Casino Royale (1954 teleplay)

There have been several attempts to bring Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, to the screen. The 1967 attempt was of course one of the most epic trainwrecks in movie history. The first attempt however was an American television production which went to air in October 1954. It was an episode of the Climax anthology series.

It has huge huge problems but these were not necessarily entirely the fault of the people who made this teleplay.

This was live television. All we have is a crude kinescope recording. Being live means it’s very studio-bound. Live television dramas were shot entirely on two or three sets. And the sets had to be simple. There was no way to do live TV any other way. Very early television, from the late 40s and early 50s, is extraordinarily clunky and stodgy mostly due to the extreme limitations of the technology. If you want an example, try watching Racket Squad (1951-53). If you can endure it.

But progress was rapid. Within a year or two of this teleplay’s broadcast TV was becoming much more assured and much more polished. Series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents (which premiered in 1955), Maverick (premiered 1957) and M Squad (premiered 1957) represent a staggering quantum leap from series like Climax.

There was no way to do exciting action scenes on live TV so the action in Casino Royale is very limp.

The other thing to consider is that in 1954 Ian Fleming and James Bond were totally unknown in the United States. Only one Bond novel had been published in the US at that stage and sales were miserable. Even in Britain Bond was still far from being a pop culture icon. In the US nobody had heard of James Bond. So it’s not surprising that in this adaptation he’s an American named Jimmy Bond (played by an American actor) and he’s a totally conventional American screen tough guy.

There is almost no mention at all of espionage. The villain, Le Chiffre, could just as easily have been a regular gangster. Bond could have been an FBI agent.

This is Casino Royale done as third-rate stock-standard hardboiled crime. It just doesn’t feel like a real spy thriller.

The glamorous deadly and sexy Vesper Lynd from the novel is nowhere to be seen. She is replaced by a dull colourless good girl heroine, Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian). Casino Royale without Vesper Lynd is like Double Indemnity without Phyllis Dietrichsen.

All that’s left from the novel is the confrontation between Bond and Le Chiffre at the gaming tables, and a very sanitised version of the scene in which Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre.

The gambling scene is done reasonably well. It’s the kind of scene that could be made to work on live television. Having Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre certainly helps.

Bond’s CIA contact Felix Leiter becomes a British agent, Clarence Leiter (played by Australian Michael Pate).

It’s hard to judge the acting because you always have to remember that this is all done within the constraints of live TV. And in 1954 actors were vaguely aware that TV acting was not like either stage or film acting but they hadn’t yet quite figured out the right approach. It’s amazing to see such entertaining actors as Peter Lorre and Michael Pate coming across as slightly stodgy.

Barry Nelson as Bond is terrible. You have to make allowance for the fact that he’s not actually playing Bond as Bond, he’s playing Bond as a generic American tough guy cop type. But he’s still very dull.

Anything recorded on kinescope (the predecessor to videotape) is going to look rough and this teleplay does indeed look rough. It was apparently thought to be lost fir many years until a copy turned up in the 80s.

Unless you’re a Peter Lorre completist or a Bond completist there’s no particular reason to watch this one. It doesn’t feel even remotely like a Bond thriller.

Casino Royale (1967)

The 1967 Casino Royale is an object lesson in how to create a cinematic disaster.

The movie came about because Eon Productions owned the rights to all the Bond novels, apart from the first. For complicated reasons producer Charles K. Feldman owned the rights to Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale. He knew he wanted to make it into a movie. He had no idea how to do so. He never did figure it out.

It ended up with ten writers and five directors. Five directors at the same time, each directing part of the movie.

Feldman initially thought of doing a straight Bond movie. Then he decided to make it a spoof.

David Niven had been under consideration for the role of Bond in the late 50s. Feldman persuaded him to take the role in Casino Royale. Then he decided it would be cool to have Peter Sellers play the role. So they both play Bond. So we get a crazy scheme to have lots of Bonds. Not because it was a cool or clever idea but because the movie had already become a chaotic mess with nobody have the slightest idea what they were doing and none of the people involved in the movie making any attempt to co-ordinate their wildly differing ideas.

Then Feldman started adding lots of Bond girls. There are no less than three lady super-spies, played by Deborah Kerr, Ursula Andress and Joanna Pettet. Plus we have Miss Moneypenny’s daughter (Barbara Bouchet) playing at being a lady super-spy as well.

