Puppet on a Chain

Puppet on a Chain (1970)

It will keep you hanging on the edge of your seat....

Following a triple professional hit a U.S. agent, Paul Sherman, arrives in Amsterdam to investigate a heroin smuggling ring. He finds a city rife with drugs and a police force unable or unwilling to do much about it. With his incognito female fellow agent, Maggie, the American is soon stirring things up.

Date of release
1970-08-02
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (34)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Thriller
Director
Geoffrey Reeve, Don Sharp

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Puppet on a Chain

Puppet on a Chain is a 1970 British thriller film directed by Geoffrey Reeve and starring Sven-Bertil Taube, Barbara Parkins and Alexander Knox. It is based on the 1969 novel Puppet on a Chain by Alistair MacLean.

Production

Alistair MacLean had formed a partnership with Geoffrey Reeve to make movies where MacLean would write and Reeves would direct. Reeves had been part of the development of Puppet on a Chain. The film was financed by the Big City company of Israel film producer Kurt Unger. MacLean wrote the script but Unger was unhappy and had it rewritten by Paul Wheeler which upset MacLean. Wheeler says he wrote the script for £2000.

The film was shot on location in the Netherlands and at Shepperton Studios.

The famous boat chase sequence was performed by Wim Wagenaar and directed by Don Sharp who was specifically hired to do it over a four-week period. Once he completed that sequence he was hired by the producers to reshoot additional sequences, using a moviola of the original cut on set to enable footage to match. Sharp says the plot was adjusted, the ending changed, among many other adjustments. Sharp:

The chappie who directed originally [Geoffrey Reeve, who died in 2010] has gone on to produce some nice movies, and before this he had a good career in shooting commercials. And he’s a talented man. But he didn’t have a story sense then, as a director, and he and his camera operator, each set-up, you know, a sequence that looked like part of a television commercial and wasn’t there for the drama of it, or just to let the audience know what was ha…

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

Recommended