The File of the Golden Goose

In 1956 Yul Brynner had become an unlikely leading man, thanks to his bravura performance in The King and I followed the same year by The Ten Commandments and Anastasia . During the next ten years he would find himself in demand and he played more diverse roles than almost any other actor of his generation. However, the end of the 1960s, with the end of the Hollywood studio system, the dominance of television, and the changing social climate, fewer films were being made. Brynner, like most of his contemporaries, found that roles were becoming scarce. It was during this time that he started making smaller budgeted films overseas. One of them was The File of the Golden Goose (1969), a spy thriller shot in London by American expatriate actor/director Sam Wanamaker. (He had left the United States during the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and settled in England where he would remain for the rest of his life). Brynner's son Rock recalled this difficult time for his father in his book Yul: The Man Who Would Be King. "By now, he told me firmly, he regarded himself as a character actor, as if this were a rite of passage that the family ought to note. He was quite realistic about aging, and recognized that he has passed the point where he could play romantic leading men on the screen – such scripts just weren't proposed to him anymore. Instead, he was being offered roles as villains that, more and more often, were extremely violent. But by this time [1969], for a variety of economic reasons, the film business was in such dire straits that even Henry Fonda was making spaghetti Westerns - and so was Yul. These were Westerns, shot in Italy and Spain, in which only the famous star spoke English; all the other characters were played by gnarly-looking Italians who merely mouth the English dialogue, which was later dubbed. This was not the goal Yul had had in mind when he had studied with Michael Chekhov, but he regarded it as a personal insult when I pointed that out, as he noted that I myself was being supported by these awful movies. The truth was, though, that by the end of 1969 there were simply no roles being offered to Yul, and he had to admit that he was desperate. Not only did things look bleak in the short term, it was not even clear that one or two great roles could give his career the boost it needed." If Brynner needed a career boost, he certainly did not get it from The File of the Golden Goose. While not a bad film, it was not the hit he needed. Howard Thompson's review of the film in the October 3, 1969 New York Times notes, "The mildly arresting thing about The File of the Golden Goose, a standard little sleuthing melodrama about a counterfeiting ring, is a background sprinkling of London landmarks in nice color. As the story forges ahead familiarly, we glimpse Parliament from the Thames and the promenade of Royal Festival Hall, the neon glitter of Soho, a swank Mayfair gambling club, the Portobello Market and the Burlington Arcade. [The film was also shot at Piccadilly, the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, and Jermyn Street]. Unfortunately, the picture gets in the way, as does the shiny, bald pate of Yul Brynner, standing out as obviously as the London Hilton. And the star, mind you, is tackling a role where subtlety is a matter of life and death, as an F.B.I. agent who joins the gang of cutthroats, burrows deep into their operational secrets and - surprise, surprise - topples the culprits, with some assist from Scotland Yard...And Sam [director Wanamaker] eventually pulls the picture together a bit more tautly than it warrants, in such scenes as a bedroom double-murder and the film's best vignette, a brief, fatal encounter at the Burlington Arcade. Moreover, if the screenplay by John C. Higgins and James B. Gordon offers absolutely nothing new, it does stick to the business at hand, with no romance dutifully dragged in. But The File of the Golden Goose can best be refiled and promptly forgotten." Producer: George Fowler, David E. Rose Director: Sam Wanamaker Screenplay: James B. Gordon, John C. Higgins Cinematography: Ken Hodges Film Editing: Oswald Hafenrichter Art Direction: George Provis Music: Harry Robertson Cast: Yul Brynner (Peter Novak), Charles Gray (Harrison), Edward Woodward (Arthur Thompson), John Barrie (Supt. Sloane), Adrienne Corri (Angela Richmond), Graham Crowden (Smythe). C-106m. Letterboxed. by Lorraine LoBianco SOURCES: The Screen: Spy Story: Golden Goose' Treads a Familiar Trail Yul: The Man Who Would Be King by Rock Brynner www.reelstreets.com The Internet Movie Database