THE FIXER *

 A miscast Alan Bates is "The Fixer" of the title in John Frankenheimer's film version of Bernard Malamud's novel. Set in Czarist Russia, Bates is the Jewish handyman accused and imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and Dirk Bogarde is the lawyer who does what he can to help him and there's a large, starry cast of mostly British thespians playing various Russians and Jews to the best of their ability or not as the case may be.

It was a prestige production in the MGM tradition of grandiose literary works and you half expect to see Richard Brooks' name on the credits but from Frankenheimer you expect more. In the early sixties he was the wunderkind of the American cinema, turning out exciting and edgy pictures like "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Manchurian Candidate" but this is stodgy and old-fashioned and it hammers its arguments home with very little subtlety, (it was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo). Bogarde goes some way to redeeming it but not far enough.