The Prize

Guests arriving in Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony check into a hotel. Andrew Craig, who is to receive the literature prize, has not written anything good in years and spends his time drinking and arguing with anyone who takes an interest. At the hotel he sees the professor collecting the physics prize and decides something is wrong: the man is not behaving like the person he knows. Nobody believes him, because he is drunk all the time. The film turns the Nobel ceremony into a spy thriller along a classic line of suspicion: nobody believes the hero, and the hero is not a reliable witness. The most quoted passage has Craig fleeing his pursuers half-dressed into a meeting of naturists. Mark Robson directed, from a screenplay by Ernest Lehman based on Irving Wallace's novel. Paul Newman plays Craig, Edward G. Robinson the professor and Elke Sommer the woman. Lehman had written North by Northwest for Hitchcock, and the construction here plainly resembles it: mistaken identity, the man nobody believes, chases through crowded places. Who it is for: anyone who likes sixties star-cast thrillers and Paul Newman. Who it is not for: anyone looking for plausibility. The plot leans on coincidence, the running time is long, and the Hitchcock resemblance works against the film.