How do things like this get lost? This is a terrific Noir starring the one and only Patrick McGoohan at his stony best. Religious, brooding, dark to the point of blackness, and violent as hell, this is a near- masterpiece of cinema.
I have a visceral love of formula and/or B-movies that use familiar, even clichéd structures to do or say something different, and this one fits that definition perfectly. The worn-out 'plot' of reluctant-hit-man- does-one-last-job is almost totally irrelevant here: it's just a frame to hang the movie on. It's about life, or the absence of it.
Other reviews here demonstrate that certain people have found this movie extremely important, and I admit I'm one of them, too. I first saw it on a late-late show on broadcast TV (back when local TV stations would show almost ANYTHING in the middle of the night!) in, probably, the mid- 1980s, and never forgot it. I finally tracked down a decent VHS copy and watched it again recently, and it's lost not one bit of its power.
Maybe you have to be a certain kind of person. I suspect anyone who didn't like it just didn't even watch it long enough to form a negative opinion, and remembered it not at all; others watched it once, and it was seared in their brain.
Watching it again I just had to think, feel, "Man, there is just nothing left of this guy." Was there ever anything there? Was he ever a... person, a human being, at all? If so, 'what a waste of a man'.
I'm giving it 8 not because it's not terrific, it is, but certain parts of it irritated me intensely for reasons I can't really articulate; it's possible it's just me, the intense irritation, and possible I just don't like being confronted with some aspect of myself. Why else would I feel so strongly about such a seemingly minor thing?
Why else would it find such a strong place in my memories?
I have a visceral love of formula and/or B-movies that use familiar, even clichéd structures to do or say something different, and this one fits that definition perfectly. The worn-out 'plot' of reluctant-hit-man- does-one-last-job is almost totally irrelevant here: it's just a frame to hang the movie on. It's about life, or the absence of it.
Other reviews here demonstrate that certain people have found this movie extremely important, and I admit I'm one of them, too. I first saw it on a late-late show on broadcast TV (back when local TV stations would show almost ANYTHING in the middle of the night!) in, probably, the mid- 1980s, and never forgot it. I finally tracked down a decent VHS copy and watched it again recently, and it's lost not one bit of its power.
Maybe you have to be a certain kind of person. I suspect anyone who didn't like it just didn't even watch it long enough to form a negative opinion, and remembered it not at all; others watched it once, and it was seared in their brain.
Watching it again I just had to think, feel, "Man, there is just nothing left of this guy." Was there ever anything there? Was he ever a... person, a human being, at all? If so, 'what a waste of a man'.
I'm giving it 8 not because it's not terrific, it is, but certain parts of it irritated me intensely for reasons I can't really articulate; it's possible it's just me, the intense irritation, and possible I just don't like being confronted with some aspect of myself. Why else would I feel so strongly about such a seemingly minor thing?
Why else would it find such a strong place in my memories?