Cinema: War Games

Having scraped the bottom of the barrel, the makers of spy films are now scraping the sides, the top and even the outside in a frantic search for new stories. The spoofs are endless permutations of the number 007; the serious efforts are apt to be repetitions of Hollywood war games originally played in the 1940s.

The Naked Runner. In Von Ryan’s Express, he played the Army’s most fearless fighter. In Suddenly, he was a potential presidential assassin. In The Manchurian Candidate, he was the friend of a brainwashed veteran turned into a killer by the Chinese Reds. The Naked Runner shows Frank Sinatra trying to combine fractions of all those past film roles in a spy movie that just doesn’t add up.

An expatriate American furniture designer, Sinatra finds himself part of a blueprint for murder. The plan is drawn by British intelligence, which somehow cannot find a single soul on its staff to eliminate a defecting spy in East Germany. Recalling that the furniture man was a sharpshooter back in World War II, the British decide to turn him back into a trigger man, with the boys in London calling the shots. He refuses, so they rig up a series of schemes, including the kidnaping of his son, to break down his resistance. When Sinatra is told that his son has been killed he finally goes to Leipzig to carry out the assignment—and then learns that, all along, he has been the biggest marionette in a puppet play.

The story is full of opportunities for drama, but the audience has only the script’s word that The Naked Runner is a suspense film. Other than swiveling a pair of nervous ferret eyes, Sinatra shows no hint of emotion. Around him are a cast of inept unknowns, many of whom seem to believe that such dialogue as “Get dressssed, ve are goink for a drive,” is German for sinister. Director Sidney Furie confuses tension and pretension, hokes up the story with odd-angle camera shots—of a man bicycling alone across a huge airstrip, a confrontation with the enemy in an echoing, empty marble mansion. To no avail. As in many another amateurish spy film, Sinatra and company have forgotten to look for the enemy within—a soggy scenario that gummed up the caper from the start.

Triple Cross. During World War II a British convict named Eddie Chapman was imprisoned on the Isle of Jersey. When the Germans overrun the place, according to this semidocumentary, he convinces the commandant that he will sell out for a price. Thereafter, says this new film, he shuttles back and forth across the English Channel getting high Marks from the Germans and a mound of Pounds from the British. Neither side trusts him completely—with good reason. He is not a single or a double agent, but a triple one, in business for himself. Still, in the end, he does aid Britain by giving Germany false information, thus misguiding V-2 rockets and saving thousands of lives.

The real Chapman was saluted by both sides during the war. The Nazis gave him the Iron Cross, the English granted him a full pardon. The movies, however, have not. In Triple Cross he has been doublecrossed with an overblown, underdeveloped film in which he is misplayed to disadvantage by Christopher Plummer. Surrounding Plummer is a competent cast, including Yul Brynner, Romy Schneider, Claudine Auger and Gert Frobe. But the whole enterprise seems to suggest that a spy does not necessarily improve the more times he crosses his employers. A triple agent can be three times duller than a single one.