THE NAKED RUNNER (1967) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Sidney J. Furie
Frank Sinatra, Peter Vaughan, Derren Nesbitt,
Nadia Gray, Edward Fox, Inger Stratton,
Toby Robins, Michael Newport, Cyril Luckham
Frank Sinatra plays an American living in London, hoodwinked by a wartime colleague into performing a hit on an informant who's being whisked off to Moscow by way of Copenhagen and East Germany. Sinatra's company produced this, and it fits in with other amateur spy movies from the period like "The Defector" and "Torn Curtain", except that the protagonist here isn't really an amateur. He was a sharpshooter during the war. The plausibility rating is low. It's the kind of movie where Frank can cross international borders (even across the Iron Curtain), board international flights, and even be arrested and held in police custody, while carrying a rifle in a suitcase, and nobody ever takes away the suitcase or looks to see what's in it. Furie's use of extreme closeups is effectively unsettling, and Peter Vaughan as a British spymaster and Derren Nesbitt as his East German counterpart really know how to get on your nerves.
