inspectors71 The odd man out (in quality), Stanley Kramer's The Domino Principle taps into the some of the same paranoiac conspiracy gunk that glops up our thinking to this day, and drives the same ground as The Parallax View, Executive Action, Enemy of the State, JFK, etc.Should I go on? And yet, I remember enjoying the book and the movie, not only because I was one of the unwashed masses way back when, believing in anything conspiratorial, but because it seemed out of the norm. I was raised on TV cop dramas, where everything was wrapped up in 52 minutes and I could count the times the bad guys won on one hand.I won't give enough away to have to mark the spoiler box, but The Domino Principle, headed by Gene Hackman and followed by a really strong cast, has bad guys fighting worse guys--a concept foreign to my prime time sensibilities.I remember liking the movie, but after thirty years, I'll be lying if I told you I can remember much about it.With that in mind, I'd say rent it--if you can find it--and throw in Parallax and Executive for a triple-header of evil industrialists, mind-controllers, and sad, little heroes trying to avoid getting squashed.Then return to the real world and repeat the following: "Oswald acted alone."

Valentin T Mocanu The greatest games of Kasparov or Fischer can be a mess for a total rookie. This is a great movie. There is no special agency involved in the plot. This is the clue! This is a PRIVATE plot, built as a PRIVATE enterprise. This is a self-destructive and a self organized plot. As a conclusion, the scenario described the perfect professional plot: private, self –organized, self-destructive, with no trace at the end. Anyone can be behind the plot: a smart "director" with some money. All can be done just by delegation. The "director" must be just trigger. If the normal viewer cannot see the essence of the plot in the explicit sequences of the movie, a real plot has fewer chances to be discovered. All the actors' performances are well done , with some special mention for Gene Hackman and Mickey Rooney.

bkoganbing Gene Hackman gets himself busted out of prison by a nameless government agency who want him for an assassination. It's a given of course that Hackman has the proficient skills for the job.Nobody tells him anything though, he's given as the audience is given bits and pieces of information. That's supposed to be suspenseful, instead it's annoying and boring. Hackman goes through with the mission, but the getaway is messed up and the guy at the top of this mysterious entity orders everybody dead to cover it up. So everyone in the cast dies and at the end you don't really care.One of the other reviewers pointed out that the film was originally twice as long, almost three hours and got chopped down quite a bit. Maybe something really was lost in the translation, but I tend to think it was a mercy act on the audience.A very talented cast that had people like Richard Widmark, Candice Bergen, Mickey Rooney, Eli Wallach, and Edward Albert is so thoroughly wasted here it's a crime. And we never do find out just what federal agency was doing all this, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA or even the IRS.

DrHemlock Bad wigs and occasionally hokey dialogue aside, there's a reason why several reviewers found the plot confusing. As originally scripted and filmed, the movie was almost three hours long. Kramer was required to edit it down to 97 minutes. Big pieces of the plot were left on the cutting-room floor.This is, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence. People in positions of power on films become enamored of every word and fight against making any cuts to the script. It may be one of the producers, writers or stars; it varies from picture to picture. Whoever it is, they have the juice to get their way, so it all gets shot. When distributors subsequently refuse to accept an overly long film, scenes must be deleted. Had they been deleted earlier, during the writing process, the missing bits could have been covered in existing dialog, or plot points could have been reconceived in order to be shortened. Once the film is in the can, it's too late. Dropped scenes mean dropped connections between what came before and what comes after.The result is a mess like this one. Who knows whether we would have liked it better had we seen the original cut? The wig would still be as bad and there would probably be more hokey lines of dialogue. But the story would have made more sense -- at least to the extent that conspiracy stories ever make sense.