Prize The (1963) – full review!

There’s more than one reason why this slightly above average thriller “feels” like director Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) it too was written by Ernest Lehman though this one was based on a novel by Irving Wallace and was directed by Mark Robson (Peyton Place (1957)). Instead of using the United Nations in New York City as a backdrop this film’s story uses a Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Stockholm Sweden. Both stories utilize a protagonist male who’s out-of-place in the situational intrigue thrust upon him; forced to solve a mystery he is both helped and hindered by a beautiful blonde to whom he’s attracted and part of the time he’s also impaired by alcohol. He is chased by a long-faced villain into perilous situations and heights where a fall could be fatal (and ultimately is to said pursuer) and nobody including the police believes his story about dangerous persons who are after him. Both dramas feature mistaken identity plots comical sequences and character actor Leo G. Carroll (who appeared in more Hitchcock films than any other actor).

Paul Newman plays Andrew Craig (the Cary Grant-like role) an American novelist who’s just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Elke Sommer plays Inger Lisa Andersson the attractive blonde who’s been assigned by prize committee chairman Count Bertil Jacobsson (Carroll) to keep up with the writer whose reputation for being a lady’s man includes a drinking habit. Edward G. Robinson plays another (now) American prize winner a physicist who’d opposed the politics of his native country now behind the communist Iron Curtain and had emigrated to the United States years earlier. Once in Sweden Stratman (Robinson) is met by his comely niece Emily (Diane Baker) who escorts him during the proceedings. Later Craig learns that Emily is involved in the plot to kidnap her uncle and replace him with her father Stratman’s twin who made up as the prize winner is set to deliver a speech damning capitalism and announcing that he is defecting to Russia. Of course this is the subplot that Craig discovers; he tells everybody but nobody believes him. He encounters a dead body and chases the killer (Sacha Pitoëff) with whom he struggles before he’s pushed and falls from a great height thankfully into a canal. Later he’s pursued into a nudist colony’s meeting and shortly after Craig and Inger become romantically entangled she is also kidnapped and must be rescued by him (ala North by Northwest).

Some other background characters are: married prize winners Dr.’s Denise (Micheline Presle) and Claude (Gérard Oury) Marceau he has a secretary mistress Monique Souvir (Jacqueline Beer) such that he wife tries to use Craig to make her husband jealous and return to her; and shared winners Italian Dr. Carlo Farelli (Sergio Fantoni) and American Dr. John Garrett (Kevin McCarthy) who’d never met before and Garrett suspects the improvising Farelli of stealing his credit. John Wengraf plays Hans Eckhart the brains behind the kidnapping. Veteran actor John Qualen can be glimpsed delivering hotel welcome baskets to each recipient and Anna Lee appears uncredited as an American reporter.

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