Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek (1964)

A professor of astronomy helping on a missile development program. An old friend of his is a Russian chess champion. The Russian is working with shady businessman Marek and they plan to kidnap the professor and make it look as though he has defected to the Soviet Union.

Date of release
1964-06-21
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director
Cy Endfield

Casting

Interesting facts

Hide and Seek is a 1964 British thriller film directed by Cy Endfield and starring Ian Carmichael, Curt Jurgens and Janet Munro. It was written by Robert Foshko and David Stone based on a story by Harold Greene. Cy Endfield made the film before Zulu (1964) but it was released afterwards. Carmichael called the film "a great disappointment".

Production

By the early 1960s Ian Carmichael was firmly established in movies as a British comic leading man. However he says "all I was being offered (by the trunkload) were variations on the same old bumbling, accident-prone clot," and was worried that audiences would eventually get tired of him. He wanted to appear in a romantic comedy or a comedy thriller like The Thin Man (1934).

Carmichael was enthusiastic about the script for Hide and Seek written by David Stone. The actor called it "a splendid spy thriller with the most original twists and turns in the plot... Here at last was the gear change that I so badly needed to get me out of the Stanley Windrush mould." He had worked with producer Hal Chester on School for Scoundrels (1960).

Filming took place at Shepperton Studios starting June 1962. According to Carmichael, the script was rewritten during production, which went behind schedule, so many of the later scenes were shot hurriedly. He said "it turned into a chaotic mess, with Chester breathing down the neck of the director, Cy Endfield, and ran weeks over schedules. It was an enormous disappointment for me."

Cy Endfield called it "just a utility picture".

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

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