The Sicilian Cross (1976)

It's one of those questions that isn't asked often enough: what did Roger Moore do between Bond films?  You might think that, with the payday he was getting from the 007 franchise, Moore simply put his feet up and took it easy.  But, in reality, he made a number of non-Bond films of varying quality.  With his first two Bonds being released a year apart (Live and Let Die in 1973 and Man With the Golden Gun in 1974), he obviously didn't have much chance to do anything else between those two, (although he did have another movie, Gold, released in 1974), but with a three year hiatus before The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) was released, (the delay was largely due to legal issues relating to Kevin McClory's ownership of the screen rights to 'Thunderball' and, by extension, SPECTRE and Blofeld), he managed to fit in a bewildering variety of films of wildly varying quality.  The best of them was undoubtedly the big budget Wilbur Smith adaptation Shout at the Devil (1976), but he also found time to appear in the Anglo-German romantic comedy That Lucky Touch (1975) and was bizarrely cast in the title role of the 1976 TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York.  But the Roger Moore film from this period that has always intrigued me the most (and until recently had eluded me) was the Italian Mafia movie The Sicilian Cross (1976).

On paper, the film looks as if it should be half decent - clearly aimed at the international market, it co-stars Stacy Keach and features Ernest Tidyman and Randal Kleiser among its four credited writers as well as featuring extensive location shooting in San Francisco.  Unfortunately, it turns out to be confused and confusing, with a plot that makes little sense, dialogue that frequently confuses matters rather than clarifying them and choppy editing that adds to the feeling that the whole thing consists of a series of random scenes arbitrarily assembled with little regard for story and character development, let alone basic logic.  There are a number of stand out individual sequences - a spectacular car chase and Keach's 'test drive' of a car spring to mind - but they seem to be there purely to provide a spectacle, rather than being natural plot developments or, indeed, advancing the plot in any significant way.  The root of these problems is a seriously disjointed script - in all probability the result of having so many writers, both Italian and American, work on it - which sets up a main plot which, every time it looks as if it might be going somewhere, diverts into another plot line, ultimately resolving none of them in a particularly satisfactory manner.  

The main plot is ostensibly about that titular cross, which has been imported into the US from Sicily by a local Mafia chief for installation in a new Catholic church.  It turns out that it has been used to smuggle a large quantity of heroin into the US, an act of sacrilege that enrages said Mafia guy, all the other Mafia capos and the capo of capos, not to mention the priest whose church the crucifix was destined for.  Naturally, the Mafia don calls in his nephew Ulysses, an Anglo-Italian lawyer, played by Moore, to find out who was responsible.  He, in turn, brings in his racing car driver friend Charlie (Keach) to help him.  To complicate matters, the heroin discovered by the authorities is stolen by a group of dockers who plan to sell it themselves, there's a power struggle within the Mafia hierarchy culminating in the capo of capos being assassinated and, just when you think it is all drawing to a close, a past family secret is uncovered and it turns into a revenge picture.  Not surprisingly, the resulting action is all over the place, with Moore jetting off to Sicily on what amounts to a wild goose chase, while Keach chases the heroin, before they come together again in the US where they variously try to find who assassinated the big boss, track the dockers with the heroin in the hope they will lead them to whoever originally hid it in the cross, before deciding to seize the stuff themselves with a view to selling it.  Meanwhile, everybody else seems to be scheming against everybody else and double crossing each other, as the film descends into a confusing mess.

It is exhausting work watching The Sicilian Cross, as the plot pulls first one way, then changes tack to pull another, with none of the developments feeling as if they make any real sense let alone be connected to each other.  Events pile upon events, which certainly give the impression that things are happening, but somehow never seem to get us anywhere. It doesn't help that the film is seriously over-long, with too many scenes feeling like padding, resulting in the pace flagging badly every so often.  The idea was clearly to make some kind of 'buddy picture', (perhaps inspired by Moore's pairing with Tony Curtis in The Persuaders), with Moore's smooth and suave Ulysses contrasted with Keach's rough and ready Charlie.  Unfortunately, the script gives Roger Moore few real opportunities to deploy his trademark smooth charisma, with Stacy Keach generally coming out of it better, as he makes the most of his scenes as the more roguish Charlie.  Moreover, despite Moore's undoubted charm, it is difficult to warm to a character who is, essentially, a Mafia stooge.  The end result is that the duo fail to establish any kind of adversarial dynamic between the two characters.  Nonetheless, so long as you don't stop to think about it too hard, The Sicilian Cross is a reasonably entertaining watch - it looks good with a superficial gloss that distracts from the confused plot and a number of well-staged action sequences.  (The version I saw was the UK release version, with a running time of 105 minutes, but it was bought for US distribution by AIP, who cut it to just over ninety minutes and retitled it Street People.  I've yet to see this version, but I can't imagine that the cuts would make it any more confusing and might well improve the film by tightening it up somewhat).

Moore, of course, continued to make films between his Bond assignments - two between Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker (1979), four between the latter and For Your Eyes Only (1981) and another two between Octopussy (1983) and View to a Kill (1985), (he seems to have taken a sabbatical between For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy).  The most successful of these were those where he played variations on his suave secret agent/adventurer character, such as The Wild Geese (1978) and The Seas Wolves (1980).  Attempts to do something different, like The Naked Face  (1984) or the anthology film Sunday Lovers (1980), or even The Sicilian Cross, were considerably less successful, although a couple of variations on his regular persona - his German officer (and dodgy German accent) in Escape to Athena (1979) and his bearded woman disliking anti-terrorist expert in North Sea Hijack (1979), for instance - are both amusing and enjoyable.  Despite his attempts to prove that he could do something different, by the seventies Moore was too closely identified with The Saint, Brett Sinclair (from The Persuaders) and Bond, that audiences were reluctant to accept him in any other type of role.