The Holcroft Covenant
(1985)
(SPOILERS) There’s something oddly comforting about 1980s
Michael Caine spy thrillers, not because they are any good – most aren’t – but
due to his sheer reliability in simply showing up, baring his teeth at some
point while grimly enraged, and generally behaving as if he’s still a viable
lead in such fare. Caine came on board The
Holcroft Covenant late in the day when James Caan fell out, and it might have
seemed at first glance to possess a very faintly promising pedigree; an
admittedly past-his-prime John Frankenheimer was helming, it was adapted from a
Robert Ludlum novel (pre-Bourne and
lacking cachet but another of his having provided the source material for Sam Peckinpah’s
last, The Ostermann Weekend) by
George Axelrod (who hadn’t worked on anything acclaimed in about twenty years,
but did have The Manchurian Candidate on his resumé)
and Edward Anhalt. The result? Well, see my opening remark about Caine spy thrillers
made in the ‘80s, only even less so.
Caine (ostensibly) made the movie to work with Frankenheimer
and didn’t much like the end result (quite a common refrain on his part during
that period). He also found the screenplay incomprehensible. I don’t know that
it’s actually incomprehensible so much as the fiendishly evil plan doesn’t make
a whole lot of sense. Noel Holcroft (Caine), along with the children of two
colleagues of his late Nazi father (as in dead, rather than a former Nazi), is
left $4.5bn to use philanthropically to right the wrongs perpetrated by
Hitler’s hordes, or so it goes (I kept wondering that such a stash wouldn’t
instantly be confiscated, even given it’s in Switzerland, but let it go). Turns
out, though, that dad – Herr General Heinrich Clausen (Alexander Kerst) – wasn’t
such a repentant schweinhund after all; he was quite content to sacrifice his
son as revenge on his missus (Lilli Palmer) for forsaking him, and in so doing
laying the paving stones for the emergence of the Fourth Reich.
Tennyson: Can you imagine a hate so strong that it can
wait years for revenge?
Accordingly, the concerns of Oberst (Richard Munch) that
Noel was planning on using the loot to establish a Fourth Reich weren’t so
balmy after all. In fact, the other members of the foundation, Mario Adorf’s
Jurgen Maas (really Erich Kessler, son of Michael Wold’s General Kessler) and Anthony
Andrews’ Jonathan Tennyson (Johann von Tiebolt), accompanied by his sister
Helden (Victoria Tennant), have precisely that goal in mind, albeit somewhat
goofily, via “a wonderful idea to
consolidate every terrorist group in the world into one cohesive overwhelming
force to create international crises”. This will throw the entire globe
into anarchy and panic and so create the mood to accept a new leader. One might
forward an argument that something not wholly dissimilar has been attempted
with ISIS, but it still seems like something of a stretch. Better for a Bond movie, really.
Caine really does not
give a toss in this one. He claims he’s always professional and… Well, he’s
always watchable, but he seems indifferent to playing a nominal American
(German-American) here, and if you didn’t notice his less-than-half-hearted
approximation of a twang in various scenes, that wouldn’t be at all surprising.
He’s also supposed to be a decade younger than he is, and while some can pull
that off, he’s not really achieving it where it counts. Motivation-wise, it
isn’t clear why Holcroft, a highly successful architect (“Sorry, I’m an architect, not a financial genius”) should want to
get involved in the foundation at all, except to combat some sense of
generational guilt (which isn’t remotely telegraphed). Holcroft’s also entirely
passive, except, bizarrely, when called on to momentarily engage in an exchange
of gunfire (his first time firing a weapon, and he shoots someone in the head,
through a windscreen) or with a skilled assassin (turning a gun on him during a
grapple).
Leighton: A shootout in Trafalgar Square just isn’t
done.
The screenplay is nigh-on terminally exposition heavy, which
means it takes the likes of Bernard Hepton (as Oberst’s cohort Leighton: “More often than not, I’m on the right side”)
to deliver the goods. Frankenheimer stages a nice little assassination in crowd
early on, as “highly respectable banker”
Manfredi (Michael Lonsdale) leads an oblivious Holcroft to his car, but he
seems most inspired by a sequence at a Berlin carnival, which seems to be there
entirely for the director to leer with his camera at T&A.
That aside, Victoria Tennant is pretty but entirely
forgettable as love interest-cum-cold-blooded killer Helda, not really pulling
off the hooker gear in Berlin. Something was evidently amiss when she announced
to Noel, “You’re wonderful. I’ve never
met a man like you before”, but you’d be forgiven for assuming it was the
flatulent dialogue that had been haunting the picture every step of the way,
rather than necessarily her attempting to manipulate her mark (earlier, she
berated Noel’s lack of a driving licence – mirroring Caine’s – with “Don’t you realise you’re endangering our
lives with your incompetence?!”, so one might just have wondered if she wasn’t
a bit loopy). Although, the reveal of an incestuous affair with her brother is
a late-stage surprise (“My love, my
sister, my spouse”). Talking of whom, Andrews far and away steals the show
as a Nazi who works for The Guardian, who sports a silly tache but also gets
the single best scene in the movie.
Tennyson: You see, the world must not be run by the
frightened and ignorant and weak, and because of my father, and because of
Kessler and because of Klausman, it will not be much longer.
Tennyson holds the list that Oberst and Leighton want (the
thousand names that will change the world, of terrorist contacts), and late in
the game he drops in unannounced on Oberst, who’s entertaining Noel’s mum
Althene. Tennyson’s instantly commanding, disarming his host, airily
complimenting Althene on the potato salad and sending a plate spinning into a
wall above Oberst’s head (“Just keep your
nasty, trembling, liver-spotted hands away from those buttons”, referring
to Oberst’s wheelchair control panel). There’s a charming ruthlessness to
Tennyson that Franhenheimer would have done well to have tapped more, as the
director immediately ups his game when he’s got someone putting some welly in.
The Film Yearbook Vol
5 pronounced The Holcroft Covenant
one of the Turkeys of the Year, Harlan Kennedy offering a particularly sturdy
takedown of Ludlum’s rep (if this was the common view, it may explain why it
took another decade and a half to make a success from one of his works, and
that one did so by stripping the source novel of all but premise): “another doomed bid to film a book by that
master of cinematic prolixity”.
Over-explanatory dialogue aside, The Holcroft Covenant’s pretty clunky and forgettable, alas. It
fits loosely into the very minor subgenre of nascent Fourth Reich endeavours
that includes The Boys from Brazil,
but fails to really draw on the potential of the scenario. In the pantheon of ‘80s
Caine thriller fare, I’d take all the other contenders (The Jigsaw Man, The Whistle
Blower, The Fourth Protocol) over
this one.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.