The Sell Out (1977)
This action drama centers on a former CIA operative who grudgingly rejoins the spy game due to the machinations of his one-time student - a screw up who goes to work for the Soviets. As his job drags him deeper into a dangerous and under-handed world, the student wants out of the agency and oout of the U.S.S.R. But the man's choices have made him a target and now both the United States and Russia want him dead, sending their mos able hit men to do it.
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How sad is this?
Absolutely Fantastic
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Oliver Reed looks like he is ready to continue his memorable turn of Bill Sykes in this so called thriller. Trouble is that he has been thrown into an absolutely muddled stinker along with Richard Widmark.Widmark is supposed to be Jewish here living in Israel as a retired CIA agent. The only things we can relate to Widmark and Judaism was that his ex-son-in-law was Sandy Koufax and he was absolutely brilliant as the prosecuting attorney in "Judgment at Nuremberg," 15 years before he made this ridiculously confusing film.Gail Hunnicutt plays the girlfriend of both Reed and Widmark. She tends to play both ends until it's discovered what her real game is and she pays for it with a bullet. The same bullet needed to be shot into this awful script.As an agent who defected to the Soviet Union, Reed wants to come back to the American side and this causes havoc. However, the film never explains why Widmark is also marked for death.The ending scenes as the duo attempt to flee to Jordan are so dark that you can't see anything.Absolutely miserable production. Assaf Dayan, the son of Moshe, appears in this film, but he is hardly noticed.
Typical (and typically complex) Cold War spy saga, not the best in the genre by far – but still counting among its admirers film-geek supremo Quentin Tarantino! The narrative deals with hounded KGB man Oliver Reed who's wanted by one side and deemed expendable by the other; the only one who can help him is Richard Widmark, recently retired from the C.I.A. and currently living with Reed's ex-flame (Gayle Hunnicutt) in Israel! On Reed's trail are Sam Wanamaker of the C.I.A. and Vladek Sheybal of the KGB; an Israeli agent, who's trying to keep the situation under control, is sympathetic to Widmark but ends up paying for the interest with his life. As a film, It's watchable enough but hardly outstanding, despite a plethora of action sequences set to a pounding score and culminating in a desert trek fraught with peril. Even so, the star combo works surprisingly well (watching them dressed up in Jewish garb "praying" beneath the Weeping Wall is an unintentionally comic highlight), the supporting cast all pull their weight (particularly Sheybal's sleek but ruthless hit-man), and the overly-hysterical Hunnicutt is ultimately exposed as a femme fatale.THE SELL OUT is available on a budget DVD containing two other espionage titles (all under the dubious name of "Great Spy Movies"): these are the obscure THE INSIDE MAN (1984) – which, at least, offers some interest due to the presence in the cast of Dennis Hopper and Hardy Kruger – and the distinctly unappetizing HANGMEN (1987) with Sandra Bullock and Jake LaMotta!
The Sell-Out finds Oliver Reed as an American agent who's turned and become a double agent for the Soviets. Now he wants out of their system because he's found it's not all it's cracked up to be. Unfortunately both sides want to see him taken out.What to do for Ollie. When you've got a friend like Richard Widmark who was your original sponsor at the Central Intelligence Agency and now retired to Israel with your former mistress Gayle Hunnicutt you go there for more than one reason. Widmark agrees to help him flee, but as it turns out comes at a terrible price.This Israeli made feature had the distinct aroma of tax write off around it. Everyone just walks through their parts and collects their salary. Especially Oliver Reed who it seems had to have his entire performance dubbed so he could sound convincingly American. Seems like you could have gotten another American or made him British and saved a lot of money.The cinematography in and around Jerusalem was nice to see, it took your mind off a very trite spy story.
A pretty good cast with lots of delightful bad guys. But what's the point. Who's who and what do they want? That's the problem. This is a mishmash of intrigue and espionage where we can't tell the characters without a program. We assume we are pulling for Richard Widmark and Oliver Reed, but we can't be sure. What makes a real spy story work is knowing the real milieu that is put forward. If everyone is flip-flopping back and forth within the story and if we don't have an identifiable end, we can't sense the suspense. I just couldn't get into this film. I like Reed and Widmark; they are two wonderful actors, but this must have been thrown together. The pyrotechnics are laughable. They use the old rule, if you can't come up with a plot, use a bunch of car chases. When all is said and done, who are these people answerable to. Is he CIA corrupt or is there a visible entity for us to fear. If there is, it's never brought forward in this film.