Skullduggery

Continuing my plan to watch every Burt Reynolds movie in his filmography in order, I come to Skullduggery.

Plot In A Paragraph: Douglas Temple (a likable Burt Reynolds) manages to wrangle his way on to a jungle expedition in New Guinea when anthologist Sybil Greame (Susan Clarke) lands in his territory. While she searches for old bones, he searches for phosphor (which is used in the "new" colour TV's) they not only discover both, but a whole lot more.

I'm amazed by what I read on here sometimes, as some of the people rating this movie 2/10 or worse 1/10 clearly just didn't get it. Even if it was made today this movie would still ring true.

Burt Reynolds is incredibly likable and shows great promise for more important roles. However "Skullduggery" winds up a bit of a mismatch due to an inconsistent mix of humour and human drama. That's down to bad editing and poor direction.

One of the most boring, silly, insipid, badly scripted and acted things ever to come out of the entertainment field. Even for Burt Reynolds, this was bad news. If you are home alone and bored to tears don't watch this drivel. Avoid at all costs.

American movie by Gordon Douglas (A Night of Adventure) about Vercors's Animaux dénaturés. The anthropologist Sybil Greame (Susan Clark, Colossus) leads in Papua New Guinea with the father Dillingham (Chips Rafferty, Walk into Paradise, which has inspired the female paddled canoes scene) an expedition backed by the industrial Vancruyse (Paul Hubschmid, Journey to the Lost City) and his lawyer Buffington (Alexander Knox, Bikini Paradise), in order to find old bones and get some skull dug in a remote area, hoping for a Nobel prize.

An adventurer working at the airfield, Doug (Burt Reynolds, Deliverance), manages to take part to the expedition with his pal Kreps (Roger Carmel, Gambit) by getting rid of the mechanic Bruce (Edward Fox, The Day of the Jackal): they want to discover on their side an important deposit of phosphorous highly valuable for color TV tubes. Arriving in the highland mountains, they find a strange tribe of prehistoric creatures which could be the famous missing link of evolution. As Kreps manages to make contact with a female of the tribe, whom he called Topazia (Pat Suzuki, The Year of the Dragon), the great question arises: are they apes or humans?

The film lacks unfortunately of rhythm, focusing and common thread in its first part, but then regains in interest for the trial development full of trickery, with characters such as the judge Draper (Rhys Williams, How Green was my Valley), the Attorney General (William Marshall, The Boston Strangler), the racist doctor Eaton (Wilfrid Hyde-White, The Third Man), or the Black Panther like Smoot (the Motown manager Booker Bradshaw, Coffy).

I watched this movie in the early seventies, at my hometown in Mexico. I must have been 14 or 15 at the time. I liked the movie a lot not because of the acting, but because of the subject, which captivated me. The ethical and philosophical question of what constitutes humanity. Maybe the cinematographic quality of the film is not great, but having seen this movie only once and still remembering its impact on me after almost forty years is a tribute to its merits. I remember vividly the shock the climax scene caused in me, and the anger at the injustice done to the poor critters, and their unresolved fate, which undoubtedly would not be a good one if we go by the conventional wisdom of the time. I do believe this movie is much better conceptually than it is generally considered. I hope it will someday be released on DVD. I would certainly buy it.

The first half of the movie tastes like a remake of a jungle expedition in one of those old Tarzan classics starring Weissmuller, the second half tries to be something like a class in philosophy - what makes a human human etc. Sadly, despite a good cast and production both parts never really blend well together. The first part was entertaining to me, a simple but fun adventure movie, the second part was a rather boring affair to me - an attempt to make something significant but not really engaging, and in the context of the first half (adventure, romance) it just feels too much out of tune.