1960s Alistair MacLean adaptations featured top rank stars, and excellent behind the scenes talent. The 1970s version tended to be B list efforts - you'd have stars like Barry Newman and David Birney. Here is some bloke called Sven-Bertil Taube as an "American" agent poking around Amsterdam trying to crack a drug ring.
That means he basically walks around Amsterdam following dodgy people, encountering addicts. There's some tsk-tsk-ing from older characters about rampart use of drugs among young people which wouldn't be out of place in a 1930s film (although from memory this wasn't uncommon in action novels aimed at middle aged men that came out in the 60s through 80s).
It's not a very good movie. The pace is plodding, the story uninteresting. Taube lacks charisma. There's little humour and not much action in the first healf - the odd fist fight. The best thing about it is the photography and the Amsterdam locations - these are pretty good.
Barbara Perkins is pretty as the girl who helps Taube. I didn't quite buy she'd fit in as an undercover operative - too American for someone working in Holland. The girl who plays a girl whose brains have been so raddled by heroin she's childlike isn't terribly convincing, to put it politely. Alexander Knox is very good.
In the second half things pick up. There's a few decent twists: the execution of Parkins; the reveal of a reverend as a baddy (this actually wasn't such a surprise); the double reveal of a head cop and his heroin addicted niece as baddies. There's a justifiably famous boat chase, which was shot by Don Sharp (who also did some other sequences on the film), and less talk and more thumping... and you can see what sort of movie this might have made: more action, more like Bond, less bad acting.
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