Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Blu-Ray review

Billion Dollar Brain (1967) is a spy movie directed by Ken Russell, which is certainly an intriguing idea. This is one of the Harry Palmer spy movies starring Michael Caine, based on Len Deighton’s unnamed spy novels, and that makes it even more intriguing.

Not everyone likes this movie. I love it - a Len Deighton story done with Ken Russell visual brilliance just works for me.

Here's my full review.

Cover Girl Models (1975)

Cover Girl Models is another Roger Corman-produced flick shot mostly in the Philippines and directed by the gloriously inept Cirio H. Santiago. It’s part of the Lethal Ladies 2 collection from Shout! Factory, along with the Pam Grier vehicle The Arena and the kung fu stewardess movie Fly Me.

Cover Girl Models follows the usual Corman formula, following the misadventures of three beautiful girls. This time they’re not nurses or stewardesses but models and they’re off to South East Asia for a fashion shoot.

Mark (John Kramer) is a photographer for a magazine that is aimed at liberated women but all Mark wants to know from editor Diane is how much cleavage is required in his photos.

He already has three models lined up but decides he can’t work with one of them. He finds a replacement when his assistant Mandy (Tara Strohmeier) falls into a swimming pool and he notices what’s beneath her wet T-shirt. Along with Claire (Lindsay Bloom) and Barbara (played by Pat Anderson who also appeared in Fly Me) they set off for Hong Kong.

Barbara inadvertently gets mixed up with international spies when microfilm is hidden in the lining of one of her dresses. The spies try to kidnap her but she gets rescued by a Chinese kung fu-fighting travel agent (yes, this is a kung fu cover girl models movie). We tend to suspect that whatever he is he’s probably not a travel agent.

Claire is trying to sweet talk a movie producer to further her film career. She doesn’t actually have a film career but she really wants one.

Mark decides he kinda likes Mandy and he’s going to make her a big-time model, but then she runs into a photographer from a leading Asian fashion magazine who has the same idea. It’s quite possible that Mark is really more interested in getting Mandy into bed than in her potential as a model. He’s that kind of guy.

At some stage just about every female in the movie becomes a target of kidnappers. That seems to be the one big idea that scriptwriter Howard R. Cohen had so whenever he’s not sure what should happen next he throws in a kidnapping attempt.

This is standard Corman fare. There’s some nudity, some humour and an action/mystery sub-plot.

Cirio H. Santiago obviously believed that the art of film directing consisted in getting the camera in focus, which he manages to do most of the time. Well, a lot of the time anyway. Pacing is a concept to which he had apparently never given any thought. The script is thin and not terribly coherent and tends to wander about in circles.

There are spies from at least three different countries and there’s a revolutionary army in there somewhere as else.

At the end we get an extended action sequence which is actually quite decent, with gunplay taking the place of kung fu. The three girls are caught in the middle. They’re no action heroines but they do have a highly developed sense of self-preservation. The plot doesn’t exactly resolve but hey if you have enough shooting the viewer isn’t going to care if all the plot strands are not neatly tied up.

Do the girls find true love? Do their dreams come true? Well, not exactly, but it was a learning experience for them. Who knew that modelling could be so dangerous?

As with Fly Me the movie’s biggest asset is Pat Anderson. She’s gorgeous and likeable and as an actress she’s perfectly adequate for this type of movie.

The transfer is pretty decent if unspectacular. There are no extras.

Cover Girl Models has plenty of flaws. It would be difficult to describe this as a well-made movie but Corman knew his market and made sure that all his movies contained the ingredients that the market demanded. It’s no cinematic masterpiece but if you set your expectations fairly low it’s an acceptable time-waster and the girls are very pretty and if you’re in the mood it’s kinda fun. Worth a look if you’re going to buy the Lethal Ladies 2 collection anyway (The Arena being almost certainly the reason you will buy it).

Matt Helm in The Silencers (1966)

The Silencers, released in 1966, was the first of the Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin. While Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels were serious spy thrillers and were quite dark and very cynical the movies were essentially spy spoofs.

The Silencers starts with a pretty good opening credits strip-tease sequence which establishes the decadent mood rather nicely.

Matt Helm had been a top agent for an American counter-intelligence outfit called ICE. Now he’s a photographer. What he photographs are girls, sometimes with their clothes on. Considering the palatial gadget-filled house in which he lives we assume he’s doing very well. He has no wish to go back to being a secret agent. In fact he’ll do anything to avoid doing that. Then a bodacious blonde tries to kill him and glamorous fellow ICE agent Tina (Dalia Lavi) turns up to save him, then a whole bunch of guy tries to kill him so he figures he’s back to working for ICE whether he likes it or not.

Tina and Matt head for Phoenix where a stripper is killed but before she dies she passes something (a cylinder containing a computer tape) on to the beautiful but accident-prone Gail Hendricks (Stella Stevens). Is Gail an innocent bystander or an enemy agent? Matt and his boss MacDonald (James Gregory) don’t know but they do know they can use Gail. Maybe she’ll lead them to Sam Gunther, a suspected top operative for the nefarious international criminal organisation the Big O. Gail has no desire to help but she isn’t given a choice.

