Cold Sweat

Terence Young is best known as the director of 3 Bond movies, Thunderball (1965), From Russia With Love (1963) and Dr. No (1962). That might explain why he’s directing Charles Bronson in this B-grade action film but barely what James Mason is doing in it and certainly not one-time Bergman muse, Liv Ullman..

Mason, who looks like he’s badly on his druthers plays Captain Ross, a slimy mercenary soldier and drug dealer who Bronson’s character, Joe Martin, abandoned, along with a couple of other dirt-bags, in a prison break in which a guard was killed seven years earlier. Joe fled to the South of France and settled down with Ullman’s Fabienne and her daughter running a tourist fishing boat while the others went back to the can. All is sweet until the ne’er-do-wells turn up and try to get him to help them pick up a drug shipment and escape, taking his boat in expiation for having left them behind.

Frankly Cold Sweat is a crudely made film but it borders on the exploitational and anyone who likes late 60s style will enjoy the low budget attempts to be cool, with the South of France locations typifying the era’s idea of the place to be and a truly awful performance from Jill Ireland (who was married to Bronson at the time) as Mason’s hippified moll. .

For the most part the film is forgettable with a buffed Bronson dispatching the villains in comic-book fashion but there is a car chase down the side of a steep, rock strewn hill that is a quite remarkable piece of stunt work. 

DVD Extras: Unseen footage; Stills gallery: Original Theatrical trailers.

Available from: Madman

 

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