Action of the Tiger

Along Romania, Albania suffered after WW2 the hardest communist dictatorship; Enver Hoxca (d.1985) ,who proclaimed his country the most atheist in the world,was responsible for extremely bloody reprisals .

It came to an end only in 1991. Today the country has opened up to Tourism ; you can go to the country from Greece by boat .....

But circa 1957 ,you were not able to walk just right in, like our heroes ; the borders were inaccessible, and a guy and his machine gun ( Sean Connery in the movie) single-handedly fighting both the Albanian soldiers and police , in your dreams perhaps !

Not only the captain (Van Johnson ) and his passenger (Martine Carol) can enter the country ,but most of the time they cross the country while effotlessly deceiving caricatures of soldiers (the galeries Lafayette bill - a department store in Paris- takes the biscuit !) and finding the brother straight-away , but they also find help on the way (Carol being the price to pay !)

Martine Carol was French biggest sex symbol in the fisrt half of the fifties ,till the coming of BB : she often appeared topless ("Lucrèce Borgia" "un caprice de Caroline Chérie" ) ,so it was only natural to show her breast after a swim :there's absolutely no chemistry between her and Johnson ,but Sean Connery -who would work again with Terence Young and was catapulted into megastardom- is more than fond of her .

Director Terence Young later dismissed ACTION OF THE TIGER as poorly directed and acted. Today, many seem to concur it's a bad film, only of interest because it brought Young and Sean Connery together, setting them on the path to make history with DR. NO five years later. However, I have to contest the idea that ACTION OF THE TIGER is a total turkey. Maybe it's because of its low reputation, but I was pleasantly surprised with it.

To be sure, the conventional wisdom that Van Johnson is miscast as a tough-talking sea captain is true. This role would have been ideal for Humphrey Bogart in his 1940s heyday, but not Johnson by any means. He struggles to seem like a hardass and his tough guy line delivery is stiff. Martine Carrol is a little better, but she's often wooden as well. She also happens to be the other lead.

However, I say the film survives this miscasting. It's a straightforward adventure story, the sort that would be homaged in the INDIANA JONES series. There's travel, exotic locations, dangers from an authoritarian regime, moments of humor, and plenty of suspense. Young keeps it all rolling and his direction, far from lousy, is assured throughout. It's not earth-shattering, but it is entertaining, ideal for a rainy Sunday.

Action of the Tiger is a very ordinary anti-Communist film that benefits from a location shoot in Greece (filling in for nearby Albania). The woefully miscast Van Johnson plays Carson, an amoral American smuggler who agrees to help blonde bombshell Martine Carol rescue her brother from the bondage of Enver Hoxha and company. Herbert Lom and Sean Connery provide assistance for Johnson, whose part really should have gone to someone with a little more gravitas, perhaps Sterling Hayden or Richard Widmark. Instead, our lead tries to prove his masculinity by wearing sweaters that are much too tight, a less than pretty sight. Desmond Dickinson's cinematography is uniformly good, especially in exterior setups, but the script is undercooked and ultimately unbelievable, as our heroes end up rescuing a motley assortment of Greek children and outwitting those dumb commies. Action of the Tiger is also of minor interest for Connery fans, as the Scots actor would reunite with director Terence Young for a little film called Dr. No five years later.

The screenplay is fairly mediocre but is given no help by the leading actors. Johnson,who is miscast,seems to be doing a Bogart impression,with a lot of "sweethearts". Carol looks like she has just walked out of Maxims,rather been travelling in a dusty and dirty environment.

If for nothing else, this film is memorable for a scene in which the heroine is chased around the hero's boat by the mate, Mike, played by Sean Connery, as obvious prelude to rape, while said hero, a particularly grubby-looking Van Johnson (who had seen better days in Santa Fe Trail and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers) looks on indifferently. Somehow or other she gets out of this, but the idea that having escaped the clutches of Connery she would subsequently fall hard for Van Johnson give cinema one of it great "huh?" moments. Otherwise, the movie lacks much interest or originality despite the Albanian background which certainly could have been better exploited, as Albania was known during its Communist era as the last surviving medieval society in Europe, and attracted a goodly share of antiquarian tourists.