The Liquidator (1965 film)

The Liquidator
Original UK quad cinema poster featuring Richard Willams artwork
Directed by	Jack Cardiff
Produced by	Leslie Elliot Jon Pennington
Written by	Peter Yeldham John Gardner (novel)
Starring	Rod Taylor Trevor Howard Jill St. John John Le Mesurier Akim Tamiroff
Music by	Lalo Schifrin
Cinematography	Edward Scaife
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1965, original) Warner Bros. (2012, DVD)
Release date	November 1965 (UK)
Running time	105 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Box office	$1,175,000 (est. US/ Canada rentals) 23,498 admissions (France)

The Liquidator is a 1965 British thriller film starring Rod Taylor as Brian "Boysie" Oakes, Trevor Howard, and Jill St. John. It was based on the first of a series of Boysie Oakes novels by John Gardner, The Liquidator. The film follows the 1964 novel closely. Due to a legal dispute, the film's original November 1965 release was delayed to the end of 1966, by which time the spy film craze was waning.

In 1944 during World War II, tank corps Sergeant "Boysie" Oakes (Rod Taylor) stumbles and unwittingly shoots and kills two men attempting to assassinate British Intelligence Major Mostyn (Trevor Howard) in Paris. Mostyn mistakenly believes Oakes was lethal on purpose.

Twenty years later, Mostyn (now a colonel in British Intelligence) and his boss (Wilfred Hyde-White) are in trouble due to a series of embarrassing security disasters. To save his job, the chief orders Mostyn to hire an assassin to illegally eliminate security leaks without official authorisation. Mostyn recruits Boysie into the Secret Service without first telling him what his employment will entail, luring him in with a lavish apartment and a fancy car. After Boysie passes a training course, Mostyn informs him that his code name is "L", and that it stands for liquidator. Unable to resign and not a killer himself, Boysie secretly hires a freelance professional assassin (Eric Sykes) to do the dirty work.

Things go well until Oakes persuades Mostyn's secretary Iris (Jill St. John) to spend the weekend with him on the Côte d'Azur, though Mostyn has warned him that any contact between spies and civilian employees is a serious criminal offence. Boysie is captured by enemy agents led by Sheriek (Akim Tamiroff), who firmly believes he is on assignment and wants to know who the target is. However, Sheriek's superior, Chekhov (John Le Mesurier), is coldly furious that he has gone beyond his orders to merely watch Boysie, thus endangering a much more important operation. He has Sheriek arrange for Boysie to escape.