SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

SnoopyStyle British agent Joseph Rearden (Paul Newman) meets his superior MacKintosh and Mrs Smith who direct him to steal diamonds from mysterious mail deliveries. He gets arrested after an anonymous tip and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He joins Slade, a KGB mole in British intelligence, in a prison escape. They are drugged and brought to a vast secret organization. Meanwhile, politician Sir George Wheeler (James Mason) rails against the government and MacKintosh informs him of infiltrating the escape organization.The first act is rather stale. John Huston directs the material in a standard manner. The trial is boring. It would have worked much better to start with Newman arriving in prison. His intelligence background should be revealed much later as a shocking twist. The pacing and plotting is rather slow and methodical. It is competently made and it has the great Paul Newman. It's well into the second half when they finally have a car chase. Otherwise, the drama is rather limited.

Spikeopath The Mackintosh Man is directed by John Huston and adapted to screenplay by Walter Hill and William Fairchild from The Freedom Trap written by Desmond Bagley. It stars Paul Newman, Dominique Sanda, Ian Bannen, James Mason, Michael Horden and Harry Andrews. Music is by Maurice Jarre and cinematography by Oswald Morris.Spy shenanigans unbound as Newman plays Joseph Rearden, a hired agent for the British Intelligence who pulls a job on the orders of The Mackintosh Man (Andrews), and finds himself sent to prison for 20 years. But this is all part of a greater plan…A well performed and serviceable drama, if a bit of a let down come the final third. The most fun and intrigue comes about once Rearden enters prison and the initial part of plotting once he is broken out, then it sort of loses its way, trying to make a simple story more intricate than it is. There's good mystery viewing to be found in working out the means and motives of the major players, and there's no shortage of action and sizzle either as Rearden is thrust into a world of espionage and counter espionage. There's a ream of suspicious accents to ignore and Jarre's musical score tries to reach the heights of Anton Karas' work on The Third Man, but fails and just comes off as a cheap repetitive attempt at a homage.More caper movie than intellectual thriller, it's never less than watchable and the cast are good value for your time. 7/10

Bill Slocum There is one scene I like in "The Macintosh Man." In it, we follow Paul Newman in a tight shot just over his head as he staggers through a dark room in a narcotized haze, falling hard onto the floor a couple of times."Hey, I can relate to this," I thought. "It's how I've felt watching this movie for the last 40 minutes."This is a film that does its best to live up to its tagline: "Whoever he is he's not what you think."I shouldn't have capitalized "Whoever" since in typical 1970s fashion it wasn't capitalized on the poster. This is a film dedicated to the notion of one not knowing anything and wears its decade of cynical malaise on its sleeve. Everything is muddy and seemingly without a point. The good guys are no better than the bad guys. Newman seems alternately disengaged and disgusted by what goes on around him, an objector without a conscience.In the beginning, we watch Newman's character "Rearden" try out an Australian accent while he goes through the motions of a violent diamond robbery in London. Caught, he becomes a sullen prisoner. We sense there's more going on behind Rearden, so that when he gets a chance to make a prison break alongside a Soviet spy (Ian Bannen), it's clear the guy has been playing a strange game all along.A very strange game; none of it makes sense. What's with Rearden's terrible Aussie accent which everyone seems to buy? Why does Rearden's English boss Macintosh (Harry Andrews) have a daughter (Dominique Sanda) who can barely speak English herself? How did Macintosh and Rearden know to count on being invited for an escape attempt with the Russian spy, and why go through such trouble shadowing someone they already had under lock and key? And what's with that stupid, left-field ending?Director John Huston seems to work at making this film his homage to "The Third Man." A Maurice Jarre score reminds you of Anton Karas' zither music, and Sanda and Newman's final scene clearly quotes the famous two-shot finale of Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten. "The Third Man" questioned the spy game with a script brimming with humor and divided loyalties; Walter Hill's screenplay here just rides the bitter vibe of the time in which it was made.James Mason plays a right-wing politician, an "extreme reactionary" we are told, who is introduced telling us that if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, "you see before you a villain, unmasked and unashamed." Let's just say that anyone with half a brain won't be surprised at how Mason's character turns out by film's end.Newman's dire performance is the film's biggest surprise. He appears thoroughly unengaged, mostly without any trace of the humor he showcased in other movies made around this time like "The Sting" and "The Drowning Pool." Sanda matches him in monotone line readings. Compared to them, Mason is a delight, yet he's too obvious in his smug, sanctimonious treachery to be enjoyed.The whole film is like that. It struggles with exposition disease as people yak about things like diamond theft and the French Resistance that have no bearing on the story at hand. Alternately, it leaves gargantuan plot holes unfilled."Macintosh Man" never makes much sense, yet it doesn't really matter because it's hard to care.

RanchoTuVu British society is under assault according to the opening scene which has James Mason as a Conservative MP addressing Parliament about social decay. Of course when it comes down to it, he's about as corrupt as they come, a fact suspected by the British police, who orchestrate a plan to infiltrate a criminal gang by getting one of their own (Paul Newman) sent to prison. Hollywood talent of writer Walter Hill (great 70's and 80's director), John Huston and Paul Newman mingles with British sensibilities and a really nice soundtrack to create a whole that exceeds the parts. The story starts take off at about the middle of the film, out somewhere on the Irish moors with Newman having infiltrated the criminal gang who had sprung him out of prison. The viewer is lulled into thinking this is a lighter film than it actually turns out to be, which has some surprisingly tough parts, especially the ending.