The Delta Factor

Tay Garnett was never a pantheon director in the true sense of the word, but at the height of canonisation his name was mentioned. He was a workmanlike director of entertaining pictures peaking in the forties.

The Delta Factor underlines the collectiveness of Hollywood filmmaking: when Garnett was at his best he had a good script and the best crew the studios could offer. Also the help of charismatic stars must be remembered. Garnett then operated as a sort of "foreman" to keep everything in schedule and producers happy.

In the fifties the auteur theorists (Truffaut, Sarris) tried to attribute the good things in cinema to the personal talents of the director, thus helping to create myth of a film director as an artists comparable to novelists or painters.

The Delta Factor is a low budget effort made late in Garnett's career. He has also adapted the screenplay and produced the piece. The result is disappointing. Not much talent is evident in the finished product. The only redeeming feature is the car chase towards the end which is technically above the level of the rest of the film.

Watch this and remember Truffaut!

This routine thriller, based on a Mickey Spillane novel, sees action-man Christopher George paired up with a female CIA agent to help rescue a kidnapped scientist from a remote island jail. It sounds pretty exciting, but unfortunately it isn't, thanks to a sluggish script and by-the-numbers direction. The film's major fault is a limited budget which excludes any decent intrigue or action sequences up until the last twenty minutes, during which a prison break and a car chase are crammed into a breakneck climax. Up until then, it's a boring affair, with the actors struggling to make sense of senseless dialogue and dull attempts to be 'cool' and modern.

Up until now, I'd only seen George in '80s-era exploitation fare, so seeing him as a handsome, slick super-agent in the Bond model was a bit of a surprise. I couldn't help but find the script beneath his talents, though. Mimieux, so well remembered as Weena in THE TIME MACHINE, doesn't get a great deal to work with either – other than some mild flirting in those excruciating drawn out scenes of hotel bed-hopping. I looked out for Yvonne De Carlo but sadly couldn't spot her without her MUNSTERS makeup. Director Tay Garnett, at the end of a long career in TV and film, displays a talent that can be best described as 'workmanlike'.

From the sky-blue eyeshadow that all the women wear to the rugged, steely hero who is too tough to actually act, this movie is the 1960s distilled. No cliché is left unused. The script is full of 'busters' and 'bud' and other masculine dialogue; the women are large of bust-line and and disposable as Kleen-Ex; the cinematography resembles a lesser episode of 'Bonanza' in its realism.

Oh, why bother? It's a Mickey Spillane film. That means it comes with expectations and it delivers all of them in the execrable fashion of the Master.

Auteur, my right hind hoof. But if you're a Mickey Spillane fan this could be your cup of coffee (tea is for sissies, buster).

Yvette Mimieux is beautiful as usual, even super sexy when she only appears in a swimsuit, but she doesn't have a real consistent role here. Action film, not who knows what action, banal story, déjà vu and so on. Watch it unless you have something better to do.

The first 70 minutes of "The Delta Factor" are essentially all setup: Christopher George (a convict asked to help the government in exchange for 20 years of imprisonment written off) and Yvette Mimieux (an agent) meet, travel to a Caribbean island, check their hotel room for bugs, organize their mission, get in touch with their local contacts, give and take messages in coded form, etc. This is all fine for a spy flick, but when it takes up more than 3/4 of the total running time, there is a problem. The budgetary constraints are pretty obvious, especially when we keep hearing all the time about this terrible storm that has cancelled all transportations, but we never see any of it! The movie finally picks up in the last 20 minutes, with a prison riot / escape, followed by a pretty cool car chase, followed by George shooting and throwing grenades at the remaining bad guys. All this climactic action does not include Yvette, by the way, but when she is on-screen she is irresistibly gorgeous, with a variety of hairstyles, a knockout face and a fit body. Though she was never really classified as a "sex symbol" in her career, "The Delta Factor" makes it easy to argue otherwise! (**)