The List of Adrian Messenger

When I was making my last set of DVD purchases, I noticed that the Kirk Douglas Centennial Collection had quite a few movies that I haven't blogged about before. Recently, I sat down to watch The List of Adrian Messenger (also available as a standalone DVD) off of it.

The movie starts off promisingly, with a man going into a bank building one evening after hours, when there's only an executive working late on the upper floors. The man sabotages the elevator so that when the executive gets into it, the elevator plunges nine floors, killing him. The mystery man crosses a name off a list, leaving only one: Adrian Messenger.

Messenger (John Merivale) is a writer of several books who is now writing about his experience in World War II. He too has a list of names, presumably people he wanted to interview, only to find out that a whole bunch of them have died accidental deaths over the past several years. Messenger's friend Gethryn (George C. Scott) worked for MI5, so could Gethryn investigate informally?

It's a good thing Messenger asked Gethryn for help, because he's about to go to Canada to do his own investigation, while the man who sabotaged the elevator knows about this. He poses as a vicar and puts a suitcase full of explosives aboard the plane, before going into a bathroom and removing his disguise, revealing that our murderer is played by Kirk Douglas. (This is more of a suspense movie than a mystery.

Gethryn continues to investigate with the help of Frenchman Le Borg (Jacques Roux), who had worked with Gethryn in the war and who was the one survivor on the plane with Messenger. Eventually, the roads lead to a wealthy family out in the English countryside, with the only heir being a young boy. Aha! As with Kind Hearts and Coronets, Kirk Douglas' character must be killing off heirs to a noble title. Not so fast.

The plot of The List of Adrian Messenger is reasonably interesting, but the movie also has a huge problem. If you watch the opening credits, you'll notice some big stars: Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Tony Curtis in addition to those whom I've already mentioned. (Dana Wynter and Herbert Marshall are among the supporting roles). And yet, those big names don't seem to show up. That's because the movie was made with a gimmick of putting these big starts under the same sort of heavy disguise that Kirk Douglas' character is under. After the end of the main action of the movie, there's a coda revealing which star had which cameo as they remove their masks Scooby Doo-style. I found it all distracting, not helped by the fact that apparently at least one of the stars only appeared for the unmasking at the end. (In Douglas' case, the makeup was necessary since his character was supposed to be in disguises so as not to be recognized by the people he's killing.) Also, some of the voices are dubbed.

The List of Adrian Messenger isn't a bad movie, but I think it could have been a lot better.