It’s all connected with an underground nuclear test and some missile tests. The Big O and its leader, the sinister Tung-Tze (played by Victor Buono as a kind of chubby Dr Fu Manchu), have some very nasty plans cooked up which you won’t be surprised to hear involve world domination. Gail being so clumsy you don’t expect her to be much use to Matt but she does manage to kill a surprising number of bad guys.

Apart from saving the world Matt has to do a balancing act between Gail and Tina, which is much more difficult.

The climactic action scenes are on a much smaller scale than you’d see in a Bond movie but there’s some fairly satisfying mayhem. The producers were confident enough they were on a winner to include a post-closing credits promo for the next film in the series.

The Matt Helm of the novels might be one of the Good Guys but he’s a cold-blooded assassin entirely without scruples. The Matt Helm of the movies is of course a cheerful irresponsible playboy. Surprisingly some of the personality of the book version is still there in the film. The film Matt Helm can at times be ruthless and manipulative. The movie is basically a spoof but there’s still a vaguely serviceable spy thriller plot and while Dean Martin mostly plays the part for laughs he does have his action hero moments and there are even brief moments when he becomes a no-nonsense secret agent. While he built his successful movie career mainly on comedy as anyone who has seen Rio Bravo can attest Dean Martin could be a very fine dramatic actor when he wanted to be so he handles the action scenes and the very rare serious moments without any difficulty. He has outrageous amounts of breezy charm and charisma and carries off the rôle with a great deal of panache.

Stella Stevens provides plenty of glamour and proves herself to be quite an adept comic actress as well. Gail is hopelessly clumsy. Being clumsy and glamorous at the same time isn’t easy but Stevens manages it with ease. Daliah Lavi adds extra glamour. Roger C. Carmel and Victor Buono ham it up outrageously but delightfully.

The movie keeps some plot elements from the novel but obviously they’re treated in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We are not expected to take this movie the slightest bit seriously. You just have to lie back and enjoy its sense of good-natured fun. The Matt Helm movies were clearly an attempt to cash in on the enormous success of the Bond movies but with the tongue-in-cheek approach much more heavily emphasised.

There was a reasonable amount of money spent on the film (although it’s obviously much much cheaper than a Bond movie), the sets are reasonably sumptuous, the gadgets are amusing and there’s plenty of action. And there are plenty of beautiful women. While Bond got to drive cars like the Aston Martin DB5 Matt Helm has to make do with a station wagon. And if your cover story is that you’re a photographer you’re not going to be able to carry much camera gear around with you in an Aston Martin. Matt doesn’t just drink and drive, he drinks while driving (the station wagon has a bar and a bedroom). Still, the station wagon was a mistake.

I saw this movie on television a decade ago and wasn’t all that impressed but the lousy pan-and-scan print didn’t help. Watching them on DVD (from the Matt Helm Lounge boxed set which includes all four movies) makes a big difference although the transfers aren’t spectacular. And having since seen the other three movies I’ve grown to really appreciate the cinematic version of Matt Helm.

This movie was based (very loosely) on the first and fourth of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels, Death of a Citizen and The Silencers (although mostly on the latter).

While it’s obviously a Bond rip-off it’s closer in tone to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series. The Silencers is silly at times but it’s meant to be. On the whole it’s light-hearted fun. Recommended.

OSS 117 Is Unleashed (1963)

OSS 117 Is Unleashed (OSS 117 se déchaîne, 1963) is part of the very successful French OSS 117 eurospy movie series. The first movie came out in 1956 and there was a long gap before the second film in 1963 (by which time of course the Bond craze was really beginning to gather steam). Six more films were made prior to 1971 (that’s not counting the three recent 21st century entries in the cycle).

OSS 117 Is Unleashed was the first of the two films to star American actor Kerwin Matthews as French super-spy Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, codename OSS 117.

Director André Hunebelle seemed to specialise in action movies in the 60s and he made four of the OSS 117 films.

It’s interesting that the movie features underwater action, two years before the Bond series would follow suit with Thunderball.

American scuba diver William Roos (actually an agent) vanishes on a dive off the coast of Corsica. There are suspicions that the bad guys are building underwater detectors to track nuclear submarines, thus threatening world peace. OSS 117 is sent to investigate. Scuba diving instructor Nicolas Renotte was present at the time Roos met with his unfortunate accident. It’s obvious that Renotte is scared and is lying about the circumstances of the incident so putting pressure on him seems to be a good first move for OSS 117.

There’s a woman mixed up in this as well of course. She’s a Swedish girl named Brigitta (Nadia Sanders) and OSS 117 will have to decide whether he can trust her or not. With glamorous blondes you can never be sure. Meanwhile people keep trying to kill him and those people seem to be trying to kill other people as well.

The point of it all is to find that submarine detector which is almost certainly hidden away in an underwater grotto. And naturally the point is also to stay alive long enough to find it. For Agent OSS 117 romancing various ladies is also a high priority and luckily Corsica seems to be knee-deep in attractive young ladies.

