Silver Bears

The caper comedy with its emphasis on cast and plot is not a genre that lends itself to significant directorial presence and indeed Silver Bears could have been directed by anybody.  To find that it was directed by the Czech expatriate whose next film would be the excellent post-Vietnam drama Cutter’s Way (1981) is the most surprising thing about it.

With an international cast including  Michael Caine, Cybill Shepherd, Louis Jourdan, Stéphane Audran, David Warner, Tom Smothers, Martin Balsam and future chat show king, Jay Leno, it complies with all the hallmarks of the style with ritzy settings as a backdrop to the pursuit of a high stakes prize to the accompaniment of lots of tongue-in-cheek banter.

Caine plays Doc Fletcher a white collar bagman for Joe Fiore (Martin Balsam), a Mafioso boss looking to launder his millions. Doc comes up with a scheme to buy a Swiss bank via the offices of Prince di Siracusa (Louis Jourdan) and so heads off to Lugano with Joe’s ne’er-do-well  son Albert (Leno) and a counterfeiter (Tony Mascia). The plot escalates from here but it's all so perfunctorily handled that you’re not likely to care one way or other. There is the occasional chuckle and the always-winning Caine, in hindsight, who was warming up for his role in the hit con-man comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) makes the film bearable but otherwise there is little to recommend it.

 

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