The Adventurers (1970) We often end up posts on old films, thinking......"you can wait and around and hope, but you'll never see the likes of this again...."
Not this one. No sane human being wants to see another "Adventurers".......
This one belonged to a peculiar, long lost genre.........the Hollywood big budget adaptation of whatever pulpy, trashy, guilty-pleasure novel had crawled up from the depths of hell and perched itself on the best seller lists.
Novelist Harold Robbins was the Supreme Master of such swill, pumping out barely grammatical sex 'n violence carnivals, all of them thinly based on real scandalous characters......
This particular pile of steaming excrement fell into the unlikely hands of of British director Lewis Gilbert, who took it on as a consolation prize after he lost his bid to direct "Oliver!".....
Personally, we would have turned this movie over to the hellishly crazy Sam Peckinpah......half of it takes place in a mythical, revolution-torn banana republic where a never-ending succession of dictators and rebels conduct enthusiastic machine-gun slaughters of each other's forces......heaven made for Sam.
Who knows what Peckinpah would make of the
other half of the movie......a depraved soap opera set mostly in Rome, brimming with orgies, sports cars, fashion shows and filthy rich, finely dressed miserable assholes........
We've no idea what a relatively high-toned, tasteful Field Marshall director like Lewis Gilbert was going for here...... possibly, in the back of his mind he thought he could re-shape and rehabilitate Robbins' sludge into a classy David Lean-like epic drama........
Fat chance, Lew.......weighing in at 3 hours, the movie takes on a demented life of its own, a mad, clumsy mixture of 'La Dolce Vita', 'Viva Zapata' and "The Wild Bunch".......
For lovers of cinema trainwrecks, the casting here was a dream come true. The lead role, an exile from the Banana Republic turned playboy-gigalo, fell to a Yugoslav side of beef named Bekim Fehmiu. In addition to possessing no discernible talent, Fehmiu spoke no English, so his tortured attempts at dialogue sounded like he extracted the words out of a pocket dictionary......all his line readings sound like he's asking the hotel desk clerk where the bathroom is.
Also humiliating themselves along side Fehmiu.........Alan Badel, playing a ruthless, murdering dictator as if he's one of the aristocrats in "My Fair Lady", Candice Bergen, at the height of her young, embarrassing non-acting powers, giving herself an instant miscarriage by having Fehmiu push her too high on a swing ( honest).......and Charles Aznavour as a sleazy banker who hangs out in his own private kinky lounge that resembles the "Clockwork Orange" nightspot
Director Gilbert doesn't leave all the awfulness to the actors alone..........he doubles down on the madness, alternating the Rome sex orgies and fashion shows with heaping generous portions of all the atrocities going on in Fehmiu's Banana-Land......non stop rape and Peckinpah-worthy massacres. The movie wallows in its own hyper-ventilating trashiness.
After 177 punishing minutes, "The Adventurers" finally grinds to a halt, still hammering away at what it considers its genius revelation........that Latino revolutionaries invariably transform themselves into the very the fascist strongmen they fought to overthrow.......
About a year later, Woody Allen made the same point in "Bananas"......except it only took him 82 minutes.......and unlike Gilbert's film, all the laughs were intentional......
For movie buffs who treasure and savor disasters......."The Adventurers" is the Holy Grain, the Mother Lode.........but fair warning: sitting through all of it ain't for sissies........we recommend a viewing only for the strongest, iron-willed curators of Trash Cinema.....
Zero stars (0)........if we never see anything like this again......then by all means praise the Deity of your choice......or just wipe your brows and go "whew!"