Kerwin Matthews makes an OK hero although he’s no Sean Connery. He was one of the many America actors who headed to Europe when their Hollywood careers failed to live up to their expectations. He did plenty of adventure movies in both Hollywood and Europe so he handles the action scenes well enough. And he has a certain charm. It goes with saying that Agent OSS 117 is very attractive to the female of the species and Matthews is sufficiently good-looking to make that plausible. He just doesn’t have charisma.

Nadia Sanders makes a suitable dangerous blonde. Daniel Emilfork makes a good subsidiary villain but a weakness of the film is that it lacks a sufficiently colourful (or sufficiently sinister) main villain. There’s also Irina Demick as another beautiful but dangerous woman. The producers certainly understood the importance of beautiful women in a spy movie

The Corsican locations look great with some spectacularly rugged coastline. The budget was obviously limited although the villains’ secret underground headquarters with its gadgetry is not too bad.

The pacing is leisurely which is a polite way of saying that this movie is too slow. There are quite a few fight scenes and they’re pretty good but there are long stretches in which very little happens. There’s a lack of spectacular action set-pieces compared to the Bond movies but spectacular action set-pieces tend to cost a lot of money.

The plot at least makes sense and even with various double-crosses going on it’s easy enough to follow.

This film was filmed widescreen in black-and-white. The next entry in the series would switch to colour and Cinemascope.

Kino Lorber have released five of the 1960s OSS 117 movies in both Blu-Ray and DVD boxed sets. Eurospy movies are a bit of a passion of mine and it’s not at all easy to find such films in decent English-friendly versions (mostly you have to watch them in sub-standard pan-and-scan presentations) so having five of these movies all released in their correct aspect ratios is pretty exciting. The transfer for OSS 117 Is Unleashed is pretty good although it is just a bit grainy.

OSS 117 Is Unleashed is an enjoyable eurospy flick and its plot coherence is a bonus. It has its flaws but I’m still going to highly recommend it because I just love eurospy movies.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Blu-Ray review

The Man with the Golden Gun was released in 1974 and it’s not one of the more admired Bond movies. Following a discussion on a recent post here (my review of A View to a Kill) I’ve decided it’s time to revisit this one. The fact that I now own the Blu-Ray release was another reason to do so.

This is the fourth and last of director Guy Hamilton’s four Bond movies, which include Goldfinger, the somewhat underrated Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die.

Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is a legendary assassin who charges a cool million dollars a hit. His trademark (apart from the fact that he’s the very best in his business) is that he always uses golden bullets. Now it appears that his next target is to be James Bond. He admires Bond and killing him will be the ultimate challenge.

Trying to avoid Scaramanga would be futile. He’s simply too good. Bond’s only hope is to find Scaramanga before Scaramanga finds him. He has almost nothing to go on. No photograph of Scaramanga exists. His present whereabouts are unknown. There is no way of knowing the identity of the client who has hired him to kill Bond.

The one hope is a belly dancer in Beirut. She was with 002 when he was killed by Scaramanga. At least it is assumed that Scaramanga was the assassin. Since the bullet was not recovered this supposition was never confirmed. Perhaps that belly dancer knows what happened to the bullet.

Bond’s search takes him to Macau and Hong Kong, then to Thailand and eventually to Scaramanga’s island. With of course plenty of action on the way - a boat chase, a car chase and a pretty decent fight scene pitting Bond against some martial arts experts who are very good, but not quite good enough.

This time Bond has two assistants, a Hong Kong police detective named Hip (Soon-Tek Oh) and a Miss Mary Goodnight, a charming young lady from the British Secret Service. Miss Goodnight manages to get herself captured but she also manages to plant a homing device that will lead Bond to her, and she manages to get hold of the device that is the key to the whole adventure so on the whole she’s not wholly incompetent.

My first impression of this movie is that it’s trying to be a bit more risqué and a little bit more harder-edged than previous Bond movies. There’s an early nude scene with Maud Adams, obscured by a shower door but she’s clearly naked. And Bond then proceeds to slap her around. Interestingly enough this is getting much closer to the Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels than you normally expect in a Bond movie. There are definite touches of sadomasochism in Fleming’s novels (which may have reflected the author’s own sexual tastes). What’s even more interesting is that Roger Moore (a much better actor than he was ever given credit for) is quite convincing as this tougher crueler Bond.

Of course there’s more than a hint of sadism in Scaramanga’s character, especially in the scene where he uses his gun in some sex play with Maud Adams.

While there are of course many comic moments (some provided by the return of Sheriff J.W. Popper from Live and Let Die) this is overall a darker Bond film, with Roger Moore mostly playing things pretty straight. And Scaramanga is not just a Bond villain, he is a brutal and ruthless killer who enjoys killing very much indeed.

One weakness is the lame solar energy plot. You want a Bond villain to be aiming at world domination, not cornering the market on better solar hot water heaters. In fact that’s the major flaw to the movie - it’s just not ambitious enough or outrageous enough or on a big enough scale for a Bond movie. The final duel between 007 and Scaramanga also seems rather abbreviated (although it is a nice echo of the pre-credits sequence).

