Ooh, goody, another revisionist western

I've stated a bunch of times, especially when it comes to foreign films, how my taste in films differs from that of the professional movie critics. Another good example of that came when I watched one of the movies that TCM ran in honor of the late Kris Kristofferson some months back: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Pat Garrett was shot to death in 1908, although the movie gets this slightly wrong by opening up the action with an expository scene near Las Cruces, NM, in 1909. Pat (James Coburn) is riding with some of his partners, at least until the group is ambushed and Garrett is killed, which did happen in real life. Now since this is just the opening scene and we haven't met Billy the Kid yet, it's obvious that there's going to be a flashback.

Indeed, we flash back to 1891. Billy Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) has been depredating parts of the New Mexico territory, and unsurprisingly the locals are tired of it. Garrett is about to be named sheriff of the county where Billy is based, charged with the responsibility of getting Bonney to move on or else face arrest. Billy scoffs at that idea, so once Garrett becomes sheriff, Billy is indeed arrested and faces the death penalty. Except that he's helped to escape.

Garrett goes to Santa Fe, the territorial capital, and meets with the territorial governor, Lew Wallace (Jason Robards, and yes that's the same Lew Wallace who wrote Ben-Hur) who, with some help from the rich cattleman types, put a bounty on Billy's head. Meanwhile back at Billy's hideout, he finds that there are people other than the authorities who would like him dead, and they show up at the old hideout where he and his gang used to stay where Billy went back to. They're going to try to kill him, but Billy is able to defeat them in a shootout, together with some help from a stranger named Alias (Bob Dylan, yes the singer).

The authorities learn that Billy has moved to the area where John Chisum (Barry Sullivan, and Chisum was the subject of a different Billy the Kid movie) has his cattle, so Garrett and some of the cattlemen's ring that also want Billy dead go there. The chase continues, and continues, until as we know from real life Billy is killed by Garrett, so I'm not giving away much here. It would be like saying the Japanese attack in the climax of From Here to Eternity.

As you might guess from my opening paragraph, I didn't much care for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It's slow, filled with those pointless zooms and pans that were a thing in movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and director Sam Peckinpah uses his signature style for filming violence -- of which there's a lot in this movie. Not that I have a thing against violence, but the Peckinpah style is tediously stylized, like watching everybody overact in an old silent movie or the deaths of the people from killer bees in The Swarm.

On the other hand, critics just seem to love love love this movie for reasons I totally can't fathom. I just don't see anything in it that makes it rise above other respected westerns. But since they do love it, it's the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

At least the adjective is appropriate

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.

Zowie!

Another movie that's coming up on TV that I have on my DVR is Our Man Flint, the first of the two Derek Flint movies. (The sequel, In Like Flint, was the subject of a January 2022 post.) Our Man Flint is on FXM tomorrow, June 2, at 11:10 AM.

Unfortunately, the movie, outside of the credits, is panned and scanned, as although the opening says it's a Cinemascope movie, the print FXM aired was in 16:9 and not the 2.35:1 Cinemascope ratio. That card is followed by a pre-credits sequence showing a bunch of weather-related disasters happening all over the world, and a bunch of international spy bosses led by Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) discussing what to do. They program their supercomputer, for some values of super since this was almost 60 years ago and the computer was probably no better than today's smartphones if that, which spits out a punchcard with the name Derek Flint.

Derek Flint, played by James Coburn, is a retired spy, now with a bevy of women he presumably collected from his spy days the way James Bond had one conquest after another. Cramden, and the rest of his spy organization ZOWIE (Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage), want Flint to investigate and figure out the source of all the disasters, and stop whoever is behind it since this clearly isn't natural. But already, whatever organization is behind it is also aware that ZOWIE is trying to bring Flint out of retirement. Two Marines outside Cramden's office are in fact enemy agents, which Flint could somehow tell just because one patch on their uniform is bogus. Yeah right.

The next clue Flint gets is even nuttier. At a restaurant, the enemy woman Gila (Gila Golan) -- because a movie like this always has to have one -- has infiltrated the restaurant's band, where she takes the part of the harpist and plans to use one of the harp strings as a bow with a poisoned arrow she'll shoot at Flint. But she hits Cramden who is able to get the poison out of Cramden and determine from residue on it that whoever fired the arrow must have been in Marseilles, France. Really.

The next clue takes him to Rome, looking for cold cream, and he finally finds Gila's company at a place called Exotica. This is, of course, a front, which is eventually going to lead to Galaxy Island, the secret lair of the evil organization Galaxy. There, a team of scientists (Benson Fong, Rhys Williams, and Peter Brocco) has learned how to control the weather. They claim to wish to use this for good, but they need to stop the governments of the world that have militaries and, horror of horrors, are using nuclear power. So they use their climate control device to cause disasters and ransom the governments of the world.

