Yul Brynner was an impressive and powerful screen presence, moving like a panther, scowling like one as well from under his intent brow. He really laid it on, and it generally works. But here is the problem: this film is about 'duplicating' him. The Soviets, aided by the East Germans (Anton Diffring not as a Nazi officer this time but as a Stasi officer, same thing), intend to replace Dan Slater, Assistant Deputy Director of the CIA (played by Brynner), with a double. The double (played by Brynner, naturally) has the same accent and the same walk, is the same size, and has had plastic surgery to have the same face. But of all the people in Hollywood who could not be duplicated, Yul Brynner must be the top. So how silly can you get? This kind of story might work with one of those identikit actors, who are especially popular in Hollywood at the moment actually, but somebody as weird as Yul Brynner?! And the story gets sillier. Because there is cute 34 year-old Britt Ekland. I had forgotten what a looker she really was in those days. Naturally there has to be 'the girl' in every such story, so credulity is stretched even further to fit her in, despite the fact that she is not really part of the story and has to be squeezed between the floorboards (that's because the story is set in the Austrian Tyrol, where all the chalets are wooden), so that Anton Diffring and his team can blend in with the locals and also so that some people can combine the film production with a skiing holiday (a joke? or real?). Shades of Leni Riefenstahl and the mountain films of the twenties and thirties such as STORM OVER MONT BLANC! This film is made all the more objectionable because of the terrible music score by Ernie Freeman. In the late sixties it was considered trendy to fill every moment of a thriller when people weren't speaking with blaring trumpets and trombones in a kind of hep ersatz jazz, the theory being that this would heighten the tension while people were walking up staircases (supposed to be ominous, with goodness knows what fate awaiting them at the top) or approaching looming buildings which might contain goodness knows what villains. More likely it made people hold their ears or run screaming from the cinema in search of a doctor. The film was directed by Franklin Schaffner (best known for PLANET OF THE APES the following year, 1968, and his next film, PATTON, two years later in 1971; his film SPHINX of 1981 was no great shakes, see my review), who should have known better, and who at least saved it from being terrible, so that it remained merely bad. Moira Lister has great fun being a spoilt rich hostess who throws parties and tries to seduce toy boys. Clive Revill is good at being a hangdog former British spy who can't take it any more, and cannot even make himself pick up a gun, although finally he regains his courage of course and does pick up one lest he let down a friend. Lloyd Nolan plays the head of the CIA from a wheelchair and whines: 'How could Dan go off somewhere without telling me where?' Some CIA! A cable arrives addressed to Dan Slater, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, we see it on screen but no one at the CIA bothers to read it and it is handed to Brynner as if it were a Christmas card. Sure, that's how it works in Washington. But this is a serious matter: will the dastardly communist Yul Brynner return to America and betray all the secrets of the USA to the sour-faced Russian who has instructed the eager Diffring? Or will the patriotic Yul Brynner save the day by stopping him? As the bad Brynner says to the good Brynner during a gunfight: 'There cannot be two of us.' Is a glass half full or half empty? Is a movie half good or half bad? Five stars will leave you wondering about that.
Review of The Double Man
