Every now and then, I look at what's on Tubi available to be streamed on demand. There's a lot of stuff that's fallen into the public domain, as well as British movies that didn't necessarily make it to America. That, and 70s stuff where it seems like someone was doing it just for the payday, especially if it didn't get released by a major studio. Falling into that last class, as well as having been made in the UK, is The Internecine Project.
There are actually two Hollywood stars and a character actor here in and among the Brits. James Coburn plays Robert Elliot, a Harvard economist who is up for some sort of presidential appointment that's going to involve congressional approval. His work takes him back and forth across the Atlantic, and as the movie opens he's on one of those drab public affairs shows to talk in platitudes about inflation, along with US journalist Jean Robinson (Lee Grant in an underused role).
The other reason Elliot is in London is because his past work involved industrial espionage, and that's a problem considering that he's up for a position that requires confirmation from the Senate. If the Senate were to find out the full truth about his past, he probably wouldn't be confirmed, as he tells businessman Farnsworth (Keenan Wynn). And there are any number of people who would probably be happy to blackmail Elliot with their knowledge of him given the chance. So Farnsworth comes up with some advice that would fit right in with one of those 1960s Cold War spy movies: eliminate these people.
Thankfully for Elliot, he was actually the spymaster, overseeing four operatives. Alex (Ian Hendry) worked in the Foreign Office; Bert (Harry Andrews) was a masseur at one of those private clubs that rich upper-class gentlemen were members off in old-time Britain; Christina (Christiane Krüger) is a high-class escort; and David (Michael Jayston) is a scientist working at a British defense contractor, making among other things some sort of sonic weapon that uses ultra-high frequencies to kill rats, and which could obviously kill humans.
Elliot comes up with the sort of plan that one could only try in the movies, because in real life there are so many points at which the plan could go totally wrong. Elliott tells each of his four operatives, none of whom know any of the others because they have no need to know, that another person is about to blow their cover which would amount to prison time or worse. So each of his operatives has to kill the person who has the goods on them. It's all a part of the sort of spy work they've already been engaged in. And of course, each of the four has been given another of the four to kill off. Now, you might be thinking, how is the last one going to be killed if the other three are already dead? Well, David is going to be killed with his sonic weapon, so he'll already have killed his victim. And Alex has diabetes and needs insulin, so it will be easy enough for another of the operatives to replace Alex's insulin with Folger's decaffeinated crystals. Wait, that's a commercial from the 1980s; the insulin is simply going to be replaced with a concentrate that will cause him to OD. So only two of the murders have to be direct killings.
The rest of the movie is Elliot's internecine plot, and the aftermath; I won't tell you how it goes wrong or even if it goes wrong. You'll just have to watch the movie to find that out. To be honest, The Internecine Project feels like the sort of material that just a few years later could easily have been done as a TV movie of the week with the various actors involved doing it for a nice paycheck. (Coincidentally, the movie's runtime of 89 minutes would be just the right length to put it in a two-hour US TV time slot with the legally allowed amount of commercials.) The idea is good although the execution isn't the best by any means. This isn't the fault of the actors, but I think of a script that's sub-par. I can see, however, why all of the Americans involved would want to go to London to make this one.
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