The File of the Golden Goose
                                                                     
Director: Sam Wanamaker
Year: 1969
Rating: 6.0
When you watch a film that is fifty years old and the plot feels a bit creaky and standard - sort of been there, done that - you have to ask the question was it when it was made. Cops going undercover is as old as the movies but certainly the gay elements were not. One of the major bad guys is very open about being gay and one of the cops tracks him down by going to one skeemy massage parlor or bath house after another - and then oddly finds him at the Cathay Massage Parlor with loads of young slender Asian women in white bikinis running around. Were the film makers nervous about going too far? In some ways though these aspects of the film were the most interesting. Swinging London. Sex out in the open, orgies and gambling casinos.


 
Not that the actors were bangers and mash. Yul Brynner, Edward Woodward and Charles Gray. I can never opine that Brynner does a good job acting. He just plays Yul Brynner - tough, implacable and unemotional but I very much enjoy watching him in anything. For some reason the thought went through my head that for all his fame, Brynner wasn't in that many great films. Then I looked at his resume and remembered The Ten Commandments, The King and I and the Magnificent Seven which were enough to make anyone famous and he had a lot more. And some real mediocrity along the way as well. This film might fall into that category but it has its moments. Woodward is a favorite of mine too especially as Callan and he resembles that character here and Charles Gray is always a treat as a villain.



The film starts off in horrible fashion. A narrator like in an episode of the F.B.I. introduces us to Novak (Brynner) and explains that he is coming home from a date with his girlfriend. Well thanks. I could never have figured that out. Then the baddies come driving by and kill her and he swears in that quiet way to get them. Them being counterfeiters out of London and he is a Treasury agent. Game on. In London he tells the Superintendent that he only works alone but they give him Thompson (Woodward) from Scotland Yard (not Thompson of Thomson & Thompson) as his partner. Lickety-split they are able to infiltrate the gang and I was ready for a long snore. Here we go. Just so darn easy to infiltrate a gang - just make a wanted poster of yourselves and throw a few around. I need to remember that.


 
But then it begins getting interesting when Novak has to throw one of the gang who is on to him off the roof and breaks with Thompson - so one man in and one man out - but he isn't sure if Thompson hasn't been lured into the good life. The Owl (Gray) is just one of a large organization that Novak has to work his ways up. Some solid suspense, some interesting bad guys and Brynner and Woodward offset each other nicely. Rock hard though. Turns out that part of the reason it felt familiar was that it is a remake of T-Men from 1947 with the same scriptwriter (not that I figured that out but read it in another review and will borrow it. Thanks.)