The Poppy Is Also a Flower

Unrated

10/16/19661h 40m

Theatrical Release (US)

~ The story of another war more deadly...more destructive...against the world wide opium conspiracy. ~

Overview:

A special United Nations bureau organises a campaign to trace a drug-smuggling ring across Europe to its source on the Afghanistan-Iran border.

Director:

Terence Young

Status:

Released

Language:

English

Buget:

$0.00

Revenue:

$0.00

Key words:

opium
narcotics cop

Cast

Senta Berger

~ as ~

Maxine

Stephen Boyd

~ as ~

Benson

Yul Brynner

~ as ~

Colonel Salem

Angie Dickinson

~ as ~

Linda Benson

Georges Géret

~ as ~

Superintendent Roche

Hugh Griffith

~ as ~

Salah Rahman Khan

Jack Hawkins

~ as ~

General Bahar

Rita Hayworth

~ as ~

Monique Marko

Trevor Howard

~ as ~

Sam Lincoln

Trini López

~ as ~

Himself

View full cast & crew

Reviews (1)

CinemaSerf
Written 3 year(s) ago
5
The opening dose of earnest monologue from Princess Grace of Monaco gives us a clue as to what we might be in for here. It's a clunkily stitched together series of cameos built around the process of identifying and stopping those bent on exporting opium from Iran to, ultimately via Europe, the United States. Yul Brynner ("Col. Salem") starts off the process working with the Imperial authorities in Iran where poppy farming is completely outlawed. Needless to say, though, if the money was right then there were those who would bend the rules and here we can look "Salah Khan" (Hugh Griffiths - a performance straight out of "Ben Hur"). The police, though, have devised a plan to inject his resin with a radioactive isotope enabling it to be tracked and them to destroy the distribution network. Helping the colonel with his task is the doughty "Sam Lincoln" (Trevor Howard) and as they follow the trail we are introduced to a cast of dozens of famous faces adding their visage, if little else, to the potency of the message set out by HSH at the top of the film. It's quite an interesting theory, the journey is well documented as are the difficulties faced by those trying to thwart this most lucrative of trades, but the style of presentation is so very disjointed and the narrative spends just a little too much time pontificating and not enough time engaging the audience. After about forty minutes I had the gist and the baddie firmly in my sights - the remainder delivered little better than an half-baked "007" adventure (Ian Fleming was involved here too). It is not without it's tragedies - this is not a sterile depiction and characters do get bumped off to illustrate just how ruthless these dealers are - but none of that really enlivened what is essentially rather a dull drama.