EDITOR’S NOTE: The Jigsaw Man was on the CBS Late Movie on May 30, 1988.
What happens when you take the real-life Cold War betrayal of Kim Philby, toss in a troubled production that nearly bankrupted half of Ireland, reunite the two heavyweights of 1972’s Sleuth and direct the whole affair with all the breathless momentum of a damp flannel? You get The Jigsaw Man, a creaky British spy movie that stands as a glorious, star-studded monument to cinematic exhaustion.
Of course I loved it.
Sir Philip Kimberley (Michael Caine) is the former head of MI6 who skipped town for Moscow back in the day. Fast-forward a decade, and Mother Russia is completely over him. He’s a pickled liability, except for one tiny ace up his sleeve: a secret dossier of Western agents he stashed away before defecting. Needing that list, the KGB gives him some handy plastic surgery so he doesn’t look like Leonid Brezhnev’s twin, ships him back to England and tells him to go fetch.
Naturally, Kimberley has other plans. He jumps ship at Heathrow, steals a coat and decides to play his former Soviet handlers and his old boss—Admiral Sir Gerald Scaith, played by a visibly baffled Laurence Olivier—off each other in a convoluted shell game. Along for the ride are Robert Powell as an agent keeping tabs on the situation and Susan George as Kimberley’s extraordinarily forgiving daughter, who apparently has zero qualms about welcoming her traitorous dear old dad back into the family fold with open arms.
As always, poor Susan George.
The trouble is, nobody looks like they want to be there. Director Terence Young—best known for anchoring the James Bond franchise with Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball —manages to bring four separate Bond alumni along for the ride (Charles Gray, Peter Burton, Vladek Sheybal and Anthony Dawson, many of whom made a living working for SPECTRE). Yet, despite all that 007 pedigree, the film crawls like a worm through the wettest clay. Caine sleepwalks through a series of increasingly bizarre disguises (including a stint as an Oklahoma oilman and a dress-up as a priest), while Olivier looks like he’s trying to remember if he left the kitchen stove on at home.
Did they do it for the money? Yes. Caine specifically told Olivier to think of the paycheck. Oh, Sir Laurence, your last few films were turds like Inchon, The Bounty and The Jazz Singer.
If you love cinematic ephemera, this is your celluloid nirvana. Where else are you going to spot uncredited cameos from Arthur Negus, Max Bygraves, composer Sir William Walton leading a Salvation Army band and David Kelly playing against his future Fawlty Towers type? Plus, there’s a car chase through Windsor Safari Park that throws monkeys and giraffes into the mix.
And yet the behind-the-scenes history is infinitely more entertaining than the plot. Shut down in Ireland because of cash-flow problems, abandoned by its stars when paychecks bounced, and rescued only by a last-minute cash injection from novelist-businessman Mahmud Sipra, the movie carries the heavy, depressed air of a project that died on the table and was stitched back together. For a spy thriller, there’s a staggering lack of thrills. The double-crosses are flat, the dialogue lacks bite, and the pacing moves at a glacial shuffle.
Even the title song — sung by Dionne Warwick — can’t save this thing from feeling like a high-class, star-studded error. It didn’t even come out in theaters in the UK, going straight to video instead.
You can watch this on Tubi.
