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d. John Frankenheimer; pr. Ely & Edy Landau; scr. George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt, John Hopkins; novel. Robert Ludlum; ph. Gerry Fisher; m. Stanislas; ed. Ralph Sheldon; cast. Michael Caine, Victoria Tennant, Michael Lonsdale, Anthony Andrews, Lilli Palmer, Mario Adorf (112 mins)

Veteran director John Frankenheimer was approached by the producing team of Ely and Edie Landau to direct an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s best-seller The Holcroft Covenant.

The project had been set up with James Caan expected to play the lead role. However, there were disagreements over the script and after a re-write process, Caan did not attend the first day of scheduled shooting and the film had to commence without a lead actor in place. Soon, Michael Caine signed to the role, necessitating yet more re-writing. Although Ludlum liked the adaptation of his book, a troublesome distribution deal between Universal in America and EMI in England ensured that the film was barely released in the United States, thereafter going straight to video. The film marked the first collaboration between Frankenheimer and scriptwriter George Axelrod since the classic The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. As was the case with much of Frankenheimer’s work after that brilliant film, it cast a shadow over this project and drew unfavorable critical comparisons. The Holcroft Covenant was a critical and box office flop and like much of Frankenheimer’s work in the period is considered thus only evidence of his coarsened technique, the director admitting that some of his choices in the late 1970s and early 1980s were inspired by too much drink. Sadly thus, the opportunity for another stylish, hit thriller was squandered.

In Berlin in 1945 with the Nazis at the verge of defeat, three Nazi officers make a secret pact. Forty years later, their surviving offspring are to be the committee in charge of a vast fortune to spend on supposedly benevolent reparations.

Michael Caine is an architect in America who is contacted by a Swiss accountant (Michael Lonsdale) to come to Europe for important news. Caine learns of his power over the money, some 4 ½ billion dollars and is somewhat befuddled over what to do. Because of the danger and power involved in such a large sum of money, assassins and spies are already on his trail when he is taken by British agents and introduced to a surviving descendent (Victoria Tennant). He goes with Tennant and the two of them soon meet up with Tennant’s brother (Anthony Andrews) who must co-sign the Covenant with Caine in order for it to take effect. In a world where nothing is what it seems, Caine must prevent a kidnapping attempt on Tennant and in the process kills a man for the first time. Caine hears of the involvement of his mother (Lilli Palmer) and indeed some machination seems directed against her. As Caine and Tennant contact the last surviving descendent, a well-known orchestra conductor (Mario Adorf), Andrews apparently has plans of his own and goes after the leader of a spy institute. Caine soon fears for his own fate as the situation becomes ever more murky and convoluted.

The Holcroft Covenant is a stylish but mediocre thriller. Like many of Frankenheimer’s lesser films it has the proverbial style to burn but here is laden with such an exposition heavy script that the film never catches fire except as an efficient succession of plot twists.

The many hands in the script unbalance it so much that the film’s comedic stresses are unsure of themselves and the film never seems certain if it is played for thrills or black comedy. This is usually Frankenheimer’s forte but he stumbles here. Still, what remains intriguing here is the offbeat effort to balance comedy and thriller, to create a fast-paced, location-hopping piece of glossy entertainment. It is in all whole-heartedness an attempt at genre sophistication and it is a shame that it fails so badly. Although the film is best thought of as an attempted spoof of the spy genre, it retains enough apparent solemnity of purpose that it cannot let its sense of comedy wholly take over and is unbalanced and uncertain of what it wants to be. Taking itself too solemnly in the end the film can only create a bathetic sense of non-involvement. Style takes over without much of any substance to back it up and the result is a wholly superficial, glossy entertainment. However, the weight of its ambition is sometimes clear and sadder for its evident faltering. It remains thus a film of moments of style which never gel into a truly memorable overall work: a patchy, spoofy thriller.

The film is ostensibly about a naïve man, pure at heart but surrounded by selfish, greedy forces – a fable about money and the soul of man. Like in so many of John Frankenheimer’s movies, a man has his perspective on life challenged by situations which soon threaten to overwhelm him.

