought was a particularly reliable modus-operandum.
After a couple of lengthy scenes taking in the thoroughly reprehensible English blood-sport practice of fox-hunting, all is seemingly resolved by the end with the unmasking of the killer, that is until Kirk Douglas steps up in person to tag on a fourth-wall-breaking epilogue which adds nothing to the story other than to help identify where his big star chums Mitchum, Curtis, Sinatra and Lancaster, as mentioned over the titles, were hiding in plain sight all along.
I wanted to like this movie which I watched in tribute to the great and sadly now late Kirk Douglas and also as I'm an admirer of the maverick John Huston's work as a writer and director. Alas, neither is at their best here, with Douglas given too little to do and Huston making rather a dog's breakfast of the direction. Apparently at least one of the cameos is said to be bogus too which wouldn't surprise me in this rather false and insubstantial caper of a movie.
From there, we get a fair bit of cat and mouse as the murderer continues his spree by sending a wheelchair-bound Irishman off a cliff and then attempting to set up another couple of deaths by horseback, which I wouldn't have thought was a particularly reliable modus-operandum.
After a couple of lengthy scenes taking in the thoroughly reprehensible English blood-sport practice of fox-hunting, all is seemingly resolved by the end with the unmasking of the killer, that is until Kirk Douglas steps up in person to tag on a fourth-wall-breaking epilogue which adds nothing to the story other than to help identify where his big star chums Mitchum, Curtis, Sinatra and Lancaster, as mentioned over the titles, were hiding in plain sight all along.
I wanted to like this movie which I watched in tribute to the great and sadly now late Kirk Douglas and also as I'm an admirer of the maverick John Huston's work as a writer and director. Alas, neither is at their best here, with Douglas given too little to do and Huston making rather a dog's breakfast of the direction. Apparently at least one of the cameos is said to be bogus too which wouldn't surprise me in this rather false and insubstantial caper of a movie.