The Prize

Andrew Craig, an American novelist whose serious literary reputation has given way to pulp detective writing, arrives in Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in Literature. He drinks heavily and pursues women, and the Swedish authorities assign him a companion to keep him in line. Among the other laureates is the physics prizewinner Dr. Max Stratman, whose behaviour strikes Craig as strange. Craig comes to believe that Stratman is not the man he claims to be and that an impostor has taken his place. His suspicions pull him and his minder into a kidnapping plot set against Cold War tensions. The police dismiss his story as the fantasy of a drunkard, leaving Craig and Inger, the official assigned to watch him, to pursue the matter themselves as their relationship shifts from supervision to romance.

The film was directed by Mark Robson, the ninth of the thirteen features he directed in chronological order, arriving between The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and Von Ryan's Express. Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay, and Pandro S. Berman produced for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Roxbury Productions. Paul Newman plays Craig, with Edward G. Robinson as Max Stratman, Elke Sommer as Inger Lisa Andersson, Diane Baker, Micheline Presle and Gérard Oury among the thirty-two credited cast members.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.8 from around 5,800 votes, and on TMDB 6.7 from roughly 119 votes. A critics' rating of 5.3 from eleven reviews places it below both audience scores.