In the divorce of Golan and Globus, it seems as if Menahem got not only Charles Bronson — 21st Century FIlms released Death Wish 5: The Face of Death — but also Michael Winner, who directed, co-wrote*, produced and edited this film. This would be the final collaboration between Golan and Winner.
Michael Caine and Roger Moore are Dr. Daniel Hicklar and Sir John Bavistock, nuclear physicists who believe they have invented a limitless supply of cold fusion energy. They are also con men Sidney Lipton and Gerald Bradley-Smith, who want to use their resemblance to those two men and steal their formula and get rich.
This movie has more dog sex than a Linda Lovelace loop, which should tell you the level of humor you’re about to get. At least it has a cast that you can be excited seeing when they show up, like Sally Kirkland as a former lover of both men, a closing cameo by John Cleese, Deborah Barrymore (the daughter of Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) playing a British agent named Flo Fleming, Patsy Kensit, Alexandra Pigg (star of British soap opera Brookside), Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart on Dr. Who) and Jim Bowen, who hosted the ITV game show Bullseye.
The final scenes for this film have one of the smallest crews ever on a major movie. Winner operated the camera, cameraman David Wynn-Jones held the reflector and Cleese moonlighted as the sound man as the sound recorder was concealed in a book he carried.
Caine’s agent told him not to do this movie, but he had always wanted to work with his friend Moore. His agent was probably right; he did a much better version of this movie two years earlier with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
*The other writers were Leslie Bricusse (Doctor Dolittle, Scrooged), Nick Mead, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (Marks and Gran worked on the TV shows Goodnight Sweetheart and Birds of a Feather together).
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