Leofwine_draca POPPIES ARE ALSO FLOWERS is a surprisingly decent little international thriller made in the Bond mould - Ian Fleming wrote it and Terence Young was even called in to direct. The film's progeny is of interest, given that it was a propaganda piece made by the United Nations to show off their abilities. E.G. Marshall and Trevor Howard play a pair of UN investigators hoping to stop an opium smuggling gang operating out of Iran, and their detection leads them to a number of slippery customers based around the world. I only know of Marshall through his roles in the likes of CREEPSHOW, so it was a surprise to see him playing an action hero here and even more of a surprise that he makes a decent stab of it. There's not a wealth of action but the train-set climax more than makes up for that with some great fight scenes. The film is well worth a watch for Bond fans looking for a pseudo-enterprise in the same mould, and an endless array of both international and Hollywood stars keeps you involved in the story: Yul Brynner, Jack Hawkins, Hugh Griffith, Anthony Quayle, Eli Wallach and even Rita Hayworth all show up to good effect here.

Dario Smagata This movie was produced by the United Nations. That's about all you really need to know. The UN has slipped up many times in history, and rarely seems to accomplish its goals, something this movie embodies perfectly. Watch it and you'll know exactly what I mean.The movie centers around a strange plan to contaminate a large shipment of opium poppies with radioactivity, so that as the drug is refined and circulated around the world, agents can track the radioactivity and see where the opium from this particular source is going. The goal of these agents is to figure out who is involved in the opium trade so that they can be arrested and the drug trade ended.Following the setup of this scheme, which takes quite awhile, the movie follows two of the agents around the world as they follow the radioactive opium, meeting a variety of people who are involved in the drug trade in one way or another. There is some fighting and spy stuff, but none of it manages to be exciting.The film's climax takes place on a train, where the agents and the bad guys face off. One agent is killed, which comes as a shock as he's been there throughout the whole movie, but it doesn't matter much as the other agent still catches the drug kingpin, and the movie quickly ends.The whole thing is narrated by Princess Grace (of Monaco), but many versions cut this out to make it feel more like a normal movie. Unfortunately, that leaves the viewer with no explanation of where anything is taking place! Even with the narration intact, this is a terrible movie and despite its obvious anti-drug stance, it does very little to actually show why drugs are bad. You will be far too bored by this movie to care about its moral.The best part of this movie is a totally pointless 3-minute scene where Trini Lopez performs "La Bamba" in full in a nightclub. Throughout the song, he keeps begging the audience to let him leave the stage so he can catch a flight! Even he didn't want to be in this. I wonder if he got paid the token $1 like everyone else in the movie (!) or if he was just performing in whatever nightclub they decided to shoot the scene in...?

bkoganbing Poppies Are Also Flowers is an all star amalgamation of two previous films on the narcotics trade. Sharp eyed fans of the cinema will spot plot elements from those two Forties era films, To The Ends Of The Earth and Port of New York. Of course both those films were infinitely better.Still a whole bunch of international stars lent their names and got a fat paycheck for this muddled episodic film which tries to make E.G. Marshall an action star. Talk about ridiculous.Best in the film by far are Yul Brynner as an Iranian general and Rita Hayworth as the dope addicted wife of Gilbert Roland who is one of the villains. Roland plays it rather straight and that ever present twinkle that I love in him is missing. The filming was done on actual locations including some of the harder to reach regions of Iran. Of course that was back in the day of the Shah's pro-western government and you can see photographs of the Shah in some of the shots. I also liked Hugh Griffith as I always do with those wild eyes of his, the wildest this side of Jack Elam. Griffith just dusts off his Sheik Ilderim portrayal from Ben-Hur and hams it up to beat the band. There wasn't much else the man could do, he knew he was in a Thanksgiving special.

Vigilante-407 Let's face it...whenever you get this many stars in one place the end result is gonna be really bad. And this is no exception.I know this film was made by the UN to help bolster efforts to stop drug trafficking and abuse...I know the most of the stars worked for scale to cut down costs. But it looks like only Trevor Howard remembered that "working for scale" still means "working"...i.e., acting. Yul Brynner is, well, Yul Brynner. He doesn't have to act...he only has two characters in his repertoire anyway (enjoyable though those characters may be).It was interesting to see E.G. Marshall as the hero of the piece though...one of the few interesting points to the film.One major part of the premise was that the UN forces tagged a shipment of opium with radioactivity to track it. Now this radioactivity was measurable at a distance of several miles at times, so one has to wonder what would happen if it got away from them and got to the junkies...hoards of radioactive heroin addicts...ack.