BREAKOUT (1975)

In August, 1971, a helicopter touched down inside the yard of Mexico City's Santa Maria Acatitla prison for just ten seconds. It took off with two men: Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a counterfeiter from Venezuela, and Joel David Kaplan, a 44-year-old businessman from New York. Kaplan, a former courier for Fidel Castro and the nephew of molasses baron, Jacob M. Kaplan, had been convicted of the murder of his business partner, Louis Vidal, Jr., in 1962. Despite serious doubts that the body found was that of Vidal’s, despite Vidal’s association with drug dealers and gunsmugglers, who, Kaplan insisted, had orchestrated an elaborate plot to fake his own death and disappear, Kaplan was sentenced to 28 years in the Mexican prison. (Time Magazine)

With his uncle’s J.M. Kaplan Fund under a 1964 congressional investigation under suspicion of acting as a money laundering conduit between Latin America and the CIA, the younger Kaplan had very few people to turn to in either country. Were it not for his sister, Judith Kaplan Dowis, and a rock star lawyer from San Francisco named Vasilios Basil Choulos, Kaplan may very well have died inside the prison. Instead, Choulos enlisted the help of pilot Roger Hershner, who painted a bell helicopter to look like that of Mexico’s attorney general’s. One hundred-and-thirty-six guards were interrogated for complicity but no inside man had been employed. In point of fact, nearly the entire population of the prison, employees and convicts alike, had been inside watching the first recreational movie shown in more than two years. Attorney General Julio Sanchez Vargas resigned in disgrace.

Once in the U.S., Kaplan was granted immunity—Choulos told the Mexican government that his client was a CIA operative, though that really didn’t satisfy anyone and was unlikely to be true anyway. Kaplan, Choulos and Hershner sat down with writers Warren Hinckle, William Turner and Eliot Asinof and the sextet released a book, The Ten-Second Jailbreak: The Helicopter Escape Of Joel David Kaplan. The book was excerpted in Playboy and immediately optioned by Hollywood producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin “I love disaster!” Winkler, to be directed by Mike Ritchie and to star Kris Kristoferson.

The story was eventually filmed and released in 1975 as Breakout, directed by Tom Gries and starring Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall, Jill Ireland, Sherree North, Randy Quaid, Paul Mantee, John Huston and Emilio “El Indio” Fernadez. The bizarre and exciting story of both Kaplan and Choulos and the ten-second rescue had been boiled down to the finest of all formulas, released with the taglines, “Sentenced to 28 years in prison for a crime he never committed. Only two things can get him out—a lot of money and Charles Bronson!” and more confusing, “No prison can hold…Charles Bronson!”

If you take the facts into consideration, which one should never do apparently, Bronson plays neither Choulos nor Hershner, but an amalgam named Nick Colton, a border country bush pilot and occasional con-artist. He owns a Cessna and a fishery in a partnership with Randy Quaid (as ‘Hawkins’) and is approached one hot afternoon by Ann Wagner, wife of wrongly-imprisoned Jay Wagner. She employs Colton to fly her into Mexico but doesn’t tell him why. She does pay his price, “Twelve hundred…and thirty-nine dollars. And fifty-two cents.”

In Breakout’s scenario, Jay is the grandson of a fruit magnate with CIA ties played by John Huston, turning in his usual solid worn-out criminal mastermind character. Harris Wagner makes some vague reference to Jay’s free-spiritedness proving to be a detriment to both the company’s stockholders and the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, and therefore has a slick lawyerly-looking op named Cable (Paul Mantee) to frame Jay for a random murder. Despite Jay being in Chile and the murder taking place in Mexico, holds no sway over the judge, who pronounces swift and lengthy sentence.

Jay’s first attempt at escape goes badly. After paying some trustees to smuggle him out in a sealed coffin, laying bent-backed on top of the box’s other occupant. Because the warden and General is played by “El Indio”—better known to audiences as the ruthless Mapache in The Wild Bunch—he lets the prisoners simply bury Jay alive for a while. Jay then falls prey to choppy editing because the next time we see him, he’s back inside the prison looking only slightly worse for wear.

Colton and Ann have barely touched down near the prison when they come under fire and are forced to leave a running Jay behind. Presumably, Colton yells at Ann the entire way back to his airfield, because he emerges with a sentence starting with “And—!” But Ann sweetens the deal with some more money, getting Colton to thinking, which also doesn’t turn out well. Attempting to use Myrna (North), an old girlfriend and current worn-down wife of the Deputy Sheriff, as misdirection for the horny guards, she refuses and he’s forced to put Hawk in drag instead. “With enough make-up, anyone can look like a whore,” says Myrna philosophically. Except, of course, for Randy Quaid, who makes a less-convincing female than Bugs Bunny. He’s beaten up by the guards (taking an extremely painful and realistic blow to the head from a rifle butt) and thus the situation becomes, for Colton, personal. Even though it wasn’t his ass thoroughly kicked.

