Director:Andrew
V. McLaglen Year: 1991 Rating: 5.0
This
is a fairly standard spy adventure film in the final movie directed by Andrew
V. McLaglen, but it was of interest to me primarily for the fictional protagonist.
Austrian Prince Malko Linge. A character unknown to most Americans, I would
guess, but very well-known to Continental Europeans. I came across a fascinating
newspaper article a few years back about French author Gérard de Villiers.
De Villiers wrote over 200 spy novels in his SAS series in which his character
Malko works for the CIA.
What made his novels different is the graphic
sex scenes and his widespread access to intelligence sources that fed him
information. His novels often had an element of not only geo-political reality
but in predicting events to come - such as Sadat's assassination. Only a
few of these have been translated into English and out of curiosity I picked
up his 2014 novel Chaos in Kabul. In it the Karzai regime is collapsing,
the Taliban are closing in and the CIA orders Malko to assassinate Karzai.
That last part did not come true though no idea where Karzai is these days.
The sex was more descriptive than I was expecting. There has only been one
other film adaptation of the Malko series - S.A.S. a San Salvador.
Here Malko is played by Richard Young who
does his best to bring some faux sophistication to the role with his mildly
faked European accent and an air of superiority. He owns an enormous mansion
as befits a Prince and is throwing a costume party in which every one is
wearing fashions of the Ancien régime before the guillotine began
falling. They are rudely interrupted by Palestinian terrorists headed by
Ben Cross. They have come to kill Malko. They fail obviously and he gets
back with the CIA (Mel Ferrar) to go after them. It is all ok, but little
of it excites and it doesn't always make sense. It also has F. Murray Abraham
as the main villain and Patrick Macnee as his partner. 93-munutes.
