Why is everybody thinking of Crisis?

A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation recently is Intent to Kill, another movie I had never heard of. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 7:40 AM and again on Monday May 11 at 6:00 AM, so I DVRed it and watched it to do a review here.

Juan Menda (Herbert Lom) is a South American leader who apparently has a lot of enemies in his unnamed home country, as he was attacked some time back and suffered some sort of brain injury that finally requires him to seek medical attention, which he's doing at a hospital in Montreal under the assumed name Martin. The assumed name is because he's understandably worried that the people who attacked him before are going to attack him again.

Menda is right about that, but more on that later. The brian surgery Menda needs is going to be performed by Bob McLaurin (Richard Todd), a British-born doctor working in Canada. His wife Margaret (Katie Boyle) is unhappy with that relationship, and she's also convinced that one of the female doctors at the hospital, Dr. Ferguson (Betsy Drake), has the hots for Bob. So Mrs. McLaurin wants her husband to go back to England and become the sort of society doctor that Robert Donat became in The Citadel.

I said that Menda was right to fear for his life. That's because there are three hired assassins, led by Finch (Warren Stevens), who are planning to do Menda in in exchange for a large sum of money. (They're actually distressed by the possibility that Menda could die on the operating table anyway, since that means they wouldn't get their money!) The plan is to dress one of the men up as a doctor, send him into Menda's room, and inject him with an air embolism, which will give Menda a heart attack with the doctors having no clue that he was in fact murdered.

Menda is no dummy, however. He has reason to be concerned about the room he's in, so gets his room changed, whereupon the person who gets put into that room is given the fatal air embolism. The doctors discover this mostly because the unfortunate victim only had a slipped disc that shouldn't have caused a heart attack like this, unlike brain surgery might.

As all of this is happening, Mrs. McLaurin is turning up the heat on her husband, threatening to go to Bob's boss (Alexander Knox) and tell him about the affair even though it's a pack of lies. But to be fair, it turns out that Dr. Ferguson has held a torch for Dr. McLaurin, and with this stressful situation, McLaurin finds that he could fall in love with Ferguson too.

The theme of performing brain surgery on a South American leader, and the presence of Betsy Drake in the cast, but give an obvious vibe of the earlier movie Crisis, in which Cary Grant plays a doctor forced into doing the brain surgery (Drake was married to Grant for a time). The similarities end there. I think Crisis is much the better movie, but Intent to Kill is not exactly a bad movie, either.

Sure, Intent to Kill has problems, in that the giant subplot of Dr. McLaurin's personal life is way overdone. It also looks like it was done on a low budget, having been filmed in Montreal but with mostly British and American stars. The fact that FXM showed a panned-and-scanned print doesn't help, either. But it's a nice enough suspense movie with a good surprise at the end.

I don't think Intent to Kill got a DVD release, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings.