The era of great Alistair Maclean movie adaptations was well past by the time infamous writer / producer / director Harry Alan Towers and bargain budget lovers Cannon Films got their hands on River of Death. Once touted as a project for Sylvester Stallone, the original novel was no great shakes but benefitted from a page turning format of daring-do along Amazon rapids and a halfway decent hunt for hidden Nazis. The lost city MacGuffin was by-the-way and the characters were the usual bunch of paradoxes, but it certainly had potential for a cinematic treatment. The film might have done decent business in the late seventies with someone like Jon Voigt or Chuck Norris in the lead, but by the late eighties there wasn’t anything very unusual about the jungle format or the story of hidden Nazis and cities.
What we end up with is a laboured transposition of the MacLean skeleton that contains the rudiments of a traditional jungle adventures. We also have a non-entity of a hero in Michael Dudikoff’s John Hamilton, a sort of hybrid of Indiana Jones, Allan Quartermain and Tarzan only without the charisma. Dudikoff was a low-rent action hero at best. The film definitely would have benefitted from someone like Chuck Norris in the lead; in fact director Steve Carver worked with the martial arts star on a couple of early eighties projects. The villainous cast is occupied by Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasance and Herbert Lom, who all know they are working with a script well below par. Knowing Harry Alan Towers wrote the screenplay helps form our [and their?] below standard expectations; you know it’ll be ropey and it is. In some respects then, River of Death doesn’t disappoint for it never attempts to be anything more than it is, a substandard outing across the board. You can tell it is cheap because the outfits worn by the cast don’t change from when they meet in the city to when they go traipsing about in the rainforest.
The plot has been slightly altered to feature deadly poisons rather than stolen Greek Orthodox antiquities and some of the more elaborate action set pieces of the book have been excised, one assumes on a cost basis. The movie was filmed in South Africa because it was cheaper too. Michael Dudikoff looks stunned by proceedings, perhaps because oldsters Donald Pleasance and Herbert Lom have been out-acting him at every turn. Robert Vaughn however is dreadful. Despite the mostly humdrum entertainment, it was worth waiting to see the final confrontation, one of some silliness, much smoke and many bullets. An annoying voice over narrative adds nothing to the proceedings we witness on screen and is baffling when you consider the novel wasn’t even written in the first person.
River of Death is trash cinema, straight-to-video fare as those of us who were there remember it. I fully expect this to turn up on Legends or the Great Movies Action channel sooner or later. As a close observer of The Saint television show for the last year, it was nice to see the lovely Erica Rogers turn up in a small role as a sleazy bar madam. And that’s about your lot…
FEAR IS THE KEY (1972) with Barry Newman, Suzy Kendall, John Vernon, and a very young Ben Kingsley in his film debut.
The premise: Newman is John Talbot. As the film begins, he's on the radio listening to a plane go down in the ocean. Three years later, he's causing a scene involving a trial, a shooting, a kidnapping, a long car chase, and a whole lotta other nonsense to eventually get captured by John Vernon's Vyland (with Ben Kingsley as his henchman). Vyland needs Talbot for a salvage operation. To say anything more would be to go into spoiler territory. Suffice to say, hijinks ensue.
It's...ok? This is one of those 'what the heck is going on?' kinda films that keeps holding back information from the viewers in order to hit them with a twist. That's fine if done right, but it's done rather clumsily here. With no clear understanding of how the opening sequence relates to the antics of the first act, I was frankly baffled as to what was going on. What are the motivations? Why is he doing what he's doing? Who are these people? Am I supposed to care about any of this? Eventually the WHY of the situation is revealed and the viewer can now follow the main throughline of the plot, but it still doesn't hit in a satisfying way. All of it carries through to the finale and a final revelation that ties everything together.
The film lacks oomph. There's a solid but overlong car chase in the opening act that adds some thrills but nothing else in the film really works in terms of adding tension. Also, Barry Newman was a pretty limited actor and a lot of things that he's asked to do in the film are frankly out of his range, especially hurting the revelation scenes. Ben Kingsley is interesting to watch here (he has hair!) in a role that doesn't require much. You can see glints of what he'd become 10 years later in GANDHI but he's otherwise unremarkable.
From an Alistair MacLean novel that I suspect was much better than the film.
I took the liberty and I hope you don't mind, Barbel, as it is an interesting Fleming V MacLean post:
Diamonds in disguise
As we all know, the 1971 film of “Diamonds Are Forever” doesn’t owe a great deal to Ian Fleming’s novel of the same name (mainly the first 15-20 minutes and the cruise liner ending). I’d like to put forward the theory that it owes an equal if not bigger debt to a novel by another well-known UK thriller writer, Alistair MacLean. “Fear Is The Key” was published in 1961, and filmed in 1972. Both book and film feature:
(1) A reclusive billionaire being held captive by a smooth master criminal, who then uses the billionaire’s organisation as a front for his own scheme.
(2) A two-man team of hitmen working for the villain.
(3) A featured car chase in which the protagonist, accompanied of course by the lovely leading lady, runs rings around the cops who think he’s a baddie. (A 30-second clip from the 10-minute chase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV4nIKIBO8Q )
(4) A climax on an oil rig (modified to suit the villain's scheme) with a small submarine attached; the plot is resolved, hero wins, etc.
Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds very like DAF to me. I’m sure there are more resemblances between the two stories- if I’ve missed anything, please point it out.
Point (1) is not in Fleming’s novel, and the explanation for it being in the film has always been that Cubby Broccoli had a dream about meeting his old friend, Howard Hughes, in one of Hughes’ residences- only when the man turned round it wasn’t Hughes at all- Cubby then had Mankiewicz and/or Maibaum write it into the script (Howard Hughes becoming Willard Whyte). I’m not doubting that explanation in any way, but am beginning to wonder if Cubby had been reading MacLean the night before!
Point (2) – Wint and Kidd are in Fleming’s novel, though treated much more seriously than they are in the film (no surprises there). Royale and Larry in MacLean’s book more closely resemble Fleming’s hitmen: Royale is older, deadly and calm while Larry is young and more excitable.
Point (3) – Of course many thrillers in the late 60s/early 70s have a car chase. Both the books have car chase scenes (albeit that in Fleming isn’t much like the film version) though the films play this up much more. The car Barry Newman drives (I'm not an expert) looks pretty similar to the one Bond has.
Point (4) – The oil rig isn’t in Fleming at all, while the entire plot of “Fear Is The Key” leads toward it.
The two films do not have the same general feeling in any way. As a side point, John Vernon plays the head villain, Vyland, and IMHO he'd have made an excellent Bond baddie- if things had been different, he could have played Seraffimo Spang.
Reading these posts about FEAR IS THE KEY, made me check the thread as I was certain I re-read the novel last year. I never posted the review I wrote! So here, for your pleasure or displeasure, MacLean is that divisive sort of writer...
FEAR IS THE KEY
1961
Fear is the Key is the sixth Alistair MacLean blockbuster thriller and the third successive set in contemporary times and revolving around an ‘espionage’ plot – this one to unearth a cache of stolen gold bullion and diamonds from a downed and drowned cargo plane. Mixed up in the narrative is John Talbot, a salvage expert on a revenge mission who is not everything he appears to be, and the delectable Mary Ruthven, daughter of an multimillionaire oil magnate. Talbot kidnaps the nubile blonde while escaping from a Louisiana courthouse. The strange, oddly humorous and slightly off-kilter opening is one of MacLean’s more peculiar scenes; he continues the tactic of showing everything yet telling nothing throughout almost the entire first half of the novel. He even disguises John Talbot’s thought processes, so the reader is unable to gauge exactly what the hero’s motives are. This device has its plus points, chiefly by disguise, but the reader constantly lurches from one extreme to another and the uncertainty doesn’t aid tension, only provokes confusion.
Stick with it.
Fear is the Key eventually straightens itself out and turns into a rollicking ride of fights, chases and underwater derring-do. If there are perhaps a shade too many scenes of violent incident, I can forgive this. It is fairly obvious MacLean wants to crank up the pressure for his hero in deliberate and unsubtle fashions. So, it works, I suppose, because Talbot’s manner is abrasive enough to make the bad guys believe every single one of his carefully woven lies, however preposterous. Of more concern is the amount of action and intrigue MacLean has left out: in the final chapter, he reveals whole swathes of back story, character development and investigation which could have been utilised to far greater effect inside the narrative. Instead, MacLean uses them as a knot-tying exercise and the suspenseful climax becomes a long monologue explaining the who, where, what and how. Unlike the early scenes, this is a case of extreme tell and not show, and it is extremely ineffective. At least the opening three or four chapters had pace and intrigue; the denouement lacks much of that which, given all that comes before, is a trifle disappointing.
Fear is the Key begins the second phase of MacLean’s career, when having established his name and career with outstanding initial critical and commercial success in the late 1950s, he began to experience self-doubt and wrote in differing styles – and even under a different pseudonymous name – in an attempt to prove he could succeed without the expectation brought on by the name tag ‘Alistair MacLean’. The novel is a successful thriller, bounding from page to page with a hefty dose of the ridiculous and the central character, while initially unlikeable, grows on the reader chapter by chapter, reflecting Mary Ruthven’s own changing attitudes. Love and sex is pushed into the background in favour of drinking and fighting, where MacLean’s strengths tend to lie. While he isn’t in the Fleming class for sexually available heroines, the author does imbibe Talbot with the steely wherewithal of a Bond-style secret agent; one can believe a desperate woman in desperate circumstances might fall for him.
So, generally a big thumbs up. Compared to most thriller writers of the era, who tended to the pedantic, Maclean understands the need to propel his stories forward with heroics and action; he sensibly saves the talk for appropriate moments. Fear is the Key, along with The Last Frontier, Night Without End and Caravan to Vaccarès displays the storyteller’s skill to the full.
I would say that's a fair enough review. I read it in my youth then again more recently plus much the same for the movie (which is pretty faithful), so I guess I like it.
I wrote a review of this for the Last Film Seen thread a couple of years ago. This essay was from a revisit from last year that I also never posted here, I think because I hadn't created the thread at the time.
Fear is the Key isn’t one of the very best MacLean adaptations, but it is a fairly good version of his fast-paced 1961 thriller, the writer and director hurtling through the book’s action sequences with some gusto and barely a moment to pause for explanations. The twists and turns of the plot are hardly important here; in fact the opening sequence, where John Talbot listens in as one of his fleet of cargo planes crashes into the Gulf of Mexico seems entirely detached from proceedings for most of the film’s length. On board the plane are Talbot’s wife and son. This important prologue isn’t explained at any great length until the very end, nor is it filmed in any spectacular fashion, giving an underwhelming opening to the movie. That might be a costing issue, it might be a scripting one in choosing to stick to MacLean’s version of events, or it might be 1970s cinematic fashion; whichever, it now seems an oversight. A clearer indication of why Barry Newman’s maddeningly, violently driven hero is how he is just might have helped the telling. If however, you prefer your stories told with oodles of senseless, grim-faced action, this will get a thumbs up.
The opening twenty minutes is fabulous stuff as Barry Newman gets himself arrested fighting Louisiana Highway Patrolmen, then flees the courthouse and enacts an extended car chase among the bijous, the unwitting and unwilling assistance of sexy Suzy Kendall proving a pretty distraction. Hers is a completely underwritten role. Kendall’s Sarah Ruthven comes across far better in Maclean’s novel, where she has to be competent to aid the hero. Here, she is shovelled into the action almost because she needs to be, not because the character has abilities and thoughts of her own. You could get away with it if she was bedhopping dolly-bird and Newman took advantage of her wantonness, but she isn’t. Kendall plays a multimillionaire’s chaste daughter caught up in a game of kidnap and blackmail beyond her or her father’s control. Ray McAnally is the dad, owner of Nyland Oil. John Vernon is – confusingly – Vyland, the villain who is searching for a cache of diamonds loaded on a cargo plane downed in the Gulf of Mexico. The gems were bound for the USA from Colombia as payment from one government to the other to buy arms to fend off a Communist revolution. That’s quite of its time and yep, you guessed it, the cargo plane was the same one carrying Talbot’s wife and son.
This revelation takes some time to catch up with the unfolding action. When it does come, it feels like an afterthought as the audience has been watching an extended series of seemingly unconnected action set pieces. When all the revelations are made, everything slots neatly into place, but by then it is too much to take in. Learning the facts piecemeal is a reflection of the original nature of the hard-as-nails prose. However, it is narrative tactic that doesn’t always work on film where clearer motivations tend to be a more useful aide-memoir. You can’t go back and revisit sections of a film and decipher them as you can in a book; at least you couldn’t in 1972. It is easy to get lost in all the tension, cool-as-cucumbers dialogues and startlingly roughhouse action to forget what Talbot’s purpose is. The revenge motive, while interesting from a psychological point of view for MacLean when he wrote the novel, isn’t very necessary in the tough actioner we have here. It would have been enough to demonstrate that innocent people died and that Vyland, along with his henchman Royale [a young and efficiently nasty Ben Kingsley] were responsible for the killings, so desperate were they to gain the diamonds. The suspenseful oxygen zapping climax in a submersible is good, but if you don’t concentrate fully, you do wonder how the characters ended up there.
Overall, after a second viewing, I quite enjoy Fear is the Key. It isn’t as taut as the novel, but it features most of the highlights and presents them in a rapid and unfussy manner. The music score is a jazzy little number from Roy Budd. Michael Tuchner is not a director I am familiar with. Mostly working in television, he is okay here, but okay doesn’t quite instil enough intrigue and purpose, despite Barry Newman’s brutishly physical performance. I fancy if they made this today they’d put Jason Statham in it, pack it with mixed martial arts, profanity and sex and call it Jason Statham’s Fear is the Key.
Not the best, no, but a better than middling Maclean adaptation.
Comments
For those interested, in the UK, Legend [free view 41] is showing FEAR IS THE KEY on Weds night / Thursday morning at 00:40.
I wouldn't call it a 'legend' or even a 'classic' but the film's worth a look.
It's one of my favourite Maclean films. I bought a copy, I liked it that much!
RIVER OF DEATH (1989)
The era of great Alistair Maclean movie adaptations was well past by the time infamous writer / producer / director Harry Alan Towers and bargain budget lovers Cannon Films got their hands on River of Death. Once touted as a project for Sylvester Stallone, the original novel was no great shakes but benefitted from a page turning format of daring-do along Amazon rapids and a halfway decent hunt for hidden Nazis. The lost city MacGuffin was by-the-way and the characters were the usual bunch of paradoxes, but it certainly had potential for a cinematic treatment. The film might have done decent business in the late seventies with someone like Jon Voigt or Chuck Norris in the lead, but by the late eighties there wasn’t anything very unusual about the jungle format or the story of hidden Nazis and cities.
What we end up with is a laboured transposition of the MacLean skeleton that contains the rudiments of a traditional jungle adventures. We also have a non-entity of a hero in Michael Dudikoff’s John Hamilton, a sort of hybrid of Indiana Jones, Allan Quartermain and Tarzan only without the charisma. Dudikoff was a low-rent action hero at best. The film definitely would have benefitted from someone like Chuck Norris in the lead; in fact director Steve Carver worked with the martial arts star on a couple of early eighties projects. The villainous cast is occupied by Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasance and Herbert Lom, who all know they are working with a script well below par. Knowing Harry Alan Towers wrote the screenplay helps form our [and their?] below standard expectations; you know it’ll be ropey and it is. In some respects then, River of Death doesn’t disappoint for it never attempts to be anything more than it is, a substandard outing across the board. You can tell it is cheap because the outfits worn by the cast don’t change from when they meet in the city to when they go traipsing about in the rainforest.
The plot has been slightly altered to feature deadly poisons rather than stolen Greek Orthodox antiquities and some of the more elaborate action set pieces of the book have been excised, one assumes on a cost basis. The movie was filmed in South Africa because it was cheaper too. Michael Dudikoff looks stunned by proceedings, perhaps because oldsters Donald Pleasance and Herbert Lom have been out-acting him at every turn. Robert Vaughn however is dreadful. Despite the mostly humdrum entertainment, it was worth waiting to see the final confrontation, one of some silliness, much smoke and many bullets. An annoying voice over narrative adds nothing to the proceedings we witness on screen and is baffling when you consider the novel wasn’t even written in the first person.