There are some gadgets (there’s a flying car and there’s the solar energy gun) but mostly the focus is on the duel between Bond and Scaramanga and that’s going to be settled by their respective skills as killers. This is is a movie in which 007’s skills in that department are absolutely central.

Scaramanga’s island hideaway is pretty cool but it’s the only really spectacular set and it’s not on the scale of some of the more outlandish sets in previous movies in the cycle. On the other hand the tilted sets in the capsized Queen Elizabeth (where M has his Hong Kong headquarters) and Scaramanga’s funhouse are clever and imaginative.

There’s certainly no shortage of glamourous ladies in this movie. We get both Maud Adams (as Scaramanga’s girlfriend) and Britt Ekland as British agent Mary Goodnight. Miss Ekland is actually very good, she shows a flair for light comedy and it’s amusing to have a Bond girl who just never seems to actually end up in Bond’s bed. Her generally light-hearted personality contrasts well with Maud Adams’ very serious approach.

If you judge it simply as a spy thriller it’s quite decent, but The Man with the Golden Gun is a bit low-key for a Bond film. This probably explains its relatively poor box office and certainly explains why the producers decided that the next Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, was going to be a much bigger film. It also undoubtedly explains why Roger Moore’s performances in the next couple of films were more extravagant and light-hearted.

What is noticeable about the Roger Moore Bond films is that they’re not only variable in quality but also quite varied in tone and approach. They seem to veer between delirious comic-book extravagance and camp outrageousness on the one hand and attempts to capture the more realistic and slightly dark spy thriller feel of the novels.

Still, you can’t dislike a movie in which Britt Ekland’s bottom plays a crucial part in the plot (almost getting her killed and Bond along with her). The Man with the Golden Gun is enjoyable enough. Recommended.

A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill is the Bond movie everybody hates. There are plenty of people who will tell you it’s the worst of all the Bond films. It does have its problems but actually it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest.

It’s true that Roger Moore was, in his own words, about 400 years too old to be playing the part once again, for the seventh and last time. But he’s still Roger Moore. He still has the charm.

The plot is a stock standard Bond plot. MI6 have discovered that there’s this super-villain planning something really big but they’re not sure exactly what it is. Bond has to find out. To do that he has to get close to the villain by insinuating himself into the villain’s inner circle. Then Bond will conduct a low-level psychological guerrilla war against the villain, getting him angry enough to make a few mistake. Then Bond destroys him and saves the world.

In this case the super villain is (as in so many Bond movies) a crazed industrialist. Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) is obsessed with horse racing, oil wells, computer chips and world domination. He’s the result of a Nazi science experiment intended to produce geniuses. He is a genius but he’s totally unhinged and psychopathic. Bond gets close to him by posing as a possible purchaser of one of Zorin’s super horses (also the result of an experiment by a crazy Nazi scientist).

On this case, unusually, Bond is given a sidekick. The fun part is that the sidekick is played by Patrick Macnee, posing as Bond’s chauffeur/valet. Macnee was even older than Moore but they make an amusing and effective team.

The biggest problem with this movie is that at 131 minutes it’s much too long. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the first half of the movie except that there’s too much of it and it’s too slow. At about the halfway point the pacing picks up dramatically, the plot starts to become more interesting and we get some pretty decent action sequences. The fire engine chase is particularly good and the action climax with the blimp is justly famous. The taxi chase early on is also terrific.

Peter Lamont was art director or production designer on most of the Bond movies from the early 70s up to the first decade of the 21st century. He could always be relied upon and does his usual fine job here. So A View to a Kill looks good.

Christopher Walken is an interesting Bond villain. He’s definitely creepy although perhaps he needed to make Zorin a bit more larger-than-life. Tanya Roberts as the Bond girl has been much criticised. I don’t know why. She’s not much of an actress but she does what she needs to do, which mainly consists of looking terrific (which she does extremely well) and getting rescued by Bond. As far as the cast is concerned the standout is Grace Jones as May Day, Zorin’s girlfriend and chief henchwoman. She looks bizarre, crazy and scary which is obviously why she was picked for the rôle. She’s actually much scarier and more sinister than Zorin.

The pre-credits action scene with the infamous snowboarding to the sounds of a cover version of California Girls has been accused of excessive silliness. It is silly, but silliness and campiness were things that you just have to accept in Bond films of this era. What’s interesting (and very pleasing) is that once that sequence is out of the way the silliness and campiness disappear and the rest of the movie has a slightly serious if mildly tongue-in-cheek tone that is closer to classic Bond.

Mention should be made of Duran Duran’s pretty good title song which also hits the right tone for a proper Bond movie.

If you compare it to another much-disliked Bond movie, the lamentable Die Another Day, which I reviewed here recently then A View to a Kill doesn’t seem too bad. At least, unlike Die Another Day, it feels like a proper Bond movie.

With a bit of tightening up in the first half and with a bit more energy and enthusiasm from Moore and Walken this could have been a very good Bond movie.

Die Another Day (2002)

Die Another Day was the last of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies and the first 21st century Bond movie. You might think it would be impossible to make a Bond movie in the 21st century. Watching this movie would strongly suggest that you’re right.