After the success of the James Bond movies, especially Goldfinger, studios wanted to come up with special agents of their own, replete with gadges, exotic locations, and pretty women. Most of the movies, however, were conceived as spoofs of the Bond phenomenon. Some of the spoofs work better than others. But for me, Our Man Flint was not one of them. The bad guys are just too stupid to have gotten where they did, and the spoof aspect isn't particularly funny here. The production also looks a lot cheaper than the James Bond movies. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

In Like Flint

One of the movies that's been showing up in the FXM rotation recently that I haven't blogged about before is In Like Flint. It's got a few more airings on the FXM schedule, tomorrow (Jan. 26) at 9:20 AM and Thursday, Jan. 27 at 6:00 AM. So recently I watched it in order to do a post on it here.

A year before this movie, Fox had released Our Man Flint, which was apparently a hit, so this sequel went into production, which would explain why there are things that aren't explained. James Coburn plays semi-independent secret agent Derek Flint, although we don't see him for a bit. Instead, the movie starts with the other parts of the story. There's a luxury spa called Fabulous Face in the Virgin Islands that caters to a certain class of women, although it's a front for the women in charge, headed by Lisa (Jean Hale). They go to watch a rocket launch, which puts a new space platform into outer space, overseen by Lloyd Cramden (Lee J. Cobb), head of the spy agency ZOWIE. The women then discuss putting "Operation Duffer" into effect.

Cramden, who received a congratulatory call from the President (Andrew Duggan), is invited by the President to a round of golf. However, the women of Fabulous Face have developed some sort of gas that stops time for people within a small radius, which gives them just enough time to gas the President and Cramden, and replace the President with a lookalike. Cramden, fortunately, had been using his stopwatch, which isn't stopped by the gas, so when he comes to he realizes that three minutes have passed that he can't account for.

This leads Cramden to call Flint, who apparently used to work for ZOWIE although I haven't seen the first Flint movie. The need for Flint's services becomes greater after Lisa, again in disguise, meets Cramden at a restaurant and drugs him so that she can frame him cavorting with hookers. This gets him relieved of his duties at ZOWIE, which is just what Cramden's second in command, General Carter (Steve Ihnat), wants. Carter has been planning, with the help of the women running Fabulous Face, to arm the space platform with nuclear missiles; the ability to rain death from the sky is obviously one that would change the world balance of power.

However, that's only part of what the women of Fabulous Face want. Lisa and the others, including Elisabeth (Anna Lee), have determined that women have been running a lot of things in the background, either as wives running households or secretaries keeping businesses running smoothly. Men have been messing things up long enough that perhaps it's time for women to run the place. And to help things along, the hair dryers at Fabulous Face are equipped with subliminal messages to get the women to go there to vote for only women, hastening the positioning of women into places of real power.

Eventually Flint and Cramden both figure out independently that something is going on down in the Virgin Islands, since the rocket launch site is there, and each of them makes his way down to Fabulous Face. But while the women have one idea, Gen. Carter has another, and might be able to use the fake president to do his bidding instead of the women's.

After the success of Dr. No in 1962, the sort of heroic spy movie where the spy has the latest in equipment became something ripe for parody. Derek Flint is surrounded by a bevy of beautiful (but apparently intelligent too) women as his assistants, and seems to be able to do anything he wants expertly, from ballet to evading a bunch of Gen. Carter's men at ZOWIE headquarters.

Unfortunately, In Like Flint seemed to me as though it couldn't decide how serious it wanted to be, and how much a parody it wanted to be. The three-way conflict is an interesting one, and there are some very humorous scenes, most notably with Lee J. Cobb in drag to get into the Fabulous Face resort. But most of the time it felt more like Cobb and Flint had been put into a sequel for perfunctory reasons, and nobody was certain how to catch lightning in a bottle again. Perhaps if I had watched Our Man Flint first I would have gotten more out of In Like Flint.

The Last Hard Men

Our next installment in "movies back in the FXM rotation" is The Last Hard Men. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:10 AM, with another airing Wednesday morning at 3:00 AM.

James Coburn plays Zach Provo, who at the beginning of the movie is on a chain gang laying down some rails, or otherwise maintaining them, somewhere in the desert of southwest Arizona a few years before statehood. There are only two guards with guns, and a ruse is created for one of the guys to get his chains broken and overpower one of the guards. The other guard soon follows, and the prisoners can at make their escape.