We have two diabolical criminal masterminds, played by Orson Welles and Woody Allen, Yes, Woody Allen. Neither of these diabolical criminal masterminds has any actual master plan. That’s because the movie has no actual plot. It has no plot at all.

There were some very good spy spoof movies made during the 60s and what they all have in common is that they have actual spy movie plots. The humour comes from taking a spy movie plot and then playing it for laughs. But you need a plot. If you have an actual spy plot you can extract lots of humour from it. Without that all you have is a bunch of comedy sketches thrown together for no reason at all, which is what Casino Royale is. Which is why Casino Royale is so much less funny than the other 60s spy spoofs.

If you have a plot and you have characters you can extract more humour from the interactions between the characters, especially between the hero and the sexy lady spy and between the hero and the super-villain. Casino Royale is so overloaded with stars and characters that none of the characters is developed sufficiently to bring out their comedic potentials. The interactions are not funny because the characters are not characters, they’re just random actors speaking lines to each other for no discernible reason.

If you’re aiming for comedy it helps to have some decent gags. There’s not a single truly funny moment in this film.

This film relies on being zany, crazy, outrageous and madcap. But it manages to be zany, crazy, outrageous and madcap without actually being funny.

Then there’s the Peter Sellers factor. I have to put it on record that I have never thought Peter Sellers was funny but here he’s particularly feeble. Every single scene in which he appears would have worked better had it been played by David Niven.

There really are just too many unnecessary characters. One diabolical criminal mastermind is enough. Orson Welles could have been a very fine and very amusing tongue-in-cheek Bond Villain but he needed to be given more scope for evil plotting. Woody Allen is one villain too many and he seems to belong to a totally different movie and being a villain is not the kind of role that plays to his comic strengths. There’s probably one too many lady super-spies and they all belong in different movies.

This movie has some huge flaws but it does have a few major strengths. The cinematography, the production design and the costumes are stunning and delightfully extravagant and fun. I love the spy school that looks like it’s straight out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

I love this film’s extreme artificiality. At times, visually at least, it does achieve a wonderful wild surreal comic-book feel. It looks totally amazing.

A major asset is Ursula Andress. She speaks with her own voice here. She was dubbed in her earlier movies. She has a strong accent but it makes her an even sexier lady spy. She’s enormous fun when she’s being seductive and she projects stupendous amounts of glamour. Her costumes are bizarre but magnificent.

Look out for Alexandra Bastedo and Jacqueline Bisset in bit parts (Bisset plays Miss Goodthighs).

For all its many and egregious flaws Casino Royale is worth a look if you enjoy spectacular but morbidly fascinating cinematic trainwrecks.

I’ve reviewed lots of 60s spy spoofs including Deadlier Than the Male (1967), The President’s Analyst (1967), the Matt Helm movies - Murderers’ Row (1966), Matt Helm in The Silencers (1966), The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969), the Derek Flint movies Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967) and the absolutely delightful Hot Enough for June (Agent 8¾, 1964). These are all examples of totally successful spy spoofs.

Casino Royale came out a year after Modesty Blaise (1966), which suffers from some of the same problems, having been made by a director, Joseph Losey, who did not have a clue what he was doing. Modesty Blaise, like Casino Royale, was aiming for a psychedelic vibe but misses the mark.

Scorpio (1973)

When people talk of 1970s paranoia movies they often neglect to mention Michael Winner’s Scorpio but as well as being a spy thriller it has as much paranoia as the heart could desire.

At the beginning of Scorpio we are introduced to Jean Laurier (Alain Delon). He’s a hitman known as Scorpio. He’s a freelancer but he does a lot of jobs for a particularly sinister organisation. No, not the Mob. They at least have some ethics. He does jobs for a much more sinister outfit who have no ethics at all - the CIA. Scorpio often works with a CIA agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster).

Scorpio opens with the CIA assassinating a Middle East political leader. He’s an American ally but the US Government feels he would be a more useful asset dead. The assassin was Scorpio, working with Cross.

Scorpio had another mission which he failed to carry out. Now the CIA wants that job done. This begins a whole complicated series of events involving possible betrayals and possible double-crosses and lies and manipulations and conflicted loyalties.

