Death is too good for these guys.
Although he hasn't the presence of Robert Donat in the same role, RichardChamberlain exudes a nice dose of directed menace at some people who did
him dirt in the end of the Napoleonic era.
As the story goes Chamberlain as Edmond Dantes is a first mate on a cargo ship which he brings in to Marseilles after the captain takes ill and dies. The
ship made an unscheduled at Elba where the late captain visited Napoleon
Bonaparte on the island and took back a sealed note and entrusted said
note to an unsuspecting Chamberlain.
Chamberlain trusts the wrong people and gets hustled off to prison without trial. He spends 15 years there before escaping. When he does escape he finds as directed one fabulous fortune.
Enough money to reinvent himself as the Count Of Monte Cristo. The story is
proof in the old adage that revenge is a desert best served cold. And in a cold
and calculating way he evens the score by collecting enough data on Louis
Jourdan, Donald Pleasance and Tony Curtis all of whom are solid pillars
of the French government and society.
Interesting the presence of Tony Curtis in the cast. 20 years earlier he would have been Edmond Dantes if the film had been made then. Hedoesn't quite cut it as a bad guy though by now he'd played a few. But not in the swashbuckler genre
Chamberlain loses too, the love of Kate Nelligan the girl he was going to marry
when fate intervened. Quite a bit has come between them over the years.
Taryn Power of the power acting clan makes a debut as Jourdan's daughter who
does not know of her father's duplicity.
This is a decent version of the story with no real happy ending for anyone.
score 7/10
bkoganbing 28 October 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6212620/34814
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