This aspect makes The Holcroft Covenant finally a film about one man’s efforts to regain control of his life after fate has re-defined it for him considerably. The legacy of the father, of Patriarchal fortune and responsibility saturates this film, hence with Caine and Andrews played off each other as rival inheritors to the past, Tennant between them as an oddly sexual force, although her eroticism is never brought out by the filmmakers and they lose out on that potentially rich field. With such an exposition-heavy and convoluted plot, there is a stress on the appearance of things, the underlying suggestion that nothing in the world is what it seems. In the Berlin sequence, however, a subtext of perversion surfaces through into the film, the effectiveness of the visual style revealing both the deficiency of the script and the inability to tie otherwise intriguing sequences together thematically to explore the important undercurrents of the world of duplicitous selfishness and perversion hinted at throughout in the stress on deceptive appearance. Such is never fully explored – as would be more effectively done in Frankenheimer’s subsequent 52 Pick Up.

The Holcroft Covenant
an extract from Robert Cettl's book Film Talk: Quoting the Movies in the Age of DVD (on sale now in print and soon in e-book)

In director John Frankenheimer’s ill-fated thriller The Holcroft Covenant, a hapless Michael Caine (called in to star in the film when production had already begun) is told he is the inheritor of a vast Nazi fortune. In his struggles to gain the inheritance he must deal with a vast number of enemy agents also after the money. As his efforts reveal his innocence with such matters of espionage and dangerous intrigue, he is, after attempting unsuccessfully to inventively take things into his own hands, poignantly and with all due solemnity reminded that:

“invention is the mother of fuck-up.”

Indeed!

Vision
The widescreen letterbox transfer is effective, preserving the original aspect ratio and thus drawing out Frankenheimer’s warped and distorted sense of style. The director has always in his best films maintained a balance of docudrama authenticity with extreme stylization and in The Holcroft Covenant lets his sense of style take over – the film is thus filled with wide angle compositions, tilted camera angles, frames within frames, looming figures and objects and fluid camera movement. It is undeniably stylish, to the point of marvelous grotesquerie in the decadent Berlin sequence but still fails to gel overall. In style it seems like a garish caricature of a spy film, recalling Caine’s work in the Harry Palmer films of the 1960s including such as The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. Still, it is Frankenheimer’s most desperately stylized film as if the director were longing to expand a manner he had already mastered but which had eluded him. The result is a coarsened look. There is a concern for European culture and much variety in the change of locations and the film has a glossy and sleek look. Rain is well used and some sequences at night are effective. Mirrors over a bed are well used to suggest a sleeping Caine’s distraught psyche but that overall sense of caricature to the film distorts any psychological nuance. The transfer itself, however, is usually both competent and clear, bringing out the film’s glossy 1980s sophistication.

Sound
The sound transfer is in Dolby Digital mono only. It is clear and without distraction but is flat overall. The sound design favors the score, dialogue and minor ambient effects and seems routine and polished: efficient rather than accomplished. The score by Stanislas is a major distraction, a dated and caricatured piece which often saturates the movie and brings out its manufactured nature. The score too is sometimes so exaggerated that it verges on self-parody and at other times strains for an emotional connection. Like the visual style, it seems to want to do too much with this material and is uncertain of the proper tone in which to carry it off successfully. At times, the score seems a clichéd, dated 1980s synthesizer experiment. Some ambient effects, particularly rain, work well, and the Berlin sequences manage a lively sense of aural involvement – although this certainly could have been more spatially brought in a better sound transfer. However, in design, the film lacks the detail to fully flesh out its aural ambience and the diegetic sounds of often lively locations seem flat and uninvolving, even the superior Berlin sequence not as detailed as ideally required. Flat mono does not help the design of this movie. There is some auditory distortion to Caine’s brief nightmare, but aurally the film is nowhere as stylized as the visual design. In short, this is a competent transfer of a middling and disappointing film.

There are some special features. There is a fold-out 8-page booklet included in the DVD which gives some neat background into the movie. Included is an original theatrical trailer in fullscreen, the voice-over of which accurately sums up the film as an “ordinary man in extra-ordinary danger”. In addition is a commentary track by director Frankenheimer, who sees more of merit in the film than is evident to viewers. He talks of the production history and especially of the problems facing an adaptation of a dense Ludlum novel – he is thus frank about the level of exposition in the movie. He talks of his fondness for implied rather than graphic violence, his admiration for the score, his preference for using stuntmen in roles in actual action scenes rather than doubling actors and of his long-standing love for actress Lilli Palmer. Michael Caine is referred to as virtually saving the picture and the director mentions Caine’s unique vocal mannerisms when approaching dialogue. He comments on his personal style as a director and the references to his other films found in the fast car sequences and in the final press conference scene. Frankenheimer mentions the logistics of filming in London and his particular joy in recreating the decadent Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s for the Berlin sex carnival sequence. He mentions his preference for letting actors perform rather than to resort to fast cutting and says how he set out to make a “smart” film.