The Adventurers * (1970, Bekim Fehmiu, Alan Badel, Candice Bergen, Ernest Borgnine, Olivia de Havilland, Rossano Brazzi, Charles Aznavour) – Classic Movie Review 6751

‘The Adventurers was a disaster and I should never have made it.’

In 1967, Lewis Gilbert was chosen to direct Lionel Bart’s musical of Oliver!, but he was contracted to another project had to pull out. ‘I had to do The Adventurers instead,’ he recalled. ‘The Adventurers was a disaster,’ he said, ‘and I should never have made it.’

Co-writer/ director Gilbert puts a distinguished, starry, fascinating cast through the hoops in this confused 1970 adaptation of Harold Robbins’s sexy soap opera about Dax Xensos (Bekim Fehmiu), a wealthy playboy globetrotting to raise money for a revolution in his Latin American country, where his diplomat father was murdered on the order of the nation’s corrupt president, his father’s friend.

Dax also plots to avenge his mother’s rape and death at the hands of a sadistic police official, the vilest of acts that he witnessed as a child.

The Adventurers runs like a long, feebly scripted travelogue, with over-heated stops for sex and violence, with flaccid results that failed to turn its handsome but rather wooden-acting leading player Fehmiu into a star. The Adventurers is professionally assembled, though, with fine Technicolor cinematography from the world-class expert Claude Renoir. It has an 18 certificate but a PG version cut for sex and violence also shows.

Also in the rather exotic mixed bag of a cast are Sydney Tafler, Fernando Rey, Leigh Taylor-Young, Thommy Berggren, John Ireland, Jaclyn Smith, Delia Baccardo, Anna Moffo, Yolande Donlan, Jorge Martinez de Hoyos, Christian Roberts, Angela Scoular, Yorgo Voyagis, Milena Vukotic, Loris Loddi, Roberta Donatelli, Ferdy Mayne, Peter Graves, Katherine Balfour, Allan Cuthbertson, Michael Balfour, Katia Christine, Linda Towne, Joan Carlo, Anthony Hickox, Lois Maxwell, Vanessa Lee and Roberta Haynes.

The Adventurers is directed by Lewis Gilbert, runs 171 minutes, is made by Avco Embassy, released by Paramount, is written by Michael Hastings and Lewis Gilbert, is shot in widescreen and Technicolor by Claude Renoir, is produced by Joseph E Levine and Lewis Gilbert, is scored by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and designed by Tony Masters.

Gilbert nearly became the man who directed The Godfather. Just a few million dollars got in the way. He recalled: ‘While doing this film [The Adventurers], I signed to do The Godfather. Because of their financial problems, Paramount could only find $2 million to make it. I said it needed $7 million.’ So instead Gilbert made Friends, an interesting film but with far fewer friends. Just for comparison, The Adventurers cost $17 million.

RIP Lewis Gilbert (1920–2018), among the best of the best.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6751

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