Interestingly enough in this movie the pre-credits sequence in which Bond is causing mayhem in North Korea is actually part of the main plot, or at least it is an important prologue to the main plot. Bond is captured and spends fourteen months in a North Korean prison. When he is released he finds that MI6 no longer trusts him and no longer wants him. He isn’t pleased about this and he goes rogue. He is convinced that he was betrayed by a mole inside MI6 and he wants revenge. The trail initially leads him to Havana, to a secret medical clinic. He encounters Kickass Action Heroine Jinx (Halle Berry). But to track down the mole he will have to go to to London. There he runs into the villain of the piece, supercilious upper-class business tycoon Gustave Grimes, and he will follow him to his ice palace in Iceland. Lots of action ensues.

It’s probably fair to deal with the film’s strengths first. The action scenes are spectacular. Some are a bit silly but a touch of self-parody in the action scenes has been par for the course in Bond movies since the 70s so that’s no great problem. The highlight of the movie is the sword-fighting scene between Bond and the villain. Sword-fights are the oldest of all action movie clichés but this one has an extraordinary intensity and physicality that makes the cliché seem fresh. The hovercraft battle is original and exciting.

There are enough explosions and gun battles to satisfy any reasonable person.

Some of the gadgets are also on the slightly silly side, like the camouflaged Aston Martin, but again it’s no problem since this is expected in a Bond film.

The sets, by Peter Lamont, are generally superb. Any Bond Villain worth his salt has to have a cool secret headquarters and the ice palace qualifies nicely (and it’s used to excellent effect). The mysterious clinic and the secret MI6 headquarters are terrific as well.

Gustav Grimes is a very serviceable Bond Villain. Toby Stephens plays him as an arrogant public school bully and he puts plenty of enthusiasm into his performance. John Cleese is fun as Q.

They’re the good things in Die Another Day.

Now we come to the problems. Firstly, the CGI effects are not good. The scenes on the aircraft at the end could have been fun but they look very very fake. The space scenes look cheap and fake. The disappearing Aston Martin provokes laughter rather than wonder.

Not one but two Kickass Action Heroines have been added to assist Bond, champion fencer and MI6 agent Miranda Frost and Jinx. Jinx threatens to take over the film. Now the essence of the Bond character is that he’s a loner. He works alone because nobody can work with him. He’s not a team player. He’s a loose cannon. MI6 tolerates him, reluctantly, because he gets results.

There is a standard Bond formula. We know who the villain is right from the start. MI6 knows as well. Bond’s invariable approach is to get close to the villain (whether the villain likes it or not) and get right up his nose. Put as much pressure on the villain as possible and sooner or later he’ll make a mistake and Bond will destroy him. To do all this Bond neither needs nor wants a sidekick. All the Jinx character manages to do is distract us from the plot, slow things down (and it’s a movie that is already way too long) and shift the focus away from Bond. She’s a completely unnecessary character and she serves no plot purpose whatsoever.

It doesn’t help that Halle Berry and Rosamund Pike (as Miranda) are rather dull and their characters are uninteresting. Actually that’s probably just as well since Pierce Brosnan’s performance is bland and colourless. His Bond seems old and tired. Brosnan was nearly 50 when he made this movie. Of course Roger Moore was much older (and fatter) when he was still playing Bond but Moore had style and charisma and an unparalleled ability to make dialogue sparkle. Brosnan sadly lacks these qualities.

One thing that’s amusing is that this is a movie that is trying desperately hard to be feminist but it’s actually the most sexist Bond movie I’ve ever seen. There’s not a single female character in the film. The ostensible female characters (Miranda, Jinx and M) are simply male characters who happen to be played by actresses. If you replaced Halle Berry, Rosamund Pike and Judi Dench with male actors you wouldn’t need to make any changes to the dialogue or the plot or the characterisations. All you’d have to do is eliminate the very unconvincing love scenes that seem out of place anyway. The message of the film seems to be that women are awesome as long as they behave exactly like men.

The movie’s political stance is interesting. The Chinese and the Cubans are the good guys. The American contempt for the British is startling. It’s made very clear that M takes her orders from Washington, not London. In fact from watching this movie you wouldn’t know that Britain had a government. MI6 is a provincial branch office of the CIA. Of course even in Ian Fleming’s 1950s Bond novels there’s a good deal of resentment towards the Americans and bitterness at Britain’s irrelevance in the postwar world but you don’t expect quite so much anti-Americanism in a 2002 Bond movie.

The big problem is that in this movie James Bond is no longer James Bond. The character has been watered down to the point where there’s nothing left. He’s been made safe and innocuous and inoffensive. He could be an accountant enjoying a holiday in exotic climes, or be working behind the counter at a chemist’s shop in the High Street. He doesn’t seem the least bit dangerous. You could take him home to meet your Mum. This is Bond made politically correct. And a politically correct Bond is not Bond.

Die Another Day is not in any way, shape or form a Bond movie.

