Frank Sinatra‘s only British film is an espionage thriller with a fistful of twists.
Sam Laker (Sinatra) is a widower and American industrialist working in Britain, where he designs furniture.
He has just been awarded an international award for industrial design and is planning to travel to Leipzig in East Germany to attend a trade show and show off his invention, taking his 14-year-old son Patrick (Michael Newport) with him for a holiday.
Meanwhile, British Intelligence officer Martin Slattery (Peter Vaughan) – who served with Laker in the OSS during World War II – decides to use the opportunity of Laker’s trip behind the Iron Curtain and his lack of an intelligence profile to coerce him into carrying out an operation for the British Intelligence Service.
They want Sam – a crack marksman – to kill a defector who is about to reveal vital secrets to the Russians. They use Karen Gisevius (Nadia Gray) – a woman who helped Laker during the war when she was part of the underground – as bait.
Patrick Laker is kidnapped at the behest of the East German secret police boss Colonel Hartmann (Derren Nesbitt) and so begins a game of cat-and-mouse between Sam and the two spymasters competing for his services.
He is shifted to Copenhagen to assassinate a spy who has defected to Denmark, but the target for the killing never shows up, and Sam returns to Leipzig, where he is told that Patrick has been killed because the assassination attempt failed.
Angry and vengeful, Sam begins to trail Hartmann, learning his routine and patterns, and waits with a high-powered rifle on a road where Hartmann passes daily. When his car passes, Sam puts the driver in his cross hairs and fires, killing him instantly.
Slattery and Hartmann (it wasn’t him in the car) arrive almost immediately to explain that Patrick is, in fact, still alive, and the man Sam has just murdered was the same defector that Slattery had originally asked him to kill.
Director Sidney J Furie (who had made the excellent The Ipcress Filetwo years earlier) showed his instinctive feel for this genre again, using many clever camera angles to inject a unique visual style into the picture. The Naked Runner was based on a novel by Francis Clifford.
Sam Laker
Frank Sinatra Martin Slattery
Peter Vaughan Colonel Hartmann
Derren Nesbitt Karen Gisevius
Nadia Gray Ruth
Toby Robins Ritchie Jackson
Edward Fox Anna
Inger Stratton Joseph
J.A.B. Dubin-Behrmann Cabinet minister
Cyril Luckham Patrick Laker
Michael Newport
Director
Sidney J Furie
Video
Related Posts
Manchurian Candidate, The (1962) The Manchurian Candidate looks at a group of decorated Korean War veterans who all have recurring nightmares about their involvement in…
List of Adrian Messenger, The (1963) Novelist Adrian Messenger (John Merivale) believes a succession of ostensibly isolated "accidental" deaths are really related murders. He asks his…
Victors, The (1963) This three-hour film follows in the footsteps of a squad of young American soldiers from the early days of the…
Caprice (1967) The later movies of Doris Day now look like period artefacts: here she plays Patricia Foster - an agent ("The…
Psychopath, The (1966) A series of strange murders have been taking place in London. The murders are of men who play in a…
Tobruk (1967) September 1942. A Canadian soldier named Major Donald Craig (Rock Hudson) has been taken prisoner by the Italians and is…
24 Hours to Kill (1965) Tarzan star Lex Barker and Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney head a glittering international cast in this crime thriller from British…
633 Squadron (1964) Lieutenant Erik Bergman (George Chakiris), a Norwegian Resistance fighter, tells British Air Intelligence that the Germans are about to launch…
Patrick Laker is kidnapped at the behest of the East German secret police boss Colonel Hartmann (Derren Nesbitt) and so begins a game of cat-and-mouse between Sam and the two spymasters competing for his services.
