Year:  1968
Rating: 5.0

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Caught up with an oldie film from the 1960's last night called Sol Madrid. Not that much to recommend it for other than a nice 60's set of actors - David McCallum, Stella Stevens, Rip Torn, Pat Hingle, Michael Ansara, Ricardo Montalban, Michael Conrad and one of my favorites, Telly Savalas. McCallum was coming off his popular stint as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E and this film tries as best as it can to capitalize on that by making him an Interpol agent trying to bring down a maniacal mafia drug boss (Torn). I guess I never quite understood the McCallum appeal. He has the charisma of a jar of mayo left out too long. Poor guy even had Jill Ireland leave him for the rugged Charles Bronson.


Here he loses the accent but keeps the steely reserve as he cynically uses ex-moll, on the run, Stella to get the goods on the bad guys. He also kills a couple of guys in cold blood which Illya never would have done. Much of the film is supposedly shot in Acapulco where Savalas and Hingle are, but if this is Acapulco they sure did a lousy job of capturing its pizzazz like Elvis's Fun in Acapulco did. A couple side streets, a beach, a house in the hills - where was Ursula Andress, girls in bikini's and guys diving off the cliffs. And McCallum's name is Sol Madrid. What the hell. The film is based on the anti-drug law enforcement book Fruit of the Poppy by Robert Wilder and I am pretty sure the book had no Sol Madrid, so someone in Hollywood thought that would be a cool name for an agent and hopefully spawn a sequel or two. It didn't.