Death Trip (1967)

Death Trip (Kommissar X - Drei grüne Hunde) is one of the very successful series of seven Kommissar X europspy movies made between 1965 and 1971. Death Trip was a West German-Italian-French-Hungarian-Lebanese co-production!

It was shot partly on location in Istanbul and released in 1967.

The Kommissar X movies followed the adventures of American private eye Joe Walker (Tony Kendall) and New York cop Tom Rowland (Brad Harris) who were continually getting mixed up in spy capers. There’s never a plausible explanation for their involvement in the world of espionage but if you’re looking for things to have plausible explanations then the eurospy genre is probably not for you anyway.

This time Tom Rowland has been assigned to transport a million dollars’ worth of LSD to an American military base in Europe, LSD being supposedly seen as a key chemical weapon (and in fact the C.I.A. did have a murky involvement with LSD in the 60s). A gang called the Green Hounds wants to steal the LSD.

Naturally Joe will end up getting drugged with LSD. Naturally he will get mixed up with a series of glamorous women at least one of whom will be beautiful but evil. Naturally the non-evil girls will be kidnapped by the bad guys. Naturally there will be narrow escapes from certain death, and quite a few fistfights and quite a bit of gunplay.

Joe has the coöperation of the Turkish police but he’s under pressure from the U.S. military to retrieve the LSD no matter what the cost.

There’s a good chase over the rooftops in Istanbul, and there are some atmospheric dungeon scenes. There are also rats to be dealt with. Actual rats. Hundreds of them.

One of the major assets of the Kommissar X series is Tony Kendall. That’s not to say that Joe Walker is a well-rounded three-dimensional character. He isn’t. He’s a comic-book hero but he’s great fun and Kendall plays him with charm and panache. Walker is very similar in style to Lemmy Caution, the hero of a terrific series of French crime/spy thrillers like Dames Don’t Care. The darkly handsome Kendall (who was actually Italian) is physically poles apart from the gravel-voiced weatherbeaten Eddie Constantine of Lemmy Caution fame but Walker has the same sublime self-confidence, the same cheerful arrogance, the same keen interest in the female of the species and the same tendency to jump into a fight with both fists.

Tom Rowland is more of a straight arrow type and he makes a good foil for the impetuous maverick Walker.

There’s an interesting attempt to link the Green Hounds to events in the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century.

LSD doesn’t play as much of a röle as you might expect. It’s mostly used as a McGuffin. There are no attempts at elaborate acid-trip scenes. Which is just as well since eurospy movies are pretty psychedelic even without actual psychedelic drugs.

Istanbul was up until the 70s a favourite location for spy stories. It has that East meets West ambience, it’s exotic and it’s a very photogenic city. The Valley of a Thousand Hills is also pretty cool. The Turkish locations are used to great advantage.

Rudolf Zehetgruber wrote snd directed the movie and also plays an important supporting role. He does a pretty fair job in all three capacities.

The supporting cast is generally adequate. The girls were obviously cast mostly for their looks, but their looks are nothing to complain about.

The Sinister Cinema DVD-R offers a badly washed out print although it is mostly in the correct aspect ratio. I believe that most of the Kommissar X films have been released in Germany in much better editions although I’m not entirely sure if they include English subtitles or the English dubbed versions (some sources say that they do).

The English dubbing is reasonably well done.

Death Trip is a pretty good entry in the Kommissar X series and it’s a more than decent eurospy flick.

You might also be interested in my reviews of other Kommissar X films - Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick (1966), So Darling, So Deadly (1966) and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (1966).

The Quiller Memorandum (1966)

The 1960s produced the Bond movies which of course spawned countless imitators. The 1960s also produced the phenomenon of the anti-Bond movies - movies that were a deliberate reaction against the Bond films, movies that tried to be dark and edgy and cynical and non-glamorous and that generally took themselves pretty seriously. They were aiming at being Serious Cinema, as distinct from mere entertainment. A few of them, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, succeeded. Others did not. One spy movie of this period that definitely falls into the anti-Bond camp is the Anglo-American co-production The Quiller Memorandum, made in 1966. 

Quiller (George Segal) works for the British Secret Service. Two top British agents have been killed in West Berlin and Quiller has now been assigned to take their place. They were investigating a neo-Nazi organisation.

Quiller meets a pretty young German school teacher, Inge Lindt (Senta Berger). One of the other teachers at her school has recently been arrested for being a Nazi so Quiller assumes the school must be a hot-bed of neo-Nazi activity (although why he would assume that is difficult to comprehend). Sure enough Inge knows all about the neo-Nazis and tells Quiller she can introduce him to someone who can tell him where their secret base is. Quiller quickly manages to get himself captured without finding out anything and is drugged in an attempt to get him to tell the neo-Nazis where the British have their secret base. At this point you might be thinking that this sounds like a pretty lame plot, but it gets worse.

Quiller and Inge fall in love. Quiller manages to get himself captured once again. This time he thinks he’s found the secret base but now he has to find a way to get the information to his controller.

That’s about all there is to the plot. Many spy movies of this era fall into the trap of over-complicating things with so many plot twists that it becomes difficult for even the most alert viewer to keep track of what is going on. The Quiller Memorandum has the opposite problem. It has no plot twists at all. Well OK, it has one, which is supposed to be a big shock but it’s unfortunately rather obvious and not much of a shock at all.

