It's a sad day when I get more out of a film by reading the reviews here on the IMDb boards than by watching the picture itself. My DVD copy had poor audio quality making it hard to follow the dialog, so I barely made out that some sort of conspiracy was involved in blackmailing a Swiss bank and some of it's clients into NOT revealing their identity. Somehow by the end of the story there was a chase on for a bag of uncut diamonds which I guess was part of the blackmail demand, but that really wasn't very clear to me.
So there's really not a whole lot here to recommend this story, although individual elements might be noteworthy. A couple of German beauties grace the screen; Senta Berger as a nominal love interest for leading man David Janssen, and Elke Sommer in an underused role as the mistress of a bank VP. I didn't get the attraction between Berger's character Denise Abbott, and Janssen's David Christopher, but I guess these stories need some kind of romantic sub-plot to keep them going.
What amused me were those two hit-men who kept running around trying to knock off Christopher. They looked like a couple of fugitives from Gabe Kaplan's inner city high school class in 'Welcome Back, Kotter'. Actually they did a pretty nasty job on John Saxon in the early going, which made me wonder why Saxon's name was up there in the credits above Ray Milland and Sommer. Not going to lose any sleep over it though.
The other odd thing that struck me throughout the picture was how Christopher, the bad guys and Swiss detective Benninger (Anton Diffring) all wound up running into each other over the course of the story in a city as large as Zurich. Like in that scene when the hit-men shoot at Christopher and wind up hitting the bank VP, and the authorities arrive right at that moment. How does that work?
When all is said and done however, here's what I really want to know - how did they retrieve David Christopher's car after turning it into a teeter totter on the edge of that cliff?
So there's really not a whole lot here to recommend this story, although individual elements might be noteworthy. A couple of German beauties grace the screen; Senta Berger as a nominal love interest for leading man David Janssen, and Elke Sommer in an underused role as the mistress of a bank VP. I didn't get the attraction between Berger's character Denise Abbott, and Janssen's David Christopher, but I guess these stories need some kind of romantic sub-plot to keep them going.
What amused me were those two hit-men who kept running around trying to knock off Christopher. They looked like a couple of fugitives from Gabe Kaplan's inner city high school class in 'Welcome Back, Kotter'. Actually they did a pretty nasty job on John Saxon in the early going, which made me wonder why Saxon's name was up there in the credits above Ray Milland and Sommer. Not going to lose any sleep over it though.
The other odd thing that struck me throughout the picture was how Christopher, the bad guys and Swiss detective Benninger (Anton Diffring) all wound up running into each other over the course of the story in a city as large as Zurich. Like in that scene when the hit-men shoot at Christopher and wind up hitting the bank VP, and the authorities arrive right at that moment. How does that work?
When all is said and done however, here's what I really want to know - how did they retrieve David Christopher's car after turning it into a teeter totter on the edge of that cliff?