The Formula

Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and I recorded several of his movies such that I've got a backlog of his films to get through. Next up is one of his later films, The Formula.

The movie starts off with a couple of establishing scenes in Germany in early 1945, before V-E Day but with the Soviets rapidly closing in on Berlin. A meeting of Nazi Reichsministers talks to a general, and gives him a truckload of documents that he's to try to take to the border with Switzerland and use to try to negotiate an amnesty with the Americans, as surrendering to the Americans is considered far less bad than surrendering to the Soviets. The general leaves, but is unable to make it to Switzerland, getting stopped at an American checkpoint headed by a Maj. Tom Neeley.

Fast forward 35 years to the present day (the movie was released in 1980), and Los Angeles. Barney Caine (George C. Scott) is a Los Angeles police detective, divorced, and spending his weekend with his adolescent son at a movie revivl house. Coming out of the theater, he is stopped by a a Sgt. Yosuda, a fellow police detective. Unfortunately, an urgent case has come up and Caine is going to have to give up the rest of his Sunday off to investigate: the murder of one Tom Neeley, who after the war became a higher-up in the police department and Caine's former boss!

Caine interviews the man who found the body, who gives up the information that he works for a wealthy Mr. Clements who liked to host cocaine-fueled parties -- and that Neeley was the one who obtained the drugs for Clements. Further investigation involves Neeley's ex-wife Kay (Beatrice Straight), who seems to be less than honest about what's been going on. The fact that she, too is later found murdered, is pretty good indication that she wasn't quite honest. More investigation brings into the case an oil executive named Adam Steiffel (that's Marlon Brando, looking rather older and bald).

Neeley was working for Steiffel, in a role that involved ferrying large sums of cash over to Europe. All roads lead to Germany -- so Caine feels he needs to go over there to find out what might have been going on with Neeley's business in Germany to cause somebody to murder him. Not that it's too hard to figure out Germany was going to get involved again considering the opening scene.

That involvement, and those documents the Nazis were trying to get to Switzerland, involve a secret Nazi project code-named Genesis. The Germans, being in central Europe, were not in a location that produced much oil, mostly coal. That's part of why they wanted to get to the smallish oil fields in Romania, and larger fields in north Africa and what is now Azerbaijan but then in the Soviet Union. Instead, they made synthetic gasoline by converting their large reserves of coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process. Genesis was a way to make the conversion process much more efficient. And if Genesis could be put into action today, it might well make a world of cheap energy and put the current oil companies out of business. No wonder someone might have wanted to murder people for possible knowledge of Genesis.

The Formula has a pretty good cast -- I haven't yet mentioned John Gielgud as the present-day version of the Minsiter for Energy at the Nazi conference at the beginning of the movie. But the whole trope of "big business using ridiculous conspiracy theory to stifle innovation" is one that had already been done to death in the 1970s, so the result is a movie that feels tired and as though it's going through the motions. In theory an interesting idea, but in practice not the greatest execution.