Meanwhile, Jay’s health is deteriorating inside the cell and unbeknownst to him (but not us, since we saw the violent and Peckinpah-ish slow-mo opening) his new cellmate is the actual triggerman in Jay’s frame-up, forced at gunpoint to shoot who seems to be someone quite close to him. Either that or Sosa (Jorge Moreno) bawls at the drop of a bullet. How unmanly. Jay’s unhappy at being incarcerated, he takes it out on Ann during one of their conjugal visits, which becomes extremely non-conjugal, lessening our sympathy for him a bit, but because Jill Ireland plays the rape scene with the same distracted indifference that she uses throughout the film, it isn’t really that affecting.

Eventually, Colton gets around to taking some helicopter piloting lessons but proves to be terrible—until it counts, of course. By the third act, his convoluted-yet-simplistic escape plan involves a still-broken Hawk, Myrna (“Keep poppin’ up to ‘borrow’ my wife? She ain’t a lawnmower!” exclaims Deputy/Hubby Spencer) and his soon-to-be-married flight instructor. As we know from the real-life story, Colton successfully liberates Jay, but since this is a Bronson movie and he hasn’t gotten to punch anyone for over an hour, the suspense is continued at the customs department in Mexico City, where everyone finally confronts the slick, sleazy CIA fellow.

I don’t mean to be harsh towards Breakout in pointing out its silly beats. The movie is actually extremely watchable and a good deal of fun. Jill “Mrs. Bronson” Ireland is a real drawback, with her dull accent, glassy eyes and implausible wigs. Duvall is mostly wasted, spending his time in the dark or in hospital beds, leaving one with the suspicion that most of his story was left on the cutting room floor in favor of more Bronson. Huston’s two scenes with Mantee seem to be from a different movie and he pretty much vanishes by Act II.

So what we’re left with is a surprisingly-relaxed and easy-going Bronson. In his fifties by this point, his squinty eyes and weathered skin makes his face resemble a catcher’s mitt, but he’s obviously having a good time playing the gutsy make-it-up-as-he-goes hero. Breakout must have been a relief for him after playing all of his famed anti-hero roles in The Mechanic, Mr. Majestyk and Death Wish. Gries direction is almost absent, but there is some magnificent photography courtesy of DP Lucien Ballard and 2^nd Unit Director Bob Bender, including a real hero shot of the rescue’s commencement featuring Colton’s convertible, the Cessna and the helicopter all framed against the desert backdrop. North and Quaid are both solid—North’s trampy character and yen for Colton are real low comedy highlights—and both the escape and the climax are tense and well-staged.

There’s even a surprising death for one villain where we see his entire body shredded by a plane propeller, rivaling Hungry Joe’s death in Catch-22. It’s an obvious effect today, as many IMDb reviewers point out, but in the ‘70s it had to have been quite shocking. Hell, it still packs a jolt at the moment.

But the film’s loss is not including the real-life hero Vasilios “Bill” Choulos. A fascinating character in and of himself, Choulos made a name for himself in San Francisco as a crusader for the common man in fhe face of government, corporations and industry. One of the first attorneys to ever file a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, a man who traveled all over the world to represent the families of pilots killed in crashes of the faulty F-104 Starfighter “widow maker” jets, he also represented members of Sonny Barger’s Hell’s Angels in a high profile murder case and served on the defense team for Jack Ruby. His clients included Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary and Abby Hoffman and was one of the few men to correspond directly with the Zodiac Killer. He opened his home to his counter-culture clients and over time it became a kind of artist community.

In his obituary in the SF Chronicle in 2003, his partner, Claude Wyle, said of Choulos, “A lot of the work he did in products liability paved the way for lawyers in this country today. He was a brilliant negotiator whose brutal honesty could get under people's skin, but somehow also endeared him to others. Anything that's timely today, he's already done it, and he was probably the first to do it.” (Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer)

Honestly, it might not have been too much of a stretch to turn Bronson into this brilliant crime-fighting legal mind. He certainly demonstraits in Breakout that he possessed a rarely-employed mischievous sense of humor. Rather than the down-and-out everyman tough guy that he delivered time and time again, the movie really could have benefited for another touch or two of the outrageous to throw off the beats and numbers just a little. But that’s just hindsight. You want Bronson, in Breakout you get Bronson, albeit just a little more relaxed and less murdery.

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963)

In 1963, larger-than-life-in-a-Hemingway-er-way director John Huston perpetrated a hoax on audiences far and farther. Not a huge hoax; actually more like a dirty trick. Thankfully, it was concealed inside a terrific movie.

A soft-spoken little thriller set amongst the near-royalty of the British top-most crust. After we witness a night-time murder and a name scratched from a list, we meet first Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott), formerly of British Intelligence MI5, then unassuming writer Adrian Messenger (John Merivale). Messenger believes that a series of accidental deaths weren’t so accidental and that the men were likely murdered. He asks Gethryn to look into these seemingly unrelated events, then promptly meets his doom when his plane inexplicably (to everyone who is in the movie and not the audience) explodes. Before dying, Messenger manages to croak out a few disjointed sentences to the plane’s only survivor, Raoul Le Borg. Le Borg, as it turns out, was Gethryn’s Great War ally in the French Resistance, and he joins the former agent in his quest, now that it’s become personal. The main clue in Messenger’s utterings is the word “broom”, which Le Borg misremembers as “brush”. But who is giving the brush to whom?

Gethryn and Le Borg investigate Messenger’s list and their hunt takes them all over England, bringing them into contact with a crippled Cockney soldier (“Lost me barrel and keg [in Burma]”), a mysterious gypsy, an Italian food-cart vendor, and fox hunt protestors (“It’s the unspeakable after the uneatable!”), not to mention joining a couple of fox hunts themselves upon the Bruttenholm estate. All the while, the mysterious killer remains one step ahead of them, donning a series of disguises before revealing himself to be Kirk Douglas—er, George Brougham.

Incidentally, “Brougham” and “Bruttenholm” are both pronounced “broom”. And once we discover that old George is not only a distant heir to the Bruttenholm legacy but was also a prisoner of war in Burma with the entirety of the dead men on the list, it’s not too hard to place the rest of the pieces in the puzzle, especially when the corners are so well-defined and the size of dinner plates.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of mystery in The List of Adrian Messenger, but there is an awful lot of fun. With Scott as our guide through the foggy underbelly of England to the magnificent grounds of the Bruttenholm estate, we meet a wonderful assortment of characters and red herrings. The opening credits boast a lot of names—Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum—and they’re present in the film in disguises, just like Douglas’ Brougham. In the film’s post-script coda, all the disguised cameo characters unmask themselves and reveal their famous faces. And we all laugh and delight in the trickery.

To modern eyes, the made-up characters are extremely easy to spot. Douglas’ first quick-change in a rest room, slipping out sclera contacts and replacing a bald cap, is still a marvelously-staged sequence, and was likely quite a shock to ‘60s audiences. Now that every film fan is world-weary, delighting in proclaiming “that’s so fake!” at every movie’s slight-of-hand, the masquerades designed by Bud Westmore in Messenger will be unlikely to impress. But if you’re heart isn’t two-sizes too-small, you’ll let it go and just have a good time.

But here’s where Huston’s hoax really comes into play. As it turns out, his trickery was not in the disguises but the disguised. With the sole exception of Robert Mitchum playing a sinister soldier, none of the famous actors are in the movie. They’re only in the unmasking sequence! Accounts differ as to who played whom and to what extent, but character actor Dave Willock definitely doubled for Douglas during some of the lengthier disguise sequences while the rest were likely portrayed by Space Patrol’s Jan Merlin. In fact, Merlin’s novel, Shooting Montezuma, involves the making of a movie where disguise and deception plays a key role. To add insult to injury, the legendary Paul Frees provided the voices for Sinatra, Curtis and Lancaster.

In the end, Huston makes monkeys out of us all twice. It’s up to the deceived to decide if it was a low-down rotten trick or a mastery of public relations. After all, he didn’t have to pay exorbitant fees for his cameo-ees, outside of a couple hours’ worth of scratch for the masking and reveal, and he still got some glamorous mugs for the curtain call and the advertising. You can’t say that Sinatra or Lancaster aren’t in the movie, just not in the way you expect. Not a rare rug-pull then and it’s still used today. The “Famous Face on the Box” Deception.

But that doesn’t make The List of Adrian Messenger any less a joy to watch than do the visible wires attached to the actors during the climactic fox hunt. It’s all Hollywood magic trickery, from the exciting but predictable plot (based on the 1961 book by Philip MacDonald) to the bombastic acting to Scott’s amused grin permanently-affixed beneath his impressive moustache. It’s a Golden Age film for an audience growing more and more sophisticated with each release.

Now, the usual sturm and drang: The List of Adrian Messenger can only be found on the Warner Brothers Collection DVD-R-on-Demand service, unless you want to try and catch it on cable (TCM runs it frequently). It might be one movie where the remastering is to its detriment. The clarity of the wires and seams (both in terms of make-up and plot threads) are made too visible by technology.