The Internecine Project
1974 film by Ken Hughes
The Internecine Project is a 1974 British espionage thriller film directed by Ken Hughes and starring James Coburn and Lee Grant. It was written by Barry Levinson and Jonathan Lynn based on the novel Internecine by Mort W. Elkind.
Plot
Renowned American economist Robert Elliot who is about to be promoted to be a government adviser has also been secretly running a business espionage ring in London with the help of four operatives: corrupt Foreign Office official Alex Hellman, masseur Bert Parsons, sex worker Christina Larsson and scientist David Baker. He is advised to have his operatives killed by E.J. Farnsworth, a businessman who has helped secure Elliot's appointment to prevent them from exposing Elliot's dubious activities. To avoid himself or anyone on the outside being implicated, Elliot devises and carries out a clever plan in which his four former associates will unwittingly kill each other on the same night. He visits each of his associates in turn and convinces each of them that their intended target is about to expose their activities and that they must be killed to ensure their silence.
On the night the murders have been planned for, Elliot keeps track of his operatives' progress by listening for a series of telephone rings that indicate each associate's current location. David leaves for Alex's apartment where he replaces the diabetic Alex's regular insulin supply with a stronger, lethal dose. Despite being delayed in leaving Alex's apartment, he returns home in time to be killed by his own sonic weapon which he had earlier demonstrated to Elliot and which has been planted by Christine on a timer. Christine returns home and Bert enters her apartment with a key given to him by Elliot, and proceeds to strangle Christine to death while she's taking a shower, before placing a fragment of skin Elliot had earlier removed from a corpse under the lifeless Christine's fingernails in order to confuse police pathologists.
The public source identifies “The Internecine Project” as 1974 film by Ken Hughes. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Internecine, Project and film.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Internecine Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.