Golden Rendezvous (1977)  

Review: written March 2012

Mediocre MacLean Adaptation

This might well have been a decent film, but I’ve so far only been able to see it in a dismally bad video transfer onto DVD. It received such bad reviews at the time that it was reedited into a TV movie for US distribution.

Plot wise, this is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the MacLean novel, which tells the tale of the (not so ) good ship Caribbean Star, on which the First Officer has to investigate some mysterious disappearances and murders, which evolve into a more overt threat to the crew and her varied elite passengers as the story rolls on. Some liberties have been taken to add some action scenes - mostly to replace scenes in the book which were largely first person narrative. A few (superfluous) characters have been added and some have been radically altered, but somehow in the process all of them have been somehow made entirely bland and one dimensional. In particular, the plot twist of MacLean's novel has been altered to shoehorn in some action which is in fact quite predictable - workmanlike in its delivery rather than executed with panache.

Now, Alistair MacLean was perhaps not best known for his plots necessarily, but he was a master of description combined with a marvelously dry and self deprecating wit, and somehow that depth of colour is washed out here, both literally and figuratively. It's actually a pretty good cast - Richard Harris as the hero, Gordon Jackson as the ships doctor, John Vernon (wasted) as the bad guy, David Janssen and even Burgess Meredith (as a character not appearing in the book). In fact almost all of the cast is played by well known actors of the time, but taken when they were clearly not at their best... certainly Richard Harris looks like he is walking around filling the shoes of the lead just to pay his bar bill, and adds none of the dry humour that other actors such as Richard Burton, Robert Shaw or even Barry Newman, have brought to MacLean roles. The lady who implausibly starts to fall for Richard Harris' charms is played by the impossibly long legged Ann Turkel (Cassandra Crossing) .. well, I say implausibly and yet she and Harris were married in real life.

So on the plus side, we have much of the story from one of MacLean's most popular novels - at best it starts in the same place and finishes in the same place, even if it takes a different path in places to get there, there is some action and there are interesting actors. It also appears to have been genuinely shot on board a ship. On the minus side, everyone, and i mean everyone, under-performs.. the acting is flat to say the least. And we have an idiosyncratic score from synth wizard Jeff Wayne - this at best is going to divide opinion. At the beginning this made me groan with despair, it was so out of place.. but as the movie continued, the worst excesses were kept at bay, and only served to propel some action scenes along, which after all is what a score is meant to do - so I don't have too much beef with it.

Final note should be made that as of writing, the only available edition I have found is the Australian DVD version which has been clearly copied from a VHS - I'm not kidding. You can actually see the tell tale flickering in places, so it's not even a good VHS copy. The colours washed out, the sound warbly - it's dodgy to say the least, and pushes the score down. I'd avoid until they give it a proper release some time, if they ever do.

Summary: Decent story, passable action, mediocre direction, awful acting, miserable presentation.