The Domino Principle (1977) aka The Domino Killings

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075950/





Tucker is a maximum security inmate with still 15 years left to serve on his murder conviction sentence.

While still in prison, one day he is called to the prison Warden's office where he is approached by outsiders, identifying themselves only as being members of "The Organization", to do a job in exchange for his guaranteed freedom, a new identity and promise that he will be reunited with his wife he hadn't seen in 15 years.

It's never mentioned specifically but we can all surmise "The Organization" is a shadowy agency like the CIA or some rogue Government assassination group.

The job he is asked to do is never mentioned but it's clear they want Tucker to assassinate someone.

The movie runs 1 hour and 41 minutes including opening and ending credits.

It starts out well with the interview of Tucker by "The Organization", the subsequent discussion of their offer although rather vague and sketchy, then the set up but then once he was out of prison, it starts to change the pacing and fall apart:

at 1 hour and 18 minutes into the movie, not only nothing has happened, the job they want him to do is not even talked about in detail.

This is supposed to be a paranoia filled political conspiracy thriller, one of the many movies with the same topic that were made and released by Hollywood in the 70's like Klute (1971), Executive Action (1973), The Domino Killings (1977), Winter Kills (1979), The Conversation (1974), Marathon Man (1976), The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President's Men (1976).

Yet there is nothing thrilling, paranoid, tense, nor suspenseful about this movie.

Supposedly there were over 3 hours of footage that was filmed and when the final cut was put together, the studio balked at its length and made director Stanley Kramer excise over 1 1/4 hour of it - thus resulting in a mess that makes no sense and containing no excitement whatsoever.

This movie is also Kramer's biggest financial and commercial failure and his penultimate film. It's a shame a great director such as Kramer who gave us epic cinema classics like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), The Defiant Ones (1958), Ship of Fools (1965), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), On the Beach (1959) and Inherit the Wind (1960) had to end his career with such a low point movie such as this one.

It's also been reported that Gene Hackman, who had also admitted to it himself, made this movie for money.

At the time he was offered other roles in movies such as "Jaws" , " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ", " Close Encounters of the Third Kind ", "Apocalypse Now" and " March or Die".

Hackman agreed to appear in this film instead because he was offered a bigger paycheck if he accepted the role for this film.

Finally it's a shame that this movie turned out the way it did because it had a cast taht featured some of the more notable stars of the time: Richard Widmark, Mickey Rooney, Edward Albert, Eli Wallach, Candice Bergen, Ken Swofford and even the actress who is best known for the voice of Federation Starship U.S.S. Enterprise computer.

I really wanted to like this movie and Gene Hackman is a great actor and he is also one of my favorite but unfortunately there was nothing in the movie that gave me reason to like it or enjoy it and the blame is not on Hackman or on the rest of the cast or even on the director:

they did a hell of a job and gave it their all.

The blame for this unfortunate cinematography failure falls only on the studio.

1/5