The Holcroft Covenant (1985) (In Hindi)

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Director: John Frankenheimer

Starring: Michael Caine, Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Lilli Palmer

Genre: Action, Crime, Mystery

Released on: 18 Oct 1985

Writer: Robert Ludlum (novel), George Axelrod (screenplay), Edward Anhalt (screenplay), John Hopkins (screenplay)

IMDB Rating: 5.7/10 (2,372 Votes)

Duration: 112 min

Synopsis: Noel Holcroft is a foreign-born American citizen working in New York City as an architect. In Geneva he meets with a respected Swiss banker who tells him he has been designated to be executor of a huge 4 1/2 billion dollar trust fund designed to make reparations for the war crimes of the Nazis. Holcroft’s father, who committed suicide in 1945, was a key Hitler financial advisor who became conscience-stricken about German war atrocities, turned against the Fuehrer, and covertly diverted Nazi funds to a secret Swiss account. Under the terms of the covenant Holcroft must locate the sons of his father’s two associates so they can jointly activate their fathers’ account. They battle the sinister forces seem to be trying to prevent them from signing the document as it is believed that it will be used to establish a Fourth Reich.

Veteran director John Frankenheimer was approached by the producing team of Ely and Edie Landau to direct an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s best-seller The Holcroft Covenant. The project had been set up with James Caan expected to play the lead role. However, there were disagreements over the script and after a re-write process, Caan did not attend the first day of scheduled shooting and the film had to commence without a lead actor in place. Soon, Michael Caine signed to the role, necessitating yet more re-writing. Although Ludlum liked the adaptation of his book, a troublesome distribution deal between Universal in America and EMI in England ensured that the film was barely released in the United States, thereafter going straight to video. The film marked the first collaboration between Frankenheimer and scriptwriter George Axelrod since the classic The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. As was the case with much of Frankenheimer’s work after that brilliant film, it cast a shadow over this project and drew unfavorable critical comparisons. The Holcroft Covenant was a critical and box office flop and like much of Frankenheimer’s work in the period is considered thus only evidence of his coarsened technique, the director admitting that some of his choices in the late 1970s and early 1980s were inspired by too much drink. Sadly thus, the opportunity for another stylish, hit thriller was squandered.

In Berlin in 1945 with the Nazis at the verge of defeat, three Nazi officers make a secret pact. Forty years later, their surviving offspring are to be the committee in charge of a vast fortune to spend on supposedly benevolent reparations. Michael Caine is an architect in America who is contacted by a Swiss accountant (Michael Lonsdale) to come to Europe for important news. Caine learns of his power over the money, some 4 ½ billion dollars and is somewhat befuddled over what to do. Because of the danger and power involved in such a large sum of money, assassins and spies are already on his trail when he is taken by British agents and introduced to a surviving descendent (Victoria Tennant). He goes with Tennant and the two of them soon meet up with Tennant’s brother (Anthony Andrews) who must co-sign the Covenant with Caine in order for it to take effect. In a world where nothing is what it seems, Caine must prevent a kidnapping attempt on Tennant and in the process kills a man for the first time. Caine hears of the involvement of his mother (Lilli Palmer) and indeed some machination seems directed against her. As Caine and Tennant contact the last surviving descendent, a well-known orchestra conductor (Mario Adorf), Andrews apparently has plans of his own and goes after the leader of a spy institute. Caine soon fears for his own fate as the situation becomes ever more murky and convoluted.

The Holcroft Covenant is a stylish but mediocre thriller. Like many of Frankenheimer’s lesser films it has the proverbial style to burn but here is laden with such an exposition heavy script that the film never catches fire except as an efficient succession of plot twists. The many hands in the script unbalance it so much that the film’s comedic stresses are unsure of themselves and the film never seems certain if it is played for thrills or black comedy. This is usually Frankenheimer’s forte but he stumbles here. Still, what remains intriguing here is the offbeat effort to balance comedy and thriller, to create a fast-paced, location-hopping piece of glossy entertainment. It is in all whole-heartedness an attempt at genre sophistication and it is a shame that it fails so badly. Although the film is best thought of as an attempted spoof of the spy genre, it retains enough apparent solemnity of purpose that it cannot let its sense of comedy wholly take over and is unbalanced and uncertain of what it wants to be. Taking itself too solemnly in the end the film can only create a bathetic sense of non-involvement. Style takes over without much of any substance to back it up and the result is a wholly superficial, glossy entertainment. However, the weight of its ambition is sometimes clear and sadder for its evident faltering. It remains thus a film of moments of style which never gel into a truly memorable overall work: a patchy, spoofy thriller.

The film is ostensibly about a naïve man, pure at heart but surrounded by selfish, greedy forces – a fable about money and the soul of man. Like in so many of John Frankenheimer’s movies, a man has his perspective on life challenged by situations which soon threaten to overwhelm him. This aspect makes The Holcroft Covenant finally a film about one man’s efforts to regain control of his life after fate has re-defined it for him considerably. The legacy of the father, of Patriarchal fortune and responsibility saturates this film, hence with Caine and Andrews played off each other as rival inheritors to the past, Tennant between them as an oddly sexual force, although her eroticism is never brought out by the filmmakers and they lose out on that potentially rich field. With such an exposition-heavy and convoluted plot, there is a stress on the appearance of things, the underlying suggestion that nothing in the world is what it seems. In the Berlin sequence, however, a subtext of perversion surfaces through into the film, the effectiveness of the visual style revealing both the deficiency of the script and the inability to tie otherwise intriguing sequences together thematically to explore the important undercurrents of the world of duplicitous selfishness and perversion hinted at throughout in the stress on deceptive appearance. Such is never fully explored – as would be more effectively done in Frankenheimer’s subsequent 52 Pick Up.