In short: The Holcroft Covenant (1985)

When he is turning 43, New York architect Noel Holcroft (Michael Caine), is, in rather complicated ways, informed that the dead Nazi war criminal father he hates with a shouty passion has left him the tidy little sum of 4.5 billion dollars to make amends for dad’s war crimes. Noel just needs to get together with the male descendants of two of his dad’s co-conspirators in the cause, and sign a covenant. Problems arise rather early with various shadowy conspirators trying to kill and/or – they never seem to be too sure themselves – protect Noel. Can Noel at least trust the other Nazi children as portrayed by Mario Adorf (clearly enjoying himself immensely doing a character who is basically a really evil Herbert von Karajan), Anthony Andrews, and Victoria Tennant? In which way is Noel’s mother Althene (Lilli Palmer) involved? Did dear Nazi dad really want to make amends, or is a ridiculously complicated plan to create a Fourth Reich involved? In any case, Noel’s going on a road trip through Europe.

I don’t think anybody’s ever going to count the Robert Ludlum adaptation The Holcroft Covenant among the great John Frankenheimer’s best movies. The film’s construction is just a bit too convoluted, the characters a bit too much on the side of pulp fiction (well, men’s adventure, given the decade) clichés, the emotions tend to the melodramatic without the script ever really making this emotionally compelling, and the whole thing never quite seems to gel completely.

Having said that, I found myself enjoying the film quite a bit. There is much to love here. There is Caine’s sweaty, shouty and often red-faced performance that does much to sell his character as a relatively normal guy totally out of his depth, while the rest of the cast is appropriately shady to outright insane in always entertaining ways even when their plans and actions often don’t make a lick of sense. Then you have the cheesy but also evocative mood of paranoia Frankenheimer was so great at creating, getting the audience to look over Noel’s shoulder even more than he does, and where nobody – perhaps even one’s own mother (gasp) – can be trusted. Thematically, this is obviously as Frankenheimer as things can get.


The action and suspense scenes are not Frankenheimer’s strongest, but middling Frankenheimer action is still much better than good action by a lot of directors, so there’s much to enjoy here also, and a couple of scenes, particularly the nightly chase through Berlin’s red light district, are as good as anything Frankenheimer ever did. It’s also clear that the director is having a bit of fun with the dumber parts of the script, so his Berlin looks, sounds and feels like it was taken from a Fassbinder movie (with some shout-outs so obvious, this must be done on purpose), and the actors doing the neo-Nazis are clearly instructed to go big on the crazy.