At least, that's the theory. They're in the middle of the desert, so figuring out where to go is tough. Provo is able to make himself the leader of a group of seven of them, and head for parts unknown; among the group are Lee Roy (Robert Donner) and Gant (John Quade) who are only following out of convenience, looking for a chance to take over if they could.

Meanwhile, in town, we see Sam Burgade (Charlton Heston). He's the retired sheriff, and the man who was responsible for putting Provo behind bars. Sam understands that Provo is going to be gunning for him now. Sam has a daughter Susan (Barbara Hershey) who is loved by Hal Brickman (Christopher Mitchum). Susan was thrilled with her father's retirement and decidedly displeased that Dad is going to be sucked in to "just one more" case.

Dad has a good idea to set a trap for Provo. Provo had been convicted for bank robbery and absconded with a bunch of gold that was never discovered; Provo being half-Indian, Sam thinks that the gold is buried on the reservation where Sam and the rest of the white authorities have no jurisdiction. So Sam tries to draw Provo in to town by getting a shipment of gold on a train coming in, and having word of that leak out where Provo is bound to hear it.

Provo does come to town, but he's no dummy. He gets the distinct impression that this is a trap, and while Sam is out at the train station waiting for Provo to show up, Provo heads over to the Burgade place. He tells Susan that he's been sent over to keep Susan safe from people out to get her, but she's no dummy. Provo is telling a half-truth; there are people out to get Susan, but he's the people out to get her. So he forces his way in to the house and kidnaps Susan, heading off for the mountains.

Meanwhile, the other escapees see this nubile young woman, and want her for themselves because they haven't had carnal relations in a long time; this holds especially true for Gant and Lee Roy who see this as another way to get back at Provo. A posse headed by Sam and Hal heads off to find Provo and rescue Susan....

The Last Hard Men is a nice little 1970s western. Being made well after the breakdown of the Production Code, there's much more scope for violence and the natural adult theme of sex. There's nothing particularly memorable about the acting or the cinematography, but it's all in service of a perfectly serviceable story. If you were looking to introduce people to classic westerns, The Last Hard Men wouldn't necessarily be high up on my list, but if you want to sit down with some refreshments and watch an eminently entertaining movie, I don't think you'll go wrong with The Last Hard Men. Definitely worth a watch.

TCM lists it as being available on a cheap box set of Fox westerns from the 60s and 70s.

Don't call me "Crocodile"!

Another of my recent watches off the DVR was Major Dundee.

The time is the end of 1864, which as you'll know is near the end of the US Civil War; the setting is a prisoner of war camp for captured confederates somewhere out in the New Mexico territory. The Apaches have attacked one of the nearby ranches, killing the parents in the family along with an army patrol; they've also taken the three children in the family. The only survivor was the young bugler, Tim Ryan (Michael Anderson Jr.).

The commander of the POW camp, Maj. Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), is none too happy. This isn't just because of the Apache attack; he doesn't even really want to be in command here, having been sent out west because he screwed up at Gettysburg. Also, all those Confederates are restless because there's a war on and under their commander Capt. Tyreen (Richard Harris), they feel an obligation to make life as difficult for the Union as possible even if they're out in the middle of nowhere in a place that's not going to affect the Civil War one bit.

Maj. Dundee decides that he needs to capture Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate), the Apache warrior who led the raid, not only to teach the Apache a lesson and to prevent further attacks, but to earn back a bit of the glory he lost at Gettysburg. The only problem is, he's way to short-staffed to do anything. The only possible way he can get more people is to recruit from among the Confederate prisoners. And they, understandably, have no desire to help.

But it turns out that one of the Union soldiers the Confederate leaders attacked died, so now they're facing murder charges and a death sentence Joining up in going after the Apache might not be the worst option if it commutes their sentence. So Tyreen reluctantly joins Dundee, along with the Hadleys (Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones) for the Confederates. Lt. Graham (Jim Hutton) is part of the Union contingent along with Dundee and Ryan; a bunch of nameless soldiers and the guide Potts (James Coburn) also join in.

Finding the Apache is going to be hard. Not only do they know the land better than the white man; they decide to escape by going south across the undefended border into Mexico. That presents big problems for Dundee, who follows the Apache into Mexico nonetheless. This being the turn of the year 1864/5, there's not just the Mexicans to deal with but the French as well, this being the period when Napoleon III tried to install a puppet state in Mexico. And the French soldiers are much better than the Mexican soldiers.

Major Dundee goes on like this, and if the movie has a problem, it's this: that it goes on... and on... and on. It only runs a little over two hours, but was apparently edited down quite a bit by the studio over objections from the director, Sam Peckinpah. It's still not tight enough, and has some plot holes. Or, if they're not plot holes, they made the movie more confusing to follow.

