The Man with Bogart's Face

United States

1980

106 Min

Color

English

Currently 1.8/5 Stars.
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PROD Andrew J. Fenady, Eddie Saeta

CAST Robert Sacchi, Franco Nero, Michelle Phillips, Olivia Hussey, Misty Rowe, Victor Buono, Herbert Lom, Sybil Danning, Richard Bakalyan, Gregg Palmer, Jay Robinson, George Raft, Yvonne de Carlo, Mike Mazurki, Henry Wilcoxon, Victor Sen Yung, Joe Theismann, Philip Baker Hall, Michael Masters

After plastic surgery to transform his face into that of Humphrey Bogart, our hero sets up shop as a private detective under the name of Sam Marlow (“$200 a day plus expenses”). He soon acquires a rather dizzy Marilyn Monroe-like secretary he calls “duchess.” Cases at first are hard to come by, but finally he meets up with Elsa, a woman whose father—a former film props master—has been murdered. While investigating, Marlow runs into a number of individuals who seem to have an unusual interest in the murdered man. They include a Commodore Anastas (a Sydney Greenstreet-like Greek tycoon), his Gene Tierney-like daughter, a rich Turkish rival named Hakim, Mr. Zebra (a Peter Lorre-like figure), and Zinderneuf (a Lionel Atwill lookalike). It turns out that all are interested in finding two lost blue sapphires known as the “Eyes of Alexander.” Elsa is soon murdered also and Marlow is drawn into a dizzying maze of intrigue that is only resolved after a visit to Catalina Island and a rendezvous on the high seas. —DVDverdict.com

Director

Robert Day

Robert Day (1922-) b. Sheen, England. An exciting British talent who sank deep into the trough of mediocre TV movies, Day was another cameraman who turned to direction. In the 1950s, the signs were all good. He achieved fine atmospheric effects amid believable high melodrama in three bloodcurdlers, and showed a nice, sense of crazy comedy in the gut-busting Two-Way Stretch (1960), the apogee of all Peter Sellers‘ British comedies. There was Tony Hancock‘s funniest comedy, The Rebel (1961) and also Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), the best Tarzan film since the 1930s. But television was already reaching out its tentacles. There were a few more Tarzan films, good at first then indifferent, in all senses, and the disastrous She (1965), in which Day seemed to have lost all his flair for atmosphere and chills – and in a Hammer film too! By this time he was making countless episodes of TV series, at first in Britain (Danger ManlSecret Agent) then America (The FBI, A Man Called Ironside, and… read more