THE CORRUPT ONES aka The Peking Medallion was described by star Robert Stack as “a derring-do, hidden treasure stinker”, a 1967 cowpie he did for the dough and out of admiration for another film done by its director. One of the era’s countless thrown-together thrillers with multiple European backers and American or Hollywood-turned international performers it was a co-production junket (West German, French, Italian) shot in Germany and Hong Kong. Dusty Springfield sings the title song, which is kinda cool in a retro-flashback way: too bad the rest of the movie belongs in the catbox.

“We’re…we’re in Red China! Run for it! Come on!”

The plot is hard to describe not because it’s impenetrable, but because it’s so boring, tacky and unbelievable that you forget—let alone care—what it’s about while watching. Simply, freelance American photographer ‘Cliff Wilder’ (Stack, in a stacked deck), working out of Hong Kong, comes in possession of an artifact, the “fabled” kind. For reasons involving greed and national pride, various parties want the bauble. They will torture and kill to get it.

Stack gets sliced by a sword, dragged around a harbor behind a speedboat and takes part in a half-dozen violent fights. He also makes instant time with every dame in the cast. Considering a couple of them are Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan he cannot be faulted in that regard. Their agents can be blamed, however, for getting them all signed on to such a piece of junk. The terrible script comes by way of Brian Clemens (Station Six-Sahara, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, The Watcher In The Woods); it’s extra lame because it’s not loaded with bad-funny dialogue, just remarkably lazy and flat, and the constant turnabouts—who’s really good or bad and why—are cartoonish. If cartoons include torture with blowtorch and acid drips.

James Hill had directed the neat Sherlock Holmes entry A Study In Terror and the smash hit Born Free (the one Stack liked, as did everyone–how do you not like Born Free?) but he nose-dived on this assignment, whose chief attribute is some closeups of the flawless complexions of Sommer, 27, and Kwan, 28, performing professionally in yet another example of how, after strong starts, their profession wasted them in one dud after another. Also on hand are Werner Peters and Christian Marquand.  Sommer, Peters and Marquand all spoke English, yet they’re all dubbed. Note the ineptitude of platoons of Red Chinese marksmen—Mao would be pissed.

Tripe barely eked $200,000 in the States, an embarrassing 172nd place. Bob Stack (his autobio is a fun read) tanked even worse that year with another foreign knockoff, Action Man, ranked 176th. Sommer fared slightly better with Deadlier Than The Male. The Internet Movie Database in its Trivia section for the film notes “Robert Stack takes his shirt off in this movie’. For the record 1967 also let fly with The Cool Ones and The Violent Ones. 

With Heidy Bohlen (kaput in the picture below) and Maria Minh. 93 minutes you’ll wish you hoarded for something else.