The cinematography is nice, helped by location shooting in Durango, Mexico. The actors do as well as they can with the script, although I found Richard Harris to be a bit miscast. All in all, Major Dundee isn't bad, but I find it could have been much better. It's available on DVD should you wish to watch.

The Last of Sheila

So couple of weekends ago I got around to watching The Last of Sheila off of my DVR after having recorded it I think back in November. It's been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection and can be purchased from the TCM Shop, so I have no qualms about doing a full-length post on the movie.

James Coburn plays movie producer Clinton, married to Sheila (Yvonne Romain). One night at a Hollywood party, they have an argument and she goes running off. She makes it to what looks like the road leading to their home, when a car comes up behind her, running her down and killing her. The car goes driving off.

A year passes, and Clinton is on his yacht, named Sheila, somehwere off the coast of the French Riviera. He has an idea who killed Sheila, and to prove his hunch he's going to invite the six main suspects aboard that yacht. There's writer Tom (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett); starlet Alice (Raquel Welch) and her husband Anthony (Ian McShane); agent to the stars Christine (Dyan Cannon) and director Philip (James Mason).

To figure out which one did it, he's devised an elaborate parlor game. Each of his six guests has been given a card stating their "secret"; that is, a dark past that they're expected to play more or less. Each night, Clinton is going to take the guests ashore and set up a game where they have to find where one of the guests has been assigned a particular secret, given the clue Clinton provides each of them. (Would that I were wealthy enough to be able to pull off the logistics necessary to do this, never mind having the yacht.) As an incentive to play the game, the winner will get top billing in Clinton's film about "The Last of Sheila", or, what happened to his wife.

Now, some of the characters begin to get the impression that Clinton actually knows a deep secret about each of them, only he's mixed up the secrets among the various guests such that the one who is given the secret of being a shoplifter isn't actually a shoplifter, but one amongst their number actually is. Worse, things start to go wrong when Christine and Clinton are lounging in the Mediterranean while the ship is at anchor and somebody "accidentally" turns the engine on such that the wake threatens to pull Christine under.

It may not have been Christine who was the target of this, however; on the second night the game takes place at an abandoned monastery on an island, and Clinton winds up dead, having been murdered around the confessional where he was hiding in the hide-and-go-seek part of the game. So now instead of a parlor game, we've got a murder mystery on our hands!

The Last of Sheila is a pretty complex mystery, and one that's hard to decipher, although it turns out that all of the clues are there, if you're attentive. (Presumably, since the guests were spending all their time on the yacht, the clues would have been more obvious to them than to us the viewer.) Once the mystery was explained, I have to admit I found it a bit too convoluted, but that's a minor flaw.

The acting is fairly good; the plot is generally entertaining as long as you pay enough attention. I don't know that anybody in particular stands out among the cast, although Mason does a good job being the analytical one trying to figure out the mystery, while Benjamin seems a little to gung-ho to put out a scenario that fits a little too neatly.

Still, I think anybody who likes murder mysteries will enjoy The Last of Sheila.

Charade

I neglected to do a post on the 1963 film Charade the last time it aired. It's coming up again this afternoon at 4:00 PM on TCM, so now's your chance to get it.

Audrey Hepburn plays Regina Lampert, a French woman married to an American who's in the business of business, or something. She doesn't really know what her husband does, except that it provides her with a living that keeps her in all that Givenchy and going to fashionable places in the alps to spend her holidays with her friend Sylvie and Sylvie's son Jean-Louis. That's where Regina meets Peter Joshua (Cary Grant). He's walking along the breakfast terrace of one of those places, when Jean-Louis comes up and... shoots him with a water pistol! Peter and Regina strike up a converstaion, playing it a bit coy and Regina thinking nothing of it.

She'll have more time to think when she gets back to Paris. She returns to find that her apartment has been emptied, and her husband murdered, thrown off a moving train! It's some small consolation that Peter has somehow made it to Paris too, and is there to comfort the grieving widow. But if Regina thinks the shock is big, she ain't seen nothing yet. When she goes to the funeral, three strange men show up to pay their respects: Tex (James Coburn), Herman (George Kennedy), and Leopold (Ned Glass); all three of them show up briefly, do something strange, and then leave. And not long after the funeral, Regina gets a letter stating that she is to appear at the American embassy and meet officer Hamilton Bartholomew.

