The Naked Runner

The Naked Runner (1967)

They found the key to Sam Laker. They wound it up good and tight. And then they turned him loose.

Sam Laker is an American industrialist, working in Britain, who has just been awarded an international award for industrial design. He is planning to travel to East Germany to attend a trade show and show off his invention, taking his 10 year old son with him for a holiday. Meanwhile a British Intelligence officer who served with Laker in the Second World War decides to use the opportunity of Laker's trip and his lack of an intelligence profile to coerce him into carrying out an assassination.

Date of release
1967-07-19
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Drama, Thriller
Director
Sidney J. Furie

Casting

Interesting facts

The Naked Runner is a 1967 British espionage film directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Frank Sinatra, Peter Vaughan and Edward Fox. It was written by Stanley Mann based on the 1966 novel of the same title by Francis Clifford.

Production

Sinatra was in need of a hit—Marriage on the Rocks and Assault on a Queen having flopped in the two previous years—so he put actor and trusted aide Brad Dexter in charge of finding a suitable vehicle. After negotiations for him to star in Harper fell through, The Naked Runner was chosen instead. Sinatra had been impressed with 1965's The Ipcress File and recruited its director Sidney J. Furie.

The film was shot on location in Europe. However, while in Copenhagen, Sinatra left the production to perform at a rally for California's Democratic governor Pat Brown who was running in the 1966 California gubernatorial election against Republican Ronald Reagan. After doing the campaign event, Sinatra decided he was not going to return to Europe.

Dexter and Furie decided to take the maverick action of finishing the film with a stand-in (James Payne) for Sinatra's remaining scenes, editing in close-ups from earlier shots in post-production and overdubbing the dialogue.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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