Some things I liked some I did not.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Let's be realistic.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

***may thoroughly accidentally contain spoilers*** This is a very charming movie, whereby it's true charm is revealed at its best at the very end.I recommend it mostly because I believe that fervent movie fans who have not yet seen it will get a big kick out of following it through to the end. It's the kind of movie that English speakers everywhere apart from the U.S. of A. call a lark, a fun exercise for actors, wherever they're from, but an especially great viewing experience because from start to finish, the whole lark is a U.S. of A. breakout into the rest of the English speaking audience terrain. From the director, through the lead actors, to the brilliantly delivered bit parts, it's a crazy splash of fun that has its culmination in a cinematic equivalence of taking a personal bow, whereby the happy grins on each of those actors reveals that it was a pleasure for all of them to take part in a very unique American lark.Btw, the expression "lark" comes from the habit of the western European lark bird to rise high above the nest, whenever it's threatened, in order to lead the assailant astray with shrill crying. hence lark, as an expression to describe dissembling.

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER is an incredibly inventive murder mystery/thriller, made by John Huston and shot on his estate in Ireland. It's quite unlike any other film I've watched, the stark black-and-white shooting style accompanying the action quite nicely. It's one of those films where the mystery is deliciously ambiguous until around the halfway mark.I found the early scenes to be the best part of the film as you have no idea what's going to happen next. Evil Kirk Douglas proves a master of disguise as he goes around bumping people off and making it look like they were killed in accidents. George C. Scott is a delight as the amateur detective who gets drawn into the proceedings and Jacques Roux is even better as the warm-hearted Frenchman and Watson character.Eventually the story begins to make sense but it continues to engage anyway thanks to the strong performances. The latter half of the story gets bogged down a bit in the fox hunting scenes but it still picks up for a climax tying it all together nicely. One of the most interesting things about the production are the elaborate disguises worn by characters; the make-up which includes face masks and even false eyes is really something special. I found most of the celebrity cameos to be a bit of a distraction, but all of the winking and grinning at the end is irresistible.

John Huston displays an indiscreet lack of subtlety, taxing our tolerance with a somewhat modern English whodunit with an extra publicity stunt: Numerous major Hollywood actors are announced to appear in the film, but are all thickly concealed in John Chambers' make-up design: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis as an organ-grinder, Burt Lancaster as an old woman, Frank Sinatra as a gypsy horse-trader. Their identities are exposed to the audience at the very end of the film, when each star strips off his masquerade. Actually, only Douglas (by far the most interesting performance) and Mitchum do any real acting beneath their heaps of collodion and crepe hair. The others just walk on to shoot their brief, tacked-on unveilings at a salary of $75,000 each, while being doubled in the film itself. The film even further cheats by often dubbing their voices with that of voice-over actor Paul Frees!The vehicle for this cash-in is a plot wherein the eponymous writer believes a succession of ostensibly isolated "accidental" deaths are really related murders. He asks his friend George C. Scott, just retired from MI5, to help resolve the obscurity, but Messenger's plane is sabotaged while he's on the way to gather data to corroborate his fears and, with his last lungful of air, he struggles to impart to a fellow passenger a crucial clue. What do you know, the passenger just so happens to be the sole survivor and…just so happens to be Scott's old WWII Resistance comrade. They collaborate to probe Messenger's inventory of names, and decipher his puzzling last gasps. Aside from the ones that insult us, more than a few story aspects in the film are akin to The Hound of the Baskervilles, like hounds, the intentions of the killer, the allusions to Canada, and the exposure of the killer using a hoax.While we discover rather soon who the killer is, the obscurity of his intentions and the anticipation of his capture are enough to keep going, even if not gripped by genuine tension or suspense. Burdened with a rasping, implausible plot, maybe this lockstep adventure should've been set in Victorian times to oblige its villain with an infatuation with costumes, its Edwardian-style consulting sleuth in a bowler hat, and its foul play in a misty Thames Path.There is something I quite liked, maybe because it took the edge off, made me relax and enjoy the kitsch. Before the haunting trumpet solos of Chinatown, the strange and threatening cues of Alien or the atmospheric strings of Basic Instinct, a comparatively green-horned Jerry Goldsmith shaped an evocative, and purely '60s-kitsch, ambiance out of an instrumental jumble incorporating saxophone, electric guitar, tuba, harp and the definitive eerie UFO-suggestive electronic whistle that creates nostalgic vibes as when we hear it in The Lost Weekend, Spellbound and BBC's Midsomer Murders.

I haven't had a chance to read all the comments here but, for those who suspect the stars are not always under the makeup until the end of the film, you are right.The full story of the actors who REALLY were under the makeup in several scenes is told in an issue of Video Watchdog. You can locate a reference to it at the Video Watchdog website.Actor Jan Merlin substituted for Kirk Douglas in several of the scenes. And other actors sometimes stood in under the makeup for some of the other stars, too.Hard to believe these big stars went along with such a silly scheme and that it was undiscovered by the public for so long. But I think a lot of suspected something when the stars in makeup at the end didn't look much like the same character seen in the rest of the film.