When Warner Bros gave Walter Hill several novels they had optioned and asked him to write a script, he chose Desmond Bagley’s The Freedom Trap, an espionage thriller loosely based on the story of George Blake, an MI6 agent who turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. Hill wasn’t all that enthusiastic about his screenplay, but much to his surprise, not only did John Huston want to direct it, but Paul Newman also agreed to play the lead. This Cold War neo-noir spy flick entitled The Mackintosh Man turned out to be a really entertaining and finely crafted movie. If we didn’t know otherwise and the DVD box stated it was directed by Hitchcock, not many eyebrows would have been raised.
Starring Newman, James Mason and Dominique Sanda, The Mackintosh Man would have probably been simply a solid espionage thriller had it not been Huston sitting in the director’s chair. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle… When the filmmaker is this well-versed, experienced and talented in the storytelling department, the end product can’t be mediocre. With the help of the cast and the great composer Maurice Jarre, Huston created a stylish crowd-pleaser we still like to pick up from time to time.
In 1972 a neophyte Spanish media company created a rare platform for artists to explore classic genre imagery with a sophisticated cinematic sensibility.
After Peter Hyams made a successful TV movie called "Goodnight, My Love", producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler approached him with the desire of...