Cross is now running. He’s been marked for death by the CIA but Cross is a very clever agent. Catching him and killing him will be immensely difficult and dangerous. You’d need someone as good as Cross. Scorpio is as good as Cross. Maybe.

But there are plenty of twists, and plenty of unanswered questions. Why does the CIA want Cross dead? What is the exact nature of the relationship between Cross and KGB agent Zharkov? They are friends, but strange friendships sometimes do exist between spies on opposite sides. It doesn’t mean Cross has sold out to the KGB, but it might mean that.

Another major unanswered question involves Scorpio’s motivations and intentions. Scorpio is not CIA. He’s a freelancer. Can the CIA trust Scorpio? Can Scorpio trust the CIA. None of the players in this game know if they can trust anyone, and the CIA don’t know if they can trust any of the players, even the guys who are supposedly working for them.

This is not a James Bond-style spy movie. It’s much closer in mood and spirit to the dark cynical pessimistic world of spy movies based on books by writers like John le Carré and Len Deighton - movies like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Ipcress File. The main difference is that Scorpio does also include some great action set-pieces.

It’s interesting that Scorpio loves cats, which I assume is a nod to the first great movie about a hitman, This Gun For Hire (1942).

Casting Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the two spies was an interesting decision. Two actors with plenty of star power and charisma but sharply contrasting styles. Lancaster had a tendency to give flamboyant larger-than-life performances. Delon was always super-cool, giving very controlled subtle minimalist performances. Both actors were good at playing dangerous men but they did so in totally different ways. They complement each other perfectly.

Winner is a much reviled director. I suspect he’s mostly reviled because people disapprove so strongly of his monster 1974 hit Death Wish (and they invariably disapprove of Death Wish without actually understanding it). My impression is that a lot of people approach a Winner film in such a prejudiced state of mind that they decide it’s junk before they’ve even watched it.

Scorpio has some very definite affinities with Winner’s excellent 1972 The Mechanic (1972). In both movies there’s an older hitman acting as mentor to a younger assassin. In both cases the relationship is complex. Both movies deal with betrayal. In The Mechanic there’s a single level of betrayal whereas in Scorpio it’s like peeling an onion - you just keep finding new layers of duplicity and betrayal. There are double-crosses and triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses.

To try to pick holes in the plot is to miss the point. To criticise the movie on the grounds that the character’s motivations are insufficiently developed is also to miss the point.

As far as this movie is concerned the world of espionage is a world of meaningless futility.

It is all pointless. It’s just a game. There is no actual objective to the game. The only objective is to strengthen your own position by weakening someone else’s. It’s like a football match in which no player cares whether his team wins or loses.

The purpose of the CIA is to increase the power and influence of the CIA at the expense of other agencies such as the FBI (the CIA guys in this movie regard the FBI as a dangerous enemy.) The characters are all aiming to advance their own interests. The CIA chief McLeod (John Colicos) aims to maintain his position and perhaps move up another run on the ladder. The objective is his subordinate Filchock (J.D. Cannon) is to take over McLeod’s job. Scorpio is an outsider. He’s just a contractor. He wants to become an insider. Then he too will have power. Cross was an idealist once but now he has no idea what his aims are, other than survival. He is amused by the fact that his KGB opposite number, Zharkov, still has beliefs.

What’s interesting is that nobody knows or cares what the case is about. Some secrets were exchanged. Nobody cares what they were. They’re just poker chips.

The CIA are definitely the bad guys but they’re not so much evil as just totally amoral. The characters have no clear motivations because they believe in nothing but the game.

Scorpio is not a meaningless movie. It’s an intelligent provocative movie about the meaningless empty world of espionage. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Winner’s best-known movies, Death Wish (1974) and The Mechanic (1972). You can see certain common themes running through both these movies and through Scorpio as well.

The Deadly Affair (1967)

The Deadly Affair is a 1967 British spy thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, although given that it’s based on a John le Carré novel (his first novel, Call for the Dead) thriller might be the wrong word. Let’s just call it a spy film.

Paramount’s 1965 adaptation of le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been much praised, and rightly so. Both movies tried to capture the distinctive le Carré atmosphere of failure and sordidness. John le Carré removed every trace of glamour from the spy fiction genre.

Call for the Dead was the novel that introduced le Carré’s most famous character, British spymaster George Smiley. Columbia had bought the rights to Call for the Dead but they did not have the rights to the George Smiley name so