The List of Adrian Messenger

(This post is part of the It’s In the Name of The Title Blogathon hosted by Reelweegiemidget and Taking Up Room)

The List of Adrian Messenger is one of those Golden Age of Detective Fiction yarns that revolve around gathering clues and solving crimes as if they were puzzles. The plot is a bit convoluted, as it relies on an improbable coincidence or two, but essentially the list in question contains the names of people whose seemingly unrelated accidental deaths Adrian Messenger believes are in truth linked murders. He asks a friend, a retired MI5 agent (George C. Scott) to investigate.

As it turns outs, there’s a killer murdering his way to a royal title and the regal manor that goes with it, wearing several elaborate disguises to hide his identity. “One man who becomes many men,” is how Scott’s character puts it.

The List of Adrian Messenger was George C. Scott’s fourth movie and first as a good guy. He doesn’t have any scenery-chewing scenes as in Patton or The Hospital, but he maintains a reserved conviction and clipped accent that never wavers even when he’s muttering clues to himself. He’s downright Holmesian in his doggedness and attention to the smallest details.

This is a mannered production; all the characters are courteous to a fault, somewhat chilly and distanced, and there’s a climactic fox hunt that ends with a gruesome death by farming machine. Today, the film is probably best remembered for the novelty of casting five of the era’s most recognizable actors – Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra – each heavily disguised, allowing audiences to guess at just who was playing whom.

In the movie’s epilogue each actor pulled off their prosthetic latex pieces and spirt-gummed hair for five big reveals. But the real revelation was that only Douglas, Mitchum and Curtis appeared in the actual film, with Lancaster and Sinatra just participating in the finale. Uncredited actors played their roles with voices dubbed in by versatile voice actor Paul Frees.

Guess who?

“It wasn’t grand theft, but it was pretty close,” admitted John Huston, the film’s director. But what Huston did cook up was a movie that was winkingly self-referential, a disguised killer lurking among a cast of disguised actors. The List of Adrian Messenger was meta before there was meta.

In a larger sense, this movie, along with The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (released a year later with Tony Randall hiding behind all seven faces) were among the first to acknowledge the bizarre make-up jobs that are central to each film by giving them prominence on their posters. And maybe in their own way helping trigger an interest in movie special effects that has only grown since.

Not to mention that whenever Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) pulled off yet another latex-face disguise to acknowledge the successful completion of a Mission: Impossible adventure the show was – whether intentionally or not – hearkening back to The List of Adrian Messenger.

This movie is a curio, but one worth checking out.