December 29, 1978 | Brass Target is fool’s gold.

This lethargic copy of Day of the Jackal spins a fantastic yarn about a plot by corrupt US Army officers to kill Gen. George S. Patton shortly after World War II. The plotters are worried that Patton, played with unconvincing swagger by George Kennedy, will uncover their duplicity in a $250-million gold theft that left over two dozen American soldiers dead. The poor soldiers were knocked out by gas, a fate akin to that which may befall anyone trying to stay awake during this plodding claptrap.

Brass Target is slick, to be sure, but it’s also so lifelessly directed by John Hough, and so unimaginatively scripted by Alvin Boretz, that it lacks even the giddy excitement of an outrageously bad movie. It’s so formulaic, so paint-by-the-numbers, that after a while you start wondering why you didn’t wait to watch it on Home Box Office, where it surely will be in a few months, or on network television, where it no doubt will be by next December. Seeing this film isn’t disappointing or annoying – it’s numbing.

This is the sort of routinely acted TV-movie-style tripe in which two villains are depicted as gay merely to provide them with some kind of distinguishing characteristics. A woman (Sophia Loren) appears in a few scenes only to provide a feminine name in the credits. And the assassin (Max Von Sydow, more or less reprising his Three Days of the Condor character) makes a lot of smug comments to the hero (John Cassavetes) about how silly morality is. Patrick McGoohan hams it up briefly as a colorful cynic, but his character winds up dead all too soon.

At the end, Cassavetes pieces together the assassination plot, finds the murder weapon – a gun used to break Patton’s back with a rubber bullet – and polishes off the bad guys. Then the movie just ends. The closing credits reveal that Patton’s death was officially listed as the result of a car accident, and the $250 million in gold was never recovered. My guess is, Cassavetes decided to keep the gold and Sophia Loren, and never mind about who killed Patton. That sounds cynical, I admit, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in Brass Target.