Review of The MacKintosh Man (1973) by Mereie D — 02 Mar 2010

â??The Mackintosh Manâ?? is a spy movie from 1973, created in a style that stirs memories of similar movies from the mid- to late sixties. It seems as if John Huston is suffering from the same habit as Hitchcock: his later movies look more old-fashioned than they actually are.

Another Huston trait that struck me in â??The Mackintosh Manâ?? is the fact that it took me two views to get my head round it and to convince myself I had really understood everything. The same thing happened to me when I watched â??The Kremlin Letterâ??, another film by John Huston.

In the latter case, I was lucky to find a highly detailed plot synopsis on Wikipedia, which convinced me that I had apparently understood everything I should have understood. The reason I initially doubted myself (both in the case of â??The Mackintosh Manâ?? and â??The Kremlin Letterâ??) is that some elements in the story are probably supposed to be a bit enigmatic or obscure.

In â??The Mackintosh Manâ??, we are lead to believe Rearden (Paul Newman) is hired to uncover a ring of spies, but all we see the alleged spies do is illegal stuff that doesnâ??t appear to have anything to do with spying.

Where are the Russians and the microfilms containing secret info to be smuggled to the other side? Where are the (fake) defectors? All the bad guys seem to do is make a lot of money from other bad guys who happen to be wealthy.

Perhaps Huston found it interesting enough to present a film about subversive elements masquerading as defenders of national law and order, embedded in a spy plot full of action, foreign locations and rather unlikely twists.

To be sure, the movie makes an amusing adventure story with a possibly spy touch, but that is about it. Many of the story components seem rather unreal: the peculiar diamond theft and subsequent arrest and conviction, the prison regime (very smartly dressed and well-behaved inmates) with its peculiar escape routine (couldnâ??t the management prevent the prison breaks if they occur on such a regular basis â?? and if they let them happen on purpose, what would they gain from it?), the peculiar people arranging the breakouts and their peculiar domicile, etc.

, etc. All these things make for some nice action scenes (Reardenâ??s escape through the Irish fields chased by the dog is only one example), but where is the logic? Up till the end I couldnâ??t make out exactly where Slade (Ian Bannen) fitted in â?? is he another spy, and if so, why is the prison break necessary for him too? What are they trying to gain by it? Who is in on what anyway, and for what reason? Huston seemed to find it unnecessary to overburden his viewers with such info, preferring to leave them in the dark instead.

â??The Mackintosh Manâ?? is nice enough to watch and amusingly bizarre at times, but that doesnâ??t prevent it from being little more than a feeble attempt to mask a crime/adventure story as a spy movie.