There's a point where PAPILLON author Henri Charrière has a long passionate kiss with Italian bombshell Claudia Cardinale when you know exactly why he wrote POPSY POP aka THE BUTTERFLY AFFAIR aka THE 21 CARAT SNATCH, and why he cast himself in the part of a really old rogue being kissed by this semi-young, gorgeous cult starlet...
He gets screwed as well, as in screwed-over by Cardinale as POPSY POP, who saunters into an extremely poor diamond-mining village in Venezuela: A uniquely ragged, dilapidated third-world location that's far more interesting than a rushed heist plot involving a helicopter vanishing with the diamonds and the girl...
Who had also befriended British import Stanley Baker as a cop named Silva, so he's supposedly a local and on the side of the otherwise violent, torturing miners/revolutionaries, who make bandits in Spaghetti Westerns -- which this resembles a cheaper jungle-set version of -- seem wimpy by comparison...
But we're not here very long, cutting to the chase with Baker and Charrière traveling through more lush, tropical towns to find the girl, who connects with an annoying (and distracting) politician in what's ultimately more a visualized script treatment (liken to Charrière's obscure PAPILLON sequel BANCO) than a realized heist flick.
He gets screwed as well, as in screwed-over by Cardinale as POPSY POP, who saunters into an extremely poor diamond-mining village in Venezuela: A uniquely ragged, dilapidated third-world location that's far more interesting than a rushed heist plot involving a helicopter vanishing with the diamonds and the girl...
Who had also befriended British import Stanley Baker as a cop named Silva, so he's supposedly a local and on the side of the otherwise violent, torturing miners/revolutionaries, who make bandits in Spaghetti Westerns -- which this resembles a cheaper jungle-set version of -- seem wimpy by comparison...
But we're not here very long, cutting to the chase with Baker and Charrière traveling through more lush, tropical towns to find the girl, who connects with an annoying (and distracting) politician in what's ultimately more a visualized script treatment (liken to Charrière's obscure PAPILLON sequel BANCO) than a realized heist flick.