Director John Frankenheimer reached a high point in the early-to-mid Sixties with such films as Birdman of Alcatraz. The Manchurian Candidate and The Train. But The Fixer is a worthy attempt to adapt Bernard Malamud's novel (set in turn-of-the-century Czarist Russia), focusing on the imprisonment of a Jew following a search for scapegoats for the nation's unrest. There are fine performances from a roster of splendid actors, headed by Alan Bates (as the Jew) and Dirk Bogarde (as the sympathetic lawyer), that also includes Georgia Brown, Hugh Griffith, Ian Holm, David Warner, Murray Melvin and Peter Jeffrey. What is lacking is a sense of ensemble, so that the film loses pace and its hold on the attention. And composer Maurice Doctor Zhivago Jarre returns to things Russian with a disastrously saccharine effect.

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