The screenplay was written by Harold Pinter. Pinter was a much-admired playwright who wrote a lot of screenplays. Unfortunately being a playwright does not necessarily make one a good screenwriter and Pinter’s films can be rather talky. The Quiller Memorandum suffers from this defect. It is also abundantly clear that Pinter had very little understanding of the spy genre. One can’t help suspecting that he despised the genre and was deliberately trying to make this not just an anti-Bond movie but an anti-spy movie. The result is a dull and uninteresting screenplay.

Director Michael Anderson also seemed keen to avoid falling into the trap of making an entertaining action movie. There are a few token action scenes, most of them very low-key. The intention was presumably to rely on suspense and on an atmosphere of paranoia but it doesn’t really come off. The street scenes late in the film with Quiller being shadowed by hordes of bad guys is the one scene where the paranoia does start to work.

One of the movie’s faults is that these dreaded neo-Nazis don’t seem very menacing. We’re never given any hint of what their master plan is. They don’t appear to have any master plan. They don’t seem to be very important people. They don’t appear to be holding vital posts in government or the armed forces or big business. Maybe they just get together once a week to drink beer and sing the Horst Wessel song. They seem rather futile and silly. They’re not even efficient thugs. Quiller is the most incompetent movie spy in history but they are even less competent. Since we have no idea of who they really are or what they are really up to it’s hard to feel any particular paranoia about them. And without any effective paranoia the movie is left with a thin uninteresting plot and virtually no action.

George Segal was a bizarre choice to play Quiller. His constant wise-cracking is at odds with the otherwise serious tone of the film. There’s no psychological interest in the character. He’s just mildly irritating. Senta Berger is a dull leading lady although her part is so underwritten there was very little she could have done.

There’s a star-studded supporting cast, all of them wasted on two-dimensional characters. Alec Guinness does provide at least some interest as Quiller’s cynical controller. Max von Sydow is the chief bad guy, a cardboard cut-out Nazi villain who doesn’t do anything villainous enough to be really interesting. George Sanders and Robert Helpmann play minor characters who play no actual part in the story. 

The characters are, without exception, lacking in depth or complexity or ambiguity and it is impossible to care what happens to any of them. Pinter may have thought he was being deep (or perhaps he thought he was being wry and offbeat) but he has only succeeded in being pretentiousness and tedious.

The movie goes for a film noir-influenced look with lots of night scenes and a very subdued and rather grungy colour palette. This works extremely well and does convey an effectively sordid and seedy feel. The scenes in the deserted indoor swimming pool complex and the neo-Nazis’ secret headquarters look genuinely menacing. The location shooting is great and the sets are great. The visuals almost succeed in achieving the paranoia that the screenplay fails to deliver.

Fox’s Region 1 DVD release offers a decent anamorphic transfer plus an audio commentary.

The Quiller Memorandum looks quite impressively atmospheric but it fails to generate any real interest. Pinter’s screenplay doesn’t work and the characters are flat and lifeless. Anderson’s directing has its moments. Possibly worth a rental if you’re an Alec Guinness completist but I can’t really recommend this one. 

Black Dragons (1942)

Black Dragons, released in 1942, was the third of Bela Lugosi’s Monogram pictures produced by Sam Katzman and it’s a slightly unusual spy thriller with (of course) some sinister overtones. And it gives Lugosi the chance to play dual roles.

The story deals with a ring of Japanese Fifth Columnists in the US just after the outbreak of war. They’re not actually Japanese - they’re American traitors working for Japan. In 1942 this was just the sort of thing audiences would have gone for, Fifth Columnists being a popular subject in low-budget potboilers at the time.

Lugosi plays Dr Colomb, a mysterious figure who seems to be taking an interest in this subversive organisation, although it’s not a sympathetic interest. The members of the espionage ring start getting bumped off one by one with a Japanese dagger left at the scene of each murder.

Dr Colomb has moved himself into the home of a Dr Saunders. The doctor’s niece Alice (Joan Barclay)  isn’t quite sure what to make of him. She’s a bit frightened of him but not as frightened as you might expect.

All the murder victims were guests at a dinner party held at Dr Saunders’ home, the purpose dinner party being to advance the plans of the Fifth Columnists to wreck the US war effort. Many of their plans focus on fomenting strikes to disrupt war production although out-and-sabotage is also on the agenda.

Dick Martin (Clayton Moore) is a handsome young US counter-espionage agent assigned to investigate the case, his method being to romance Alice Saunders in order to find out exactly what is happening at the home of Dr Saunders.

Lugosi had made a big impact in White Zombie in 1932 with extreme close-ups of his eyes being used to emphasise his hypnotic powers. A similar (although slightly less effective) technique is used here. Sinister hypnotic powers were something that Lugosi was supremely good at suggesting. He also manages to convey a somewhat ambiguous tone. We assume that (being Lugosi) he’s the villain but he appears to be extreme hostility to the other villains. He’s in fine form, which is just as well since he has to carry the movie pretty much single-handedly.

