Salt & Pepper

Directed by Richard Donner, Salt & Pepper follows 1960s nightclub owners Charles Salt (Sammy Davis Jr.) and Christopher Pepper (Peter Lawford) as they inadvertently stumble on a plot to overthrow the British government – with the film, for the most part, subsequently detailing the pair’s incompetent yet dogged efforts at preventing the bad guys from executing their sinister plan. There’s little doubt that Salt & Pepper predominantly comes off as a hopelessly dated product of its time, as Donner, working from Michael Pertwee’s screenplay, has infused the proceedings with many of the attributes that one has come to expect from certain films of the ’60s (including swinging dialogue and sets that are beyond gaudy). The chemistry between Davis Jr. and Lawford’s respective characters initially plays an instrumental role in compensating for the relentlessly innocuous nature of Pertwee’s script, with the inclusion of a few genuinely hilarious bits of comedy heightening the movie’s effortlessly easy-going vibe. (There is, for example, a laugh-out-loud funny scene in which Salt grabs something from his dressing-room closet, heads to the stage, begins saying something, and then realizes that there was a dead body in there.) It’s only as Salt & Pepper segues into its increasingly action-packed second half that the film begins to lose its tenuous hold on the viewer, as Donner’s decision to flood the proceedings with a series of underwhelming set-pieces (eg Salt and Pepper are pursued by gun-toting thugs, Salt and Pepper must fight their way off a submarine, etc) ensures that the whole thing peters out long before it reaches its larger-than-life climax – which cements the movie’s place as a time-capsule curiosity that’s long-since lost whatever relevance it once had.

*1/2 out of ****