Slow Boil

By Frank Rich

WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS OF EUROPE?

Directed by Ted Kotcheff

Screenplay by Peter Stone

The people who cooked up this thrill-less thriller are not entirely incompetent: they have brought Robert Morley back to the screen. In the role of a haughty gourmet-magazine editor, Morley puts on a hilarious show: He pats his gargantuan stomach as lovingly as a child might fondle a stuffed Teddy bear. He raises his bushy eyebrows so high that one expects them to graze the ceiling. He turns the mere act of getting up from lunch into a dainty comic ballet. Ordered by his doctor to lose weight--half his weight--Morley adamantly refuses. "I have eaten my way to the top," he announces in his most imperious manner. "I am a work of art created by the finest chefs in Europe." Robert Morley is indeed a work of art. How nice to find him back in the movies, after too many years spent hawking plane tickets on the tube.

If the people behind Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? were really smart, they would have handed the whole film over to Morley. Unfortunately, they use the actor as an appetizer rather than the main course. About half an hour after the picture begins, Morley surrenders center stage to his romantic costars, Jacqueline Bisset and George Segal; Chefs suddenly ceases to be a jolly satire on the cooking craze and becomes an exception ally talky whodunit. The movie soon dies as ignominiously as its title characters -- drowning in a stew of ketchup-colored blood and rancid red herrings.

Aside from the witty lines he fed Mor ley, Screenwriter Peter Stone has concoct ed a script strewn with terrible puns ("Ban the bombe") and snickering double-entendre gags that make all the tired connections between food and sex. The arbitrary plot about a chef murderer hops from place to place on the slightest whim. It is little more than an excuse for cameo appearances by top European actors (Philippe Noiret, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jean Rochefort) and restaurants (Paris' Tour d' Argent, London's Cafe Royal). The settings are sumptuously photographed by John Alcott (Barry Lyndon), but Ted Kotcheff s direction is lifeless. Were it not for the creepy musical score and endless interrogation scenes, it would be difficult to tell that Chefs is a suspense drama.

Perhaps to compensate for the movie's so-what story, Stone has also tried to fashion a Hepburn-Tracy relationship for his hero and heroine. Bisset is cast as the world's greatest (and probably thinnest) pastry chef, while Segal plays her ex-husband, a fast-food maven whose philan dering broke up the marriage. It is not the actors' fault that they walk through the film with plastic smiles: the characters' debates over the merits of haute cui sine and Big Macs are as predictable as their final reconciliation. Besides, it strains credibility that this couple ever split up in the first place. How could any one married to Bisset even think of car rying on with another woman? It's easier to imagine Morley making a TV pitch for the Scarsdale diet.

-- Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.