I had high hopes sitting down to watch Treasure of the Golden Condor, thinking that it might have been an inspiration for the Indiana Jones films. George Macready got the film off to a rousing start with his subtle yet vicious machinations, which he applied with aplomb throughout. Had the editing, directing and other actors been up to his level, the film could have been great, but I found it to be a shameless ripoff of the 1942 film, Son of Fury, starring Tyrone Power and George Saunders. In fact, it is a virtual line by line aping of the first film, with the tired recipe of switching out one exotic locale for another, and adding color. (If any of you readers ever saw that old Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy film in which their movie studio is always shooting the same scene over and over, even the dialogue is identical, and only the uniforms of the bad guys changes, then you know what I mean! If not, the fact that such an old memory pops up over Goldon Condor...) Perhaps I am biased because I was taken aback 10 minutes into the film, with a deja vu broadside on my cranium, but I decided that as long as they top the first film, well, OK. Macready gets honorable mention, but come on, who could top Saunders as a villain? The color and cinematography were a plus, but in every other aspect, this film is an atrocious disappointment. Anne Bancroft's take on the calculating Comtesse de Malo was fine, but too brief; I think the cutting room floor has taken most of the nuance from her relationship with Cornell Wilde. The whole movie ended up no better than a go-through-the-motions remake.
Review of Treasure of the Golden Condor