He's got an even bigger shock. Those three men were three of her late husband's four accomplices in the theft of $250,000 in gold that the five of them stole during World War II. One of the other men was believed already dead, and none of the remaining four had been able to get their hands on the hidden gold, apparetnly until now, with Mr. Lampert presumably having done so which would explain why the other three were trying to track down Lampert and get to him. They wanted their share. Regina, for her part, is completely innocent, having no idea that her husband was involved in anything like this and no idea where the quarter million could possibly be. A search of her husband's traveling back yields no clues.

And what does Peter Joshua have to do with this? He's passing himself off as a man who could be Regina's friend, and the one person she can trust in Paris while these other three guys are coming after her for the money, thinking that she's holding out on them. But as the movie goes on it's clear that Peter is keeping secrets from Regina, even as the two of them and the three obvious crooks wind up at the same run-down hotel in their search for the money and their attempts to keep their eyes on each other. Who among the various characters are the real criminals, and where is the money?

Charade is a movie with an excellent story, and one that's told exceedingly well. But, it's a movie that's got one small problem, and that's in the casting. Specifically, the casting of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Both of them are fine actors, Grant doing well playing the suave older gentleman and Hepburn being an elegant damsel in distress. But it's Grant and Hepburn. Both of them had reputations, and already 20 years earlier when Grant made Suspicion it was clear that producers hated the idea of him being an unalloyed villain and how audiences would respond to that. In the intervening 20 years, especially the decade or so leading up to Charade, Grant had become a man playing characters you knew where going to be the good guy regardless of what the story was trying to tell you. You can't help but expect that to happen in Charade too, and that's the one thing that works to the movie's ddetriment. Other than that, though, the movie is a winner in every way. It's lovely to look at, and there's a good mix of dramatic thriller elements and comic relief to break up the dark proceedings.

Charade is listed as being available from the TCM shop, but courtesy of the Criterion Collection, which means more pricey.

Hard Contract

I don't know how many more times it's going to show up on the Fox Movie Channel, and it doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so I'd better blog now about Hard Contract, which is getting an airing tomorrow (October 11) at 1:00 PM on the Fox Movie Channel.

James Coburn stars as John Cunningham, who makes his living as a hired killer. He's getting to the point, however, that he'd like to retire on his previous earnings, but to do that, he's going to have to undertake one last contract from his boss, Ramsey Williams (Burgess Meredith). This, however, is a "hard contract", in that it involves killing three people in three differenct countries over in Europe, and John won't be able to learn who the third target is until after killing the first two.

The first one is living in a seaside town on the Spanish coast near Gibraltar, so it's off to the south of Spain. John's an asocial man in the sense that he doesn't want to get too close to anybody, lest emotional attachments get in the way of his job of killing people. So when he gets to the hotel in southern Spain, he tries to obtain the services of a prostitute, something the concierge apparently knows how to provide. Or maybe not, since the hotelier arranges for Sheila (Lee Remick) to have a rendezvous with John. Sheila isn't a prostitute, but a bored American divorcée of means traveling around Europe with some idly wealthy Europeans because, well, it's not as if she has anything better to do. She, of course, doesn't know why John is in Spain, but she's willing to sleep with him anyway.

This sexual experience changes both John and Sheila. Sheila senses that John isn't quite what he's made out to be, while John begins to form an emotional attachment with Sheila. John is able to kill the first guy in Spain, and then it's off to Brussels to commit the second murder. But, John starts finding that killing people isn't so easy like it used to be. Ramsey calls up Cunningham in Brussels, and gets the impression that there's something not quite right with him. Besides, Ramsey is going to have to give his assassin the information on the third victim, so he heads off to Europe unbeknownst to John. It turns out that the third victim is back in Spain, so it's off to Spain again, at which point John meets up with Sheila and all her friends again.

Only this time there's a bigger problem, in that Sheila and her friends know the third victim, one Michael Carlson (Sterling Hayden). That, and Carlson is a former professional assassin himself. Oh, and by now Sheila's figured out the truth about Cunningham. And his relationship with her is deepening. Things are getting really complicated. How is John going to get himself out of this predicament?

Hard Contract is an interesting premise, although it's a premise that had been around in the movies for at least 20 years, being a staple of a certain noir subgenre: people who for whatever reason want to get away from their past, only to find they can't escape. In Hard Contract, the execution of the premise kind of fizzles out. Perhaps it's that all of the characters wind up being like Sheila: not just idly wealthy, but giving off an vibe of blah as a result. I really found myself having difficulty caring about what happened to these characters. And the sexual peccadilloes that John has seem to be just as conveniently post-Code material as they are character developers. On the other hand, there is a lot of lovely location shooting in Hard Contract, and the actors are all professional in doing the best they can with sub-par material. Hard Contract is worth a watch, but it's nowhere near one of the great movies even in its genre.