Review: Cold Sweat

A fit-looking Charles Bronson stars as an American in France, who makes a living taking tourists on boating trips, and is married to Liv Ullman, and they have a young daughter together. What Ullman doesn’t initially know is that Bronson has a criminal past, and that past is about to catch up with him. Actually, he’s a former military man who served under Captain James Mason. He was imprisoned for striking an officer, and the prison stint saw him re-unite with Mason, who was serving time for multiple crimes. But when Mason led Bronson and several others (including Jean Topart and Luigi Pistilli) on a prison break that saw a policeman killed, Bronson (the getaway driver) drove off, leaving the others for dead (or more accurately, re-capture). Now Mason and the gang have managed to find Bronson, and kidnap his family in order to blackmail him into transporting illegal drugs. Instead, Bronson tracks down Mason’s idiot hippie girlfriend Jill Ireland and holds her captive in an isolated cabin. Just when Mason thinks he has all the answers, Bronson has gone and changed the questions.

 

Directed by the usually reliable Terence Young (“Dr. No”, “From Russia With Love”, “The Jigsaw Man”, “Red Sun”), this 1970 crime flick boasts an interesting cast and starts intriguingly, but seems to fall apart pretty quickly. In fact, it would’ve been an infinitely superior film if Charles Bronson had just gone and shipped off the drugs like it first appears the plot will be centred around. We only come to that in the final ten minutes or so of the film, which is really bizarre. After a while it almost turns into a predecessor to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Commando”, and doesn’t even head in that direction eventually, either. For a while, I liked that, as it made the film somewhat unpredictable, especially with the tables turning on the characters constantly.

 

Unfortunately, after a while, it actually never really goes anywhere at all, and certainly doesn’t satisfy at the end of the day. Meanwhile, it has to be said that Southern accents and James Mason simply don’t mix. I like the idea of an uncouth and undignified Mason in theory, but the execution is botched, with Mason’s Southern accent making him sound like Charlton Heston. Think about that, people. A regrettable performance from a terrific but sorely miscast actor (Jason Robards was the original casting choice, and that makes much more sense). A seriously buff-looking Bronson is quite good in the lead (one of his best 1970s performances, albeit faint praise), and sleazy Jean Topart is excellent too, but Liv Ullman is stiff in English-language surrounds, and Jill Ireland’s typically awful acting nearly sink the film single-handedly. She’s pathetically unconvincing and miscast as a hippie with the most Julie Andrews-ish accent you’ve ever heard.

 

I have to say that the film doesn’t look like the work of a seasoned pro like Young. It feels like the work of an Italian hack or a slumming J. Lee Thompson (director of practically every Charles Bronson vehicle of the late 70s and especially in the 80s). The dubbing of several actors (including by “Last House on the Left” actor David Hess) is obvious and sloppily done. Young makes particularly good use of a winding stretch off mountain road, and I bet Quentin Tarantino would find lots to like here. The car and the presence of spaghetti western actor Luigi Pistilli (Eli Wallach’s disapproving, pious brother in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”), for instance. Me? Not terribly impressed, and yet, you do keep watching it just to see where it’s going, even if the destination is ultimately uninteresting. So I guess I can’t say it’s boring, just really disappointing and quite cheap-looking.

 

There are good elements here, it’s just a big mess on the whole and the performances are uneven. Based on a Richard Matheson (“The Pit and the Pendulum”, “Comedy of Terrors”, “The Incredible Shrinking Man”) novel, the screenplay is by director Young’s wife Dorothea Bennett (who wrote the novel “The Jigsaw Man” was based on), Jo Eisinger (“The Jigsaw Man”, the excellent “Night and the City”), Shimon Wincelberg (“On the Threshold of Space”), and an uncredited Albert Simonin (“Male Hunt”).

 

Rating: C