River of Death is trash cinema, straight-to-video fare as those of us who were there remember it. I fully expect this to turn up on Legends or the Great Movies Action channel sooner or later. As a close observer of The Saint television show for the last year, it was nice to see the lovely Erica Rogers turn up in a small role as a sleazy bar madam. And that’s about your lot…
Reposting, per suggestion:
FEAR IS THE KEY (1972) with Barry Newman, Suzy Kendall, John Vernon, and a very young Ben Kingsley in his film debut.
The premise: Newman is John Talbot. As the film begins, he's on the radio listening to a plane go down in the ocean. Three years later, he's causing a scene involving a trial, a shooting, a kidnapping, a long car chase, and a whole lotta other nonsense to eventually get captured by John Vernon's Vyland (with Ben Kingsley as his henchman). Vyland needs Talbot for a salvage operation. To say anything more would be to go into spoiler territory. Suffice to say, hijinks ensue.
It's...ok? This is one of those 'what the heck is going on?' kinda films that keeps holding back information from the viewers in order to hit them with a twist. That's fine if done right, but it's done rather clumsily here. With no clear understanding of how the opening sequence relates to the antics of the first act, I was frankly baffled as to what was going on. What are the motivations? Why is he doing what he's doing? Who are these people? Am I supposed to care about any of this? Eventually the WHY of the situation is revealed and the viewer can now follow the main throughline of the plot, but it still doesn't hit in a satisfying way. All of it carries through to the finale and a final revelation that ties everything together.
The film lacks oomph. There's a solid but overlong car chase in the opening act that adds some thrills but nothing else in the film really works in terms of adding tension. Also, Barry Newman was a pretty limited actor and a lot of things that he's asked to do in the film are frankly out of his range, especially hurting the revelation scenes. Ben Kingsley is interesting to watch here (he has hair!) in a role that doesn't require much. You can see glints of what he'd become 10 years later in GANDHI but he's otherwise unremarkable.
From an Alistair MacLean novel that I suspect was much better than the film.
My rather eccentric thoughts on the above- Diamonds in disguise — ajb007
Interesting! Wow, those similarities didn't even occur to me.
@Barbel l wrote in July 2013:
I took the liberty and I hope you don't mind, Barbel, as it is an interesting Fleming V MacLean post:
Diamonds in disguise
As we all know, the 1971 film of “Diamonds Are Forever” doesn’t owe a great deal to Ian Fleming’s novel of the same name (mainly the first 15-20 minutes and the cruise liner ending). I’d like to put forward the theory that it owes an equal if not bigger debt to a novel by another well-known UK thriller writer, Alistair MacLean. “Fear Is The Key” was published in 1961, and filmed in 1972. Both book and film feature:
(1) A reclusive billionaire being held captive by a smooth master criminal, who then uses the billionaire’s organisation as a front for his own scheme.
(2) A two-man team of hitmen working for the villain.
(3) A featured car chase in which the protagonist, accompanied of course by the lovely leading lady, runs rings around the cops who think he’s a baddie. (A 30-second clip from the 10-minute chase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV4nIKIBO8Q )
(4) A climax on an oil rig (modified to suit the villain's scheme) with a small submarine attached; the plot is resolved, hero wins, etc.
Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds very like DAF to me. I’m sure there are more resemblances between the two stories- if I’ve missed anything, please point it out.
Point (1) is not in Fleming’s novel, and the explanation for it being in the film has always been that Cubby Broccoli had a dream about meeting his old friend, Howard Hughes, in one of Hughes’ residences- only when the man turned round it wasn’t Hughes at all- Cubby then had Mankiewicz and/or Maibaum write it into the script (Howard Hughes becoming Willard Whyte). I’m not doubting that explanation in any way, but am beginning to wonder if Cubby had been reading MacLean the night before!
Point (2) – Wint and Kidd are in Fleming’s novel, though treated much more seriously than they are in the film (no surprises there). Royale and Larry in MacLean’s book more closely resemble Fleming’s hitmen: Royale is older, deadly and calm while Larry is young and more excitable.
Point (3) – Of course many thrillers in the late 60s/early 70s have a car chase. Both the books have car chase scenes (albeit that in Fleming isn’t much like the film version) though the films play this up much more. The car Barry Newman drives (I'm not an expert) looks pretty similar to the one Bond has.
