| The Liquidator | |
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Original US film poster by Bob Peak |
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| Directed by | Jack Cardiff |
| Produced by | Leslie Elliot Jon Pennington |
| Written by | Peter Yeldham John Gardner (novel} |
| Starring | Rod Taylor Trevor Howard Jill St. John Wilfred Hyde-White |
| Music by | Lalo Schifrin |
| Cinematography | Edward Scaife |
| Distributed by | MGM |
| Release date(s) | 1965 |
| Running time | 105 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
The Liquidator is a 1965 British thriller film starring Rod Taylor as Brian "Boysie" Oakes, Trevor Howard as his Intelligence Chief Mostyn and Jill St. John as Mostyn's secretary Iris MacIntosh. It was based on the first of a series of Boysie Oakes novels by John Gardner, The Liquidator.
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The film follows John Gardner's 1964 novel closely. It begins at the end of World War II when tank corps sergeant Oakes unwittingly saves British Intelligence Major Mostyn from an assassination attempt in Paris.
Twenty years later Mostyn's memories have elevated Oakes into a fearless master assassin when nothing could be further from the truth. He recruits Oakes into the Secret Service where after a training course, he is given the code name "L" whilst HM Government provides him with an enviable lifestyle. When the cowardly Oakes discovers that his function is to 'liquidate' security risks to the State, he hires a freelance professional assassin (Eric Sykes) to do the dirty work and maintain his position.
Things go well until Oakes seduces Mostyn's secretary Iris into coming with him to the Côte d'Azur. There he is captured by enemy agents led by Akim Tamiroff and becomes a dupe in an assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh when he visits an R.A.F. base.
The film also features David Tomlinson, Gabriella Licudi, David Langton, Suzy Kendall and Alexandra Bastedo. Composer Lalo Schifrin's score includes a driving main title vocal theme and a soft end title theme ("My Liquidator") both sung by Shirley Bassey with animated titles by the Richard Williams studio. Other than the Goldfinger-type title song, Lalo Schifrin deliberately avoided the John Barry James Bond style of music.[1]
Rod Taylor displays his gifts at being convincing in both comedy and action where he performed his own stunts.[2] He insisted on playing the role in an American accent because he was more comfortable with it by that stage in his career.[3]
Producer Jon Pennington brought Australian screenwriter Peter Yeldham to the project after both had cooperated on The Comedy Man (1963).
Like Where the Spies Are, also filmed in MGM-British Studios, MGM planned a Boysie Oakes series. However due to a legal dispute the film's original November 1965 release was delayed to the end of 1966 when the spy film craze was waning.[4] Cardiff recalled that the censors made them delete one of Taylor's lines, "it smells like a Turkish wrestler's jockstrap".[5]
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