Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

With exotic food providing the ground-bass imagery, it is only fitting that the film's one funny line should be delivered by walk-on Mr Chow, restaurateur to the rich and famous. The rest is a heavy plough through all the familiar routes along which comedy-thrillers frequently get lost: travelogue backdrops of Venice, Paris and London, gourmet Robert Morley doing battle with super-Wildean courage against unspeakable lines, a plot involving the methodical extinction of European chefs in various nasty ways (Noiret in a duck-press), and a level of joking which never exceeds puns on Bombe Surprise. Saddest of all is Segal's vulgarity, unleavened by his usually strong sense of irony. The only funny thing about all this is why Robert Aldrich was at one time interested in directing it. CPea.