With its meaningless title, tv lineage, C- rating & pre-breakout Burt Reynolds, you don’t expect much from this B-pic adventure about mismatched fortune hunters meeting in the Philippines to loot a forgotten cache of WWII gold near Corregidor. Yet it’s not bad at all. (Reynolds has far worse on his sorry-ass C.V.) Efficiently staged in & around Manila by Richard Benedict (who he?), there’s mean Lyle Bettger as a racist army vet; Rodolfo Acosta as the quick-to-fight alcoholic Native America; Vic Diaz as chubby cuckold with glam wife; and local salvage operator Burt leading the hunt and screwing the wife. Plenty for scripter John Higgins to work with. (He’s the class act here . . . but only if you go back to the ‘40s.) Plus cheeky Anne Francis as a tennis champ on hand to play doubles with Burt and find her long lost dad, the man who knows where the loot is. No doubt, low expectations help this one a lot; and where else can you see Burt putting his act together under his own head of hair, before the Good Ol’ Boy accent took over, looking fit rather than buffed & groomed? Watch him in a big extended brawl that starts at a cock fight with the crowd switching gears to bet on him rather than the roosters before heading to the street, and with Burt still doing all his own stunt work. Ouch! The guy was a natural as long as he didn’t know it.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Someone got away with a very ‘blue’ joke for 1968 when the Reynolds/Francis relationship suddenly heats up as they wait for an elevator. The doors open & the operator boy looks at Burt, asking, ‘Going down?’ Yikes! Elevators were all self-operating by then, but how else to get the line in?
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