John Huston's The Mackintosh Man, from 1973, has a pretty dire reputation, certainly neither Huston nor screenwriter Walter Hill had anything positive to say about it, but it struck me as an above average spy thriller. The picture's first act dawdles and Dominique Sanda is lost in the flood for the duration, but once the picture becomes a man on the run flick, a la North by Northwest, it finds a despairing groove. Similarly, Paul Newman seems ill at ease trying on a number of accents, but his prowess as a physical performer is well utilized once he is on the run.
The car chase sequences seem tacked on, as if to duplicate the success of Bullitt and The French Connection. What Huston excels at here is conjuring a mood of nihilistic helplessness. Any moral order has collapsed and these characters exist in a world where Manichaean dichotomies no longer exist. Newman's character has no moral compass or even a fixed identity; survival is all. Huston's cynical disgust suits the project. Only when one character's sense of justice is violated is there a moral reckoning. Huston's oeuvre between Beat the Devil and Fat City is a dispiriting succession of half-assed projects and wasted opportunities. Here, with the help of a number of excellent British supporting actors, Huston achieves, as in Fat City, genuine expressions of pain, doubt and alienation.
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