Point (4) – The oil rig isn’t in Fleming at all, while the entire plot of “Fear Is The Key” leads toward it.
The two films do not have the same general feeling in any way. As a side point, John Vernon plays the head villain, Vyland, and IMHO he'd have made an excellent Bond baddie- if things had been different, he could have played Seraffimo Spang.
"you've interfered with my evil plans the last time, James Bond 007! This time you're on Double Secret Probation!"
@chrisno1 No, of course I don't mind. It saves a reader going to the other post to see what I wrote.
(PS I don't remember you cutting and pasting my thoughts back in July 2013, but I suppose that's understandable!)
Reading these posts about FEAR IS THE KEY, made me check the thread as I was certain I re-read the novel last year. I never posted the review I wrote! So here, for your pleasure or displeasure, MacLean is that divisive sort of writer...
FEAR IS THE KEY
1961
Fear is the Key is the sixth Alistair MacLean blockbuster thriller and the third successive set in contemporary times and revolving around an ‘espionage’ plot – this one to unearth a cache of stolen gold bullion and diamonds from a downed and drowned cargo plane. Mixed up in the narrative is John Talbot, a salvage expert on a revenge mission who is not everything he appears to be, and the delectable Mary Ruthven, daughter of an multimillionaire oil magnate. Talbot kidnaps the nubile blonde while escaping from a Louisiana courthouse. The strange, oddly humorous and slightly off-kilter opening is one of MacLean’s more peculiar scenes; he continues the tactic of showing everything yet telling nothing throughout almost the entire first half of the novel. He even disguises John Talbot’s thought processes, so the reader is unable to gauge exactly what the hero’s motives are. This device has its plus points, chiefly by disguise, but the reader constantly lurches from one extreme to another and the uncertainty doesn’t aid tension, only provokes confusion.
Stick with it.
Fear is the Key eventually straightens itself out and turns into a rollicking ride of fights, chases and underwater derring-do. If there are perhaps a shade too many scenes of violent incident, I can forgive this. It is fairly obvious MacLean wants to crank up the pressure for his hero in deliberate and unsubtle fashions. So, it works, I suppose, because Talbot’s manner is abrasive enough to make the bad guys believe every single one of his carefully woven lies, however preposterous. Of more concern is the amount of action and intrigue MacLean has left out: in the final chapter, he reveals whole swathes of back story, character development and investigation which could have been utilised to far greater effect inside the narrative. Instead, MacLean uses them as a knot-tying exercise and the suspenseful climax becomes a long monologue explaining the who, where, what and how. Unlike the early scenes, this is a case of extreme tell and not show, and it is extremely ineffective. At least the opening three or four chapters had pace and intrigue; the denouement lacks much of that which, given all that comes before, is a trifle disappointing.
Fear is the Key begins the second phase of MacLean’s career, when having established his name and career with outstanding initial critical and commercial success in the late 1950s, he began to experience self-doubt and wrote in differing styles – and even under a different pseudonymous name – in an attempt to prove he could succeed without the expectation brought on by the name tag ‘Alistair MacLean’. The novel is a successful thriller, bounding from page to page with a hefty dose of the ridiculous and the central character, while initially unlikeable, grows on the reader chapter by chapter, reflecting Mary Ruthven’s own changing attitudes. Love and sex is pushed into the background in favour of drinking and fighting, where MacLean’s strengths tend to lie. While he isn’t in the Fleming class for sexually available heroines, the author does imbibe Talbot with the steely wherewithal of a Bond-style secret agent; one can believe a desperate woman in desperate circumstances might fall for him.
So, generally a big thumbs up. Compared to most thriller writers of the era, who tended to the pedantic, Maclean understands the need to propel his stories forward with heroics and action; he sensibly saves the talk for appropriate moments. Fear is the Key, along with The Last Frontier, Night Without End and Caravan to Vaccarès displays the storyteller’s skill to the full.
I would say that's a fair enough review. I read it in my youth then again more recently plus much the same for the movie (which is pretty faithful), so I guess I like it.
FEAR IS THE KEY (1972)
I wrote a review of this for the Last Film Seen thread a couple of years ago. This essay was from a revisit from last year that I also never posted here, I think because I hadn't created the thread at the time.
