The Adventurers (1970)

Thanks for the memories!

Sick Product of a Sick System

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Hilarious mess based on a Harold Robbins novel. It starts in 1945 in the (fictional) South American city of Corteguay. A young boy named Dax sees his dog shot dead in front of him. Then he sees his mother stabbed to death and his sister raped and murdered. He then shoots to death several men responsible. He goes to another place and everybody there gets murdered too! This is all in the first 20 minutes--and the film runs three hours! Eventually Dax escapes to Rome with his father. He grows up and is played by that international star (cough cough) Bekim Fehmiu. The rest of the film follows him through his life and his frequent sexual couplings and desire to help Corteguay.Wow--what a disaster! To say this is bad is putting it mildly. It's incredibly stupid but keeps throwing in so much sex, nudity and violence that you're never bored. Some of the things here are so badly done they boggle the mind. At one point Dax is romancing a young woman (Candice Bergen looking so young and beautiful) but the montage of the two of them falling in love is so clichéd it's hilarious. Then there's the scene where they first make love--with actual fireworks bursting overhead! There's a hospital scene between the two of them that was so stupid I actually laughed out loud! There's a fashion show about two hours in that's a real eye popper. Most of the dialogue sounds (and looks) badly overdubbed. Old pros Ernest Borgnine, John Ireland and Olivia deHavilland are shamefully wasted but still manage to give good performances despite the script. Leading man Fehmiu is (to put it mildly) a bad actor. He's totally expressionless throughout the whole movie. He's also ugly and not in good shape at all.There are a few good things about this movie. The location shooting in Rome and South America is just great--there's some beautiful locations and cinematography here. Fehmiu aside everyone else gives pretty good performances. There's also some cool battle sequences too. As a serious movie this is a disaster. But, as camp, it's a laugh a minute! This was originally R rated mostly for the frequent female nudity. It was reissued a few years after its initial release and was cut to get a PG. The DVD says it's the PG version but it's not. The PG version runs 170 minutes--the R rated runs 177 minutes and that's the one on the DVD. Worth catching for laughs.

I bought it on video and it was so long it was on two tapes! So a lot of fast forwarding was needed for the countless war scenes. But it was worth the wait to get to the high sixties segments, the overall best being (for the plot totally unnecessary) the fashion shows! But oh, it was the films´ highlight. Super camp fashion numbers out of the blue but totally appropriate for a high gloss sixties movie. It was released 1970, I wonder if it all seemed a little out of date even then?Loads of stars, even lesser like an early Jaclyn Smith and the underrated underused Angela Scoular (of On Her Majesties Secret Service). But the best is Candice Bergen. SO stunningly beautiful the screen almost melted and she did some fine acting even if she thought she hadn´t. She played a lesbian again and she ends up bitter and chain-smoking. (Hollywood logic).

I liked this movie when I first saw it in the UK. It was R rated and deserved to be. Definitely for mature audiences. Don't know why it was released as PG rated in US. Lost some of its mature content and bite as a result.

This film is under appreciated and rather than a mess, is a profundly complex comment on the cycle of revolution in a quest for legalism and constitutionalism.The character Dax Xenos mirrors the life of the revolutionary son and sometime exile Octavio Paz of Mexico; though the late Snr Paz became a man of letters; rather than a temporary gigolo to gain money for a business and to restore the values of his father to his homeland!