YOU CAN’T WIN ‘EM ALL, or ‘When Titles Are Apt’, as in the case of this 1970 turkey, set in…Turkey.  Take the oddball combination of Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson. Add a beautiful and popular French actress and a handsome, popular Turkish actor. Shoot on ruggedly scenic locations in Turkey, load it with noisy action scenes featuring mobs of extras, horses, ships, trains and airplanes and use the rogues-doing-right-by-a-cause frame that worked on a number of decent adventures like Vera Cruz, Santiago and Bandido. What could go wrong?  Uh…script? direction? editing? score? Minor details.

1922,  the Ottoman Empire falls into the hole it dug in history. Turkey, at the end of a four year war with Greece (right after the folly of WW1) is a ripe field of fire for soldiers of fortune. Glib hustler ‘Adam Dyer’ (Curtis) joins grudging forces with sardonic ‘Josh Corey’ (Bronson) ,who leads a team of mercenaries aiming to profit from the power vacuum. They link up with gorgeous ‘Aila’ (Michèle Mercier) and engage with a sly Turkish colonel. Between the various double & triple crosses someone should have smuggled in an abacus off the Silk Road to tally the body count. Brawls, skirmishes, ambushes, boarding party battles, bombing raids and enough machine gun fire to shame the Western Front are showcased between gouts of smarm, bravado and treachery. Toss in gold and jewels.

Peter Collinson scored with the breezy action of The Italian Job, so someone figured he was prime to direct something bigger— a tongue-in-cheek period piece with ample firepower. Character heavy Leo Gordon sidelined playing menacing thugs with scripts for film and TV: he’d had a reasonable success with the WW2 flick Tobruk. He has a supporting role as one of Bronson’s crew, handled proficiently, but his screenplay is too complicated, the dialogue sophomoric, and frankly, picking a subject as nasty as the Greco-Turkish War for a comic book adventure feels less like a swipe at historical insight and more like cheap thrills mined from verified misery. The production scale is impressive, yet the action scenes, while busy, are far-fetched (we imagine teenagers of the day would’ve been okay with it), the editing is jerky and the score from Bert Kaempfert (Bert Kaempfert! the LP easy-listening guy?) doesn’t just sell (lousy title tune as well).

Curtis walks thru smirking. At 45, he’d slipped in the mid-60s; following a solid hit with 1968’s The Boston Strangler he drew a string of wankers like this. Bronson, 49, had suddenly zoomed as a star in Europe; in 1970 he knocked out this and four more pictures. True, Rider On The Rain, Lola, Violent City/The Family and Cold Sweat were nothing to jump up and cheer over but they boosted his profile abroad. The beautiful Michèle Mercier, 31, who’d won Euro fame in a quintet of ‘Angelique’ adventures between 1964-68, is certainly easy on the eyes. So is the scenery along the coast and in the wilds of Cappadocia about 200 miles from Istanbul.

Among the inordinate number of lousy movies released in 1970, this one was so weak at the box office it didn’t even make the list: we can’t find dough info anywhere. Well, they did whip up a cool poster anyway, another example where the ad art is better than the subject; lest we forget Custer Of The West and Krakatoa, East Of Java).

100 minutes, with Fikret Hakan (36, a big star in Turkey), Patrick Magee, Gregoire Aslan, Jorst Janson and Tony Bonner. Buffs who know their 60’s European dubbing pros will recognize the voices of Nikki Van der Zyl, Robert Rietty and Paul Stassino.

Curtis v. Collins: “The country, the people, were fabulous. The thing that did us in was the very shoddy British production set up. They promised certain things on location and didn’t provide them. There were inadequate sanitary conditions: people got sick. The director, Peter Collinson? I have no comment about Mr Collinson. Some day I’ll tell you about him.”

Bronson v. Collinson: “…can only work in a fraught atmosphere, whipping up everyone against everyone else. This is awful. It was an awful experience for me making You Can’t Win ‘Em All….In this case the responsibility for the film’s failure lies with the director. As for Curtis, he is one of those gifted actors who needs a good director to bring out the best of him on film. And this film, which I have not seen and never will see, needed a director more than anything else….It is not necessary to cheat. People pay to see me, to see Tony Curtis, and instead they get shit. It really isn’t honest. I do not like Mr. Collinson. When you sign a contract and agree to do a film, you see it through to the end and do the best you can.”