Fear is the Key isn’t one of the very best MacLean adaptations, but it is a fairly good version of his fast-paced 1961 thriller, the writer and director hurtling through the book’s action sequences with some gusto and barely a moment to pause for explanations. The twists and turns of the plot are hardly important here; in fact the opening sequence, where John Talbot listens in as one of his fleet of cargo planes crashes into the Gulf of Mexico seems entirely detached from proceedings for most of the film’s length. On board the plane are Talbot’s wife and son. This important prologue isn’t explained at any great length until the very end, nor is it filmed in any spectacular fashion, giving an underwhelming opening to the movie. That might be a costing issue, it might be a scripting one in choosing to stick to MacLean’s version of events, or it might be 1970s cinematic fashion; whichever, it now seems an oversight. A clearer indication of why Barry Newman’s maddeningly, violently driven hero is how he is just might have helped the telling. If however, you prefer your stories told with oodles of senseless, grim-faced action, this will get a thumbs up.
The opening twenty minutes is fabulous stuff as Barry Newman gets himself arrested fighting Louisiana Highway Patrolmen, then flees the courthouse and enacts an extended car chase among the bijous, the unwitting and unwilling assistance of sexy Suzy Kendall proving a pretty distraction. Hers is a completely underwritten role. Kendall’s Sarah Ruthven comes across far better in Maclean’s novel, where she has to be competent to aid the hero. Here, she is shovelled into the action almost because she needs to be, not because the character has abilities and thoughts of her own. You could get away with it if she was bedhopping dolly-bird and Newman took advantage of her wantonness, but she isn’t. Kendall plays a multimillionaire’s chaste daughter caught up in a game of kidnap and blackmail beyond her or her father’s control. Ray McAnally is the dad, owner of Nyland Oil. John Vernon is – confusingly – Vyland, the villain who is searching for a cache of diamonds loaded on a cargo plane downed in the Gulf of Mexico. The gems were bound for the USA from Colombia as payment from one government to the other to buy arms to fend off a Communist revolution. That’s quite of its time and yep, you guessed it, the cargo plane was the same one carrying Talbot’s wife and son.
This revelation takes some time to catch up with the unfolding action. When it does come, it feels like an afterthought as the audience has been watching an extended series of seemingly unconnected action set pieces. When all the revelations are made, everything slots neatly into place, but by then it is too much to take in. Learning the facts piecemeal is a reflection of the original nature of the hard-as-nails prose. However, it is narrative tactic that doesn’t always work on film where clearer motivations tend to be a more useful aide-memoir. You can’t go back and revisit sections of a film and decipher them as you can in a book; at least you couldn’t in 1972. It is easy to get lost in all the tension, cool-as-cucumbers dialogues and startlingly roughhouse action to forget what Talbot’s purpose is. The revenge motive, while interesting from a psychological point of view for MacLean when he wrote the novel, isn’t very necessary in the tough actioner we have here. It would have been enough to demonstrate that innocent people died and that Vyland, along with his henchman Royale [a young and efficiently nasty Ben Kingsley] were responsible for the killings, so desperate were they to gain the diamonds. The suspenseful oxygen zapping climax in a submersible is good, but if you don’t concentrate fully, you do wonder how the characters ended up there.
Overall, after a second viewing, I quite enjoy Fear is the Key. It isn’t as taut as the novel, but it features most of the highlights and presents them in a rapid and unfussy manner. The music score is a jazzy little number from Roy Budd. Michael Tuchner is not a director I am familiar with. Mostly working in television, he is okay here, but okay doesn’t quite instil enough intrigue and purpose, despite Barry Newman’s brutishly physical performance. I fancy if they made this today they’d put Jason Statham in it, pack it with mixed martial arts, profanity and sex and call it Jason Statham’s Fear is the Key.
Not the best, no, but a better than middling Maclean adaptation.
If anyone in the UK wishes to compare notes FEAR IS THE KEY will be shown on the Legend Channel [no.69] on Saturday 20th April at 9pm.
It’s strange that whenever car chases in movies are discussed the one from FEAR IS THE KEY is never mentioned, even though it’s one of the best.