LISBON. Republic Pictures, 1956. Ray Milland, Maureen O’Hara, Claude Rains, Yvonne Furneaux, Francis Lederer, Jay Novello. Director: Ray Milland.

   It takes more than a big name cast to make a movie that’s worth watching, and here’s a case in point. All the action in this “action adventure” movie, which is how I’ve categorized it, takes place in stretch of time less than five minutes long in the last ten minutes of this ninety minute movie. Blink (or more likely, doze off) and you’ve missed it.

   The rest of the story consists of talking, talking and more talking — but in the fanciest rooms and eating places in Lisbon — and taking tours of the city with the characters cheerfully pointing out to each other various points of interest. The string-laden orchestration by Nelson Riddle in the background is (to my ears) both annoying and badly timed.

   The story is this: Maureen O’Hara wants to pay Claude Rains (a gentleman crook of the best sense of both words) to facilitate the release of her much older (and very wealthy) husband from behind the Iron Curtain. Rains, in turn, hires Ray Milland (a smuggler of high fashion perfumes) and his boat to assist in the transfer at sea.

   There’s a little bit of dounle-crossing and ulterior motives at work all around here, including Milland’s attraction to both Maureen O’Hara and Yvonne Furneaux (as Rains’ “secretary”), but there’s nothing here that needs 90 minutes of running time. If you’d like to see a travelogue of the city of Lisbon in 1956, I’m sure you can do better in that regard as well.