Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1966
Kaleidoscope (1966 film)
Buy Kaleidoscope (1966 film) now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Kaleidoscope' is a 1966 British comedy crime film starring Warren Beatty and Susannah York.'Variety' film review; 7 September 1966, p. 6
The film had its world premiere on 8 September 1966 at the Warner Theatre in the West End of London.
Plot
After leaving his lover Angel McGinnis behind in London, rich playboy Barney Lincoln breaks into a playing card manufacturer in Geneva to mark the cards, and then proceeds to break the bank at major European casinos.
Barney meets up with Angel again in Monte Carlo, where he wins a great deal of money, but her suspicions after he left England caused her to consult her father, a detective from Scotland Yard. He blackmails Barney into helping him catch a drug smuggler named Harry Dominion, who owns a casino and also has a weakness for high stakes poker.
Cast
Production
It was the third film Jack Smight directed for Warners. Smight called the script "terrific... a little hard to believe, but nevertheless a jolly fun premise laced with great humor."
He says producer Elliot Kastner cast Sandra Dee as the female lead mostly because Warren Beatty wanted to sleep with her. Smight said, "Though I had worked with Sandra in my first film...and had regard for her, I couldnt conceive of her playing a role of the British girl that the script called for...So much for the producers wanting to protect the integrity of a fine screenplay."
During preproduction in France, Kastner admitted he did not want Dee in the film. Smight asked Jack Warner if he could have Susannah York and Warner agreed; Dee was paid off.
Smight says Beatty was undisciplined during filming. They would rehearse scenes but then "just as we were about to roll the camera, Warren would ask if he could try something different from what we had earlier settled upon. I wanted to be flexible in the event that what he wanted to do was better than what we had planned. Inevitably it wasn't."
References
Buy Kaleidoscope (1966 film) now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1966