
“The story of another war more deadly...more destructive...against the world wide opium conspiracy.”
A special United Nations bureau organises a campaign to trace a drug-smuggling ring across Europe to its source on the Afghanistan-Iran border.
Release Date: 5/20/1966
Runtime: 100 minutes
Languages: English
Director: Terence Young
00Companies: Comet, Telsun Foundation Inc., United Nations (UN), Wiener Stadthalle-Station Betriebs-und Produktionsgesellschaft
Countries: France, Austria, United States of America
CinemaSerf
The opening dose of earnest monologue from Princess Grace of Monaco gives us a clue as to what we might be in for here. It's a clunkily stitched together series of cameos built around the process of identifying and stopping those bent on exporting opium from Iran to, ultimately via Europe, the United States. Yul Brynner ("Col. Salem") starts off the process working with the Imperial authorities in Iran where poppy farming is completely outlawed. Needless to say, though, if the money was right then there were those who would bend the rules and here we can look "Salah Khan" (Hugh Griffiths - a performance straight out of "Ben Hur"). The police, though, have devised a plan to inject his resin with a radioactive isotope enabling it to be tracked and them to destroy the distribution network. Helping the colonel with his task is the doughty "Sam Lincoln" (Trevor Howard) and as they follow the trail we are introduced to a cast of dozens of famous faces adding their visage, if little else, to the potency of the message set out by HSH at the top of the film. It's quite an interesting theory, the journey is well documented as are the difficulties faced by those trying to thwart this most lucrative of trades, but the style of presentation is so very disjointed and the narrative spends just a little too much time pontificating and not enough time engaging the audience. After about forty minutes I had the gist and the baddie firmly in my sights - the remainder delivered little better than an half-baked "007" adventure (Ian Fleming was involved here too). It is not without it's tragedies - this is not a sterile depiction and characters do get bumped off to illustrate just how ruthless these dealers are - but none of that really enlivened what is essentially rather a dull drama.

Senta Berger
Maxine

Stephen Boyd
Benson

Yul Brynner
Colonel Salem

Angie Dickinson
Linda Benson

Georges Géret
Superintendent Roche

Hugh Griffith
Salah Rahman Khan

Jack Hawkins
General Bahar

Rita Hayworth
Monique Marko

Trevor Howard
Sam Lincoln

Trini López
Himself

E.G. Marshall
Coley Jones

Marcello Mastroianni
Inspector Mosca
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