Puppet On A Chain is the movie best remembered for its remarkable boat chase through the canals of Amsterdam. A great drug busting film with a funky score by Piero Piccioni, Vladek Sheybal as a great villain and overall a fun movie. Lets see some posts!!
share[deleted]
I love this movie I watched it at my cousins once and I think it's underated it's better then most Bond films I have seen
shareFor some reason, my school in Scotland (a Catholic school incidently) showed this movie to the entire school in the gymnasium one day.
God knows why the picked this particular film as it definitely has an adult theme.
I remember the boat chase on the canals quite vividly.
"How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?"
Fully agree with you, the film is very good but....that boat chase !! I think what makes it stand out is the fact that no music plays over the chase sequence. The result is you get to here the sound of the boats engines, the water, the crashes etc. The sequence where Sherman rams the other boat towards the end was superb. Compare this to one of the other renowned boat chases, Live & Let Die. Despite the fact that there are far more spectacular jumps etc, it doesn't have the same impact for me because of the music playing over the chase. Have we seen this before ? Yes we have, Bullit ! No music, just the sound of the engines, the wheels and the crashes. I read somewhere that a dozen or so boats were trashed for this chase. Along with a good story, a fine international cast, (who cares what their original nationality was), it all adds up to an entertaining hour and a half.
VANQUISH3443
Except for the setting, Live and Let Die is almost a total rip-off of the boat chase scene in Puppets on a Chain. Stunt Coordinator Don Sharp should have recieved credit for that theft. The technical set-up is almost identical.
The new design of the IMDb site sucks big time. Bring back the old design, now!
Don Sharp directed the boat chase - he wasn't stunt coordinator.
According to David Pirie's "A Heritage of Horror", Puppet on a Chain was edited, then the producers realized that it wasn't working. Don Sharp, who had already directed the boat chase, was asked back to write and direct further scenes as well as supervise the editing. According to Pirie, Sharp vastly improved on what had gone before.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
According to David Pirie's A Heritage of Horror,Puppet on a chain was
edited,then the producers realized that it wasn't working.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not hard to understand why because very little is working here.
I've seen better episodes of tv series than this.Live and let die or
even Amsterdamned not only got the chase scenes right but they got
the rest of the movie right also.
Puppet on a chain is only a ghost of a good movie.
that chase sure was brilliant When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
Amazing boat chase and yes, it leaves Live and Let Die standing. The lack of music, the grittiness, the inventiveness, make the Bond vehicle look contrived and passionless by comparison. This was a fun movie overall, but the chase was a real thrill. Congrats all round.
shareThe trouble is I think they spent most of the film's budget on that chase. It is very well done, and as other posters have said, the lack of music actually emphasizes the drama.
Contrast that with the overpowering score, jerky editing* and rear-projection sequences (on the ferry) earlier in the film; it feels almost like a different movie.
* - It may not be a very good print which was shown recently, but still.
Saw this many many years ago on late night tv. You can watch the whole chase on Youtube. It is timeless~~~
share[deleted]
The movie was much better than I expected. Maybe because I thought Sven Bertil Taube, who played the lead, was very good as a cool and handsome action hero. He's otherwise known as a singer in Sweden.
The locations and the supporting cast (Vladek Sheybal! Barbara Parkins! and those young girls) contributed to making this a tight suspenseful movie. It was a bit campy-Bond movie-loke when the villain leaves the hero listening to deafening chimes of clocks!
The boat chase at the end was AMAZING! It would never be allowed to film such scenes in Amsterdam now! Piero Piccionis music was also cool too!
I have been a fan of Sven-Bertil Taube as a singer for many years and somehow had no idea he also acted. After I stumbled upon him playing a Swedish valet in an episode of Upstairs Downstairs I looked him up on IMDB and now I am thrilled to find that I have a whole movie of him to watch! It also sounds like the film is a good one.
shareits funny that the villain kills himself in the end :D
share