YouTube suggested this film to me, and when I looked up a synopsis, it sounded fairly interesting. A man asks a favour of a friend who is ex-MI5: here is a list, of ten men, living in various parts of Great Britain, nothing seemingly to tie them together, no similar occupation, no similar background, nothing. But find them , ask each of them if all is well, whether they’re still living at the addresses given in the list.

The important word here being ‘living’. Because, when the friend—Anthony Gethryn (George C Scott) sets about tracking down the men, it doesn’t take him along to find out that most of the men on the list are already dead, killed in accidents over the past five years. They couldn’t really be accidents, could they?

Very interesting. Rather like And Then There Were None (which, by the way, is referred to more than once in the course of The List of Adrian Messenger). I decided this was a film I had to watch.

When the credits began to roll, I sat up, because suddenly here were familiar names, one after another. Tony Curtis. Robert Mitchum. Burt Lancaster. Kirk Douglas. Frank Sinatra. Why on earth hadn’t I heard of this film before, I wondered. Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, especially, are among my favourites, and even if I haven’t seen all their films, I am mostly at least aware of many of the films they worked in. And one that seemed like such a casting coup? How come I hadn’t known about this?