Year:  1957
Rating: 6.0

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The one thing you quickly notice about this film is how good it looks. Framed beautifully and clean. After viewing the film I checked to see who the cinematographer was. It turns out to have been William Daniels who has a resume as long as a football field beginning in the silent era shooting Greta Garbo in many films up till the end of the 1960’s. Some of his later films are pretty well-known – Valley of the Dolls, Marlowe, In Like Flint, Ocean’s 11. There is some colorful exterior shooting as well of Istanbul but since we never see any of the actors in these shots, it is likely they never got closer to Istanbul than Davy Crockett ever did.


It is a fairly conventional film that you would never talk about afterwards over dinner other than to say perhaps that it had a strong whiff of Casablanca around it. Errol Flynn near the end of his career but still looking quite dapper here and always well suited out is an adventurer of sorts – a pilot who dabbles in smuggling and dames. In a flashback we see him in Istanbul drinking a cocktail in a lounge with a lovely blonde (Cornell Borchers) with whom he is madly in love and her with him. But illegal diamonds and cops and bad guys get in the way of their love. The ending is more than a bit corny and I expected someone to say this is the beginning of a great friendship.


As a bonus for me Nat King Cole delivers two songs in that lounge and one of the henchmen is a sly and slightly comedic Werner Klemperer before his days as Col. Klink.