The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) on Netflix
Adrian Messenger asks his friend Anthony Gethryn, a retired MI5 officer, to investigate a list of accident victims, without saying what links them. Messenger's flight is bombed.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.8/106,188 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Anthony Gethryn, lately retired from MI5, is asked by his friend Adrian Messenger to look into the people named on a list. Messenger, a writer, believes their deaths, recorded as accidents, were murders, but he keeps his reasons to himself. He sets off to gather supporting evidence, and his aircraft is bombed in mid-flight over the sea. Another passenger, Raoul Le Borg, survives the crash; he was Gethryn's counterpart in the French Resistance during the war, and the two men set out to trace the names together. Lady Jocelyn Bruttenholm joins them. She is Messenger's widowed cousin, once close to Gethryn, and Le Borg takes a strong interest in her.
Cast
- Tony Hustonas Derek Bruttenholm
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Make-up artist John Chambers disguised five Hollywood names for the film, and an epilogue shows them on camera removing the disguises: Tony Curtis as a street organ player, Burt Lancaster as a female fox-hunt protester, Frank Sinatra as a gypsy horse-trader and Robert Mitchum as the murdered James Slattery.- Elizabeth Taylor was booked as a guest star hidden under make-up as a sailor called "Chesty", but she pulled out after being told how grueling it would be to put the disguise on and take it off.
- Character actor Jan Merlin was hired in secret to perform several of Kirk Douglas's disguised personas as the killer George Brougham, working with Universal's make-up artists for nearly a year before shooting began, sometimes in pain and with no screen credit.
- Although Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra were advertised among the disguised stars, they appear only in the film's unmasking coda, and their disguised parts were played by uncredited performers; only Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas performed in the body of the film.