The other cast members range from adequate to embarrassingly wooden although Joan Barclay isn’t too bad.

Director William Nigh was an incredibly prolific B-movie director, uninspired but competent enough and he at least keeps the pacing pleasingly taut. Writer Harvey Gates had a career that followed much the same pattern - prolific but without notable distinction. His screenplay does at least have quite a few interesting touches.

The plot takes a definite turn towards the outrageous in the latter part of the film as the unexpected truth is revealed about the spy ring, and about Dr Colomb.

The movie tries hard to convey an atmosphere of breathless excitement and succeeds reasonably well, within its B-movie limitations.

This movie is in the public domain. The Elstree Hill DVD offers a transfer that is unimpressive but watchable (and marginally better than Alpha Video standards). The sound is the big problem - it’s uneven and muffled. Alpha Video have also released this one. Black Dragons might not be a great film but it’s interesting enough to deserve better treatment on DVD.

Black Dragons is an enjoyable espionage-themed potboiler with a few definite touches of horror. If you’re a fan of sinister hypnotist movies or a Lugosi fan, or even just a fan of slightly offbeat 1940s spy B-movies, it’s worth a look. Highly recommended. 

Where the Spies Are (1966)

Where the Spies Are is a lighthearted British spy film that doesn’t seem quite sure just how seriously it wants to be taken. With David Niven as the star you’re likely to be expect this one to be a bit more of a spoof than it actually is.

A British spy named Rosser has disappeared in Beirut. Fearing the worst the chief of MI6, MacGillivray (John le Mesurier), knows he has to send out someone to find out what has happened to his vanished agent. The problem is that with budget cut-backs he simply doesn’t have a real agent available. He is going to have to send someone from the B List - non-professionals who have from time to time done small jobs for British intelligence agencies. Since there’s a malaria conference about to take place in Beirut a doctor would be ideal (he’d have a fairly convincing cover story) and there just happens to be a doctor on that B List. He’s Dr Jason Love (David Niven), a country GP with a passion for 1930s American Cord automobiles (he already owns a supercharged 1937 Cord 812). Dr Love had helped MacGillivray on a case way back in 1943 but these days he has no interest in playing spy games. 

There is only one thing that might tempt him - he has a burning desire to own a Cord LeBaron. And MacGillivray offers to find one for him, if he will just do this very simple task for MI6.

Dr Love manages to find his contact in Rome, a fashion model named Vikki (Françoise Dorléac), and Dr Love starts to think this espionage business might be quite fun after all. That is, until he realises someone is trying to kill him.

Rosser had obviously stumbled upon a sinister conspiracy and now Dr Jason Love is caught in the middle of it. Due to the budget cut-backs at MI6 alluded to earlier he has only one agent to assist him. Parkington (Nigel Davenport) is willing enough to help but he’s tired and in poor health and to tell the truth he’s not exactly what you might call a secret agent of the top grade. Dr Love does however have one other ally - Farouk (Eric Pohlmann), who happens to be a fellow member of the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Car Club, in fact he’s the Lebanon’s only member of the club. Farouk is certainly willing to take a few risks to help a man who owns a 1937 Cord 812.

At 56 David Niven was perhaps a little too old for this type of movie but his charm and his inimitable sense of style carries him through without too much trouble. Françoise Dorléac makes a suitably glamorous lady spy. The very strong supporting cast of veteran British character actors helps a good deal.

There is a bit of a problem though with the romance angle, with the 24-year-old Françoise Dorléac being a somewhat incongruous romantic partner for the 56-year-old Niven.

Exotic locations were obligatory for 1960s spy movies and location shooting was done in Beirut (at that time considered to be one of the more cosmopolitan and glamorous parts of the Middle East). The budget didn’t run to the sorts of spectacular stunts that you get in a Bond movie so it has to rely more on wit and charm.

The problem is that this is not quite a full-blown spoof. At times it seems to be heading into fairly serious dark spy movie territory while at other times the tone is much lighter. The biggest problem is that while the plot is perfectly decent it just isn’t outrageous enough.

This film has little in common with spy spoofs like the Matt Helm and Derek Flint movies or the British mid-60s Bulldog Drummond films. The tone is closer to the more subtle and gentle mildly tongue-in-cheek humour of a movie like North by Northwest (although unfortunately it isn’t anywhere near in the same league as Hitchcock’s movie).

Director and co-writer Val Guest proved himself to be pretty competent in most genres but this film possibly could have worked better with a more extravagant approach.

Where the Spies Are was based on the first of James Leasor’s Dr Jason Love spy thrillers, Passport to Oblivion. Leasor was also the author of The Boarding Party which provided the basis for the wonderful 1980 action adventure movie The Sea Wolves (which coincidentally also starred David Niven).

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD offers a good anamorphic transfer (the film was shot in the Cinemascope aspect ratio). The colours look reasonably impressive.

Where the Spies Are is modestly entertaining although it’s certainly one of the lesser 1960s spy movies. If you’re a keen David Niven fan or a 60s spy film completist it’s worth a rental.