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So much average

One of my all time favorites.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

In Sweden to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, author Andrew Craig (Paul Newman) jokes that fellow laureate Dr. Max Stratman (Edward G. Robinson) might be an impostor and no one would know. Turns out the joke is closer to reality than Craig realizes as Dr. Stratman has been replaced by a Communist lookalike. Craig becomes suspicious of the impostor and soon his suspicions put his life in danger.Mark Robson's enjoyable spy movie has Hitchcockian elements but doesn't quite reach the level of the master. The pieces are there, though. Newman's his usual charming self and has good chemistry with Elke Sommer and Diane Baker. Robinson's always great. It's a little overlong and the first hour could use a trim. Hitchcock would have jumped into the main plot a lot sooner, I think. But that's just one of the many differences between a decent director and a great one.

Ernest Lehman, the writer of Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest", was a terrific choice to adapt this Irving Wallace suspense tale...and though director Mark Robson may never be confused with Hitchcock, the overall look, pacing, and feel of "The Prize" are quite similar to "Northwest". Paul Newman plays a hard-drinking heel, a once-promising but now cynical, womanizing writer who has turned to detective stories to pay the bills; he nevertheless has been chosen as one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize for his literature, and sobers up just in time for some exciting adventures in Stockholm. He suspects that one of the other Prize winners is a ringer, with no one else on-screen in his corner (just Foreign Ministry worker Elke Sommer in his arms!). A handsome piece of work, the film does have minor deficiencies: the opening introductions are amusing but a bit pedantic, while an overlong sequence with Newman escaping killers by hiding out at a nudist convention lands with a thud (Cary Grant may have been able to pull this off, but Newman is still too callow). Supporting cast is first-rate, though Lehman tries to have it both ways with Diane Baker's mysterious character, and one ends up not understanding much about her actions or motivations. Newman, shuffling along with a bemused smile, has some nice moments with Sommer, while Edward G. Robinson does a fantastic actors' turn playing two sides of the coin. **1/2 from ****

An extremely convoluted plot that somehow makes for a very entertaining movie. Mark Robson, not the most imaginative director, whips up a Hitchcockian thriller starring Paul Newman as a Nobel Prize winner (for literature!) who slowly unravels a bizarre plot involving murder, kidnapping, two Edward G. Robinsons and a couple of silent killers. Newman is terrific, giving it his all as a drunken womanizer with a wicked sense of humor. Elke Sommer, in what may very well be her finest performance, is well-matched with Newman. She's very sexy and, as the film is set in Sweden, her accent does not get in her way. Diane Baker plays an unlikely bad girl and she steals the scenes she's in. Written by Ernest Lehman and featuring some direct lifts from his previous NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

Just weeks before traveling to Stockholm in the summer of 1964, we had seen the movie "The Prize" and the distance from the level where the killer was flipped downwards onto the statue with the spear or sword which impaled him was FRESH in the mind. The movie had shown the distance from the beginning of the fall to the impalement as being about straight down. Actually, the distance the falling body would have had to have covered was more like 40 to 60 feet. Through the years, we have seen no comment on this error. Tonight (12-8-09) we saw the movie again on TCM for the first time in 46 years and again, we saw the "photographic filming error". The impalement was viewed with glee since the killer had almost done away with Paul Newman . . . but, the depiction of the disposal of the Russian "hit man" could have been authentic. Advice: go to the scene in Stockholm today and assess the distance under consideration . . and draw your conclusions. S. Brewer