Mummery Flummery

The List of Adrian Messenger. After checking an ominous 72-lb. suitcase onto a transatlantic airliner, the kindly old vicar toddles into the men's room at London Airport. But instead of washing his face, he takes it off. He squeegees out his contact eyeball covers, eases out his teeth, removes his grey wig, strips off his forehead and nose like so much tired bubble gum. And quicker than the audience can gasp "Kirk Douglas!", Kirk Douglas starts redisguising himself as a dapper diplomat. From here on, The List of Adrian Messenger becomes less a suspense movie than a guessing game: Who, among the assorted gypsies, crippled pensioners, organ grinders and ban-thefox-hunt ladies, are really Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum?

All the peeling and pasting is part of disentangling the mystery of Messenger's list: ten names of men who have met "accidental" deaths. Messenger himself cannot help; just after making the list, he blows up with the plane carrying the vicar's valise. Detective George C. Scott, in a mustache that makes him rather resemble Keenan Wynn, labors manfully, and in the end tracks down the despicable arranger of the accidents and even ferrets out his horrid motive.

The viewer keeps hoping that Messenger is another of Director John Huston's deadpan spoofs, like Beat the Devil; but it turns out to be only a tribute to the art of Makeup Man Bud Westmore. After the killer has been hooked and The End comes on the screen, a voice shouts: "Hold it! Stop! That's the end of the picture-but it's not the end of the mystery." And for what seems like ten minutes of the most crashing anticlimax to ever climax an anticlimax, the incognito cameo players peel off their makeup. Shucks, with those ears for clues, anybody could have guessed which one was Sinatra all the time.

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