It's an easy-going, mildly entertaining mystery, the solution of which is given before the ending. The mystery itself could have been cooked up by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle as a neat Sherlock Holmes short story. This one is rather dragged out. There's a subplot involving a French businessman and Dana Wynters that has nothing to do with the main story. Some of the Reveals are telegraphed ahead of time. Holmes could have solved the whole thing in a few hours over three pipes of shag.

That doesn't matter. It's kind of relaxing and enjoyable. I mean, here are all these famous faces hidden behind rubber masks, sometimes with dubbed voices. The only one we can consistently recognize from beginning to end is Kirk Douglas. (That nose! That chin!) Well, that's not entirely true. In an epilogue, Robert Mitchum struggles manfully to remove his makeup and when he's through he looks almost exactly as he did before. Some mysteries are easier to solve than others.

No need to go on about the plot. I will bet my riding breeches that whoever wrote the script had read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" not long before.

However, here are John Huston and a lot of megastars of the time having a vacation in Ireland. (Not the only Huston vacation, to be sure.) Few of the megastars appear in the same shot. That's because -- well, it works this way. You hire, say, Burt Lancaster for a week. No more than that because he's expensive. And you shoot all his scenes in a few days. Then you do the same with, say, Frank Sinatra. By featuring them all in short and separate scenes, you wind up with more cameos for your buck.

The lead is George C. Scott, with a reasonable British accent, at least to untutored ears. The unnecessary French friend may have added some appeal for French audiences. Kirk Douglas has a more substantial supporting role as the head heavy, and Robert Mitchum is on screen several times as a drunken scoundrel.

The director, John Huston, had an estate in Ireland at the time and rode in exaltation to the hounds in fox hunts. Fox hunts -- "The unspeakable after the inedible," commented Oscar Wilde.

Yet I have this vision of them all having drinks and dinner at Huston's country place. And Huston getting to his feet at the end of a long evening and suggesting they all start half an hour later tomorrow. To him, at least in my vision, this is what "Donovan's Reef" was to John Ford. And the disguised cameos are kind of fun, even after you know who's who.

This is one of those mysteries where a talented amateur (George C. Scott) slowly unravels what the police (despite having all the resources) can't seem to figure out.

Anthony Gethryn is a friend of the family of the Eark of Glenyre (Colin Brook). One of the cousins of the Earl's current heir (his grandson) is Adrian Messenger (John Merrivale) who is an author. Messenger has been working on what he calls a mystery plot, which he mentions vaguely, but with some ill-ease, to Gethryn. It seems he has been tracing a series of people he (Messenger) knew who have mostly died in grotesquely horrible accidents. He promises to tell Gethryn about it, but he has to take an air flight on business. Earlier we saw an odd looking religious man handing in a package that was supposed to go on the plane. Naturally the plane blows up killing most of the passengers and crew. But a badly injured (actually dying) Messenger tells the surviving passenger (Jacques Roux - Raoul Le Borg) a message for Gethryn. It is a long disjointed message, and Gethryn does get it after Roux is picked up (by then the sole survivor of the bombed plane).

Gethryn slowly works out the message on a set of blackboards with the assistance of the recovered Roux and Lady Jocelyn (Dana Wynter) and Sir Wilfred Lucas (Herbert Marshall). Gradually he realizes that the list of names are of men who were prisoners of war with Messenger, and that they and others were betrayed by another man who will kill anyone who is in his way to claim a large estate.

The gimmick of this film (which makes it a guessing game, but also ruins the mystery to some extent) was to guess who were the celebrities in cameo roles in this film. The five celebrities were Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Curtis. In the case of Lancaster, Mitchum, Sinatra, and Curtis the disguises are not too bad (although Mitchum bone structure is a dead give-away. But Douglas (and I am not ruining the story to say this) is in four disguises, and like Mitchum it is just too difficult to hide his bone structure. One of his disguises, by the way, looks like Dr. Hawley Crippen.

Despite the gimmick taking one's attention away from the actual mystery, the film is a good one, well directed by John Huston (who has a cameo here as well, as does his son), and has some nice countryside photography - particularly of the final fox hunt. It is a decently made, above average mystery.

Adrian Messenger as played by John Merivale asks a friend George C. Scott to look up 12 names quite unofficially to see if these people are all still fogging mirrors. Right after that Merivale is killed in a plane crash that was caused by a bomb. That list becomes the key to finding his murderers as Scott and plane crash survivor Jacques Roux go on the hunt.

The List of Adrian Messenger is a nice murder mystery of the type that the British do so well. Had it not been for the gimmick of the heavily make-up laden stars playing bit roles except in two cases the film might well have stood on its own merits of well executed plot and good acting. Except for George C. Scott, like Gregory Peck in The Paradine Case he drifts in and out of an affected English accent.

Three of the stars, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, and Burt Lancaster have small walk-on parts. I'm also reasonably sure that both Lancaster and Sinatra's voices were dubbed. Robert Mitchum has a small role as one of the names on The List of Adrian Messenger. He plays a cockney war veteran who was with Merivale in a prisoner of war camp in the Burma Theater of World War II. John Huston would have been foolish indeed not to have taken advantage of Mitchum's uncanny gift for speech mimicry. It's the POW camp and what happened there that's the reason for all this homicide.

The villain is Kirk Douglas and we see him in several disguises. Douglas was the co-producer of The List of Adrian Messenger so he gave himself the villain's role. Although he precipitated both a train wreck and a plane crash to get two of his victims, he's by no means mad. He's got a very well thought out plan and he comes close to completing it.

I agree with everyone else who has said that John Huston took this particular film assignment so he good indulge in fox hunting and get paid for it. He was living in Ireland at the time and the fox hunting scenes were shot there. In fact it's a fox hunt that is the climatic scene of the film. Douglas almost gets away with a final murder, but a well trained gypsy horse and a bloodhound foil the villain at the end.

Clive Brook came out of a 20 year retirement to play the Marquess of Gleneyre and his daughter-in-law is played by the beautiful Dana Wynter who always graces any film she's in. Herbert Marshall is the MI5 man who was Scott's superior in war time and Huston cast as the young heir to the Gleneyre title and Douglas's last potential victim with his son Walter Anthony Huston. All look quite comfortable in their roles.

The List of Adrian Messenger is a short film for an A feature. It moves effortlessly and pleasantly and will be good entertainment. And personally I think you'll like guessing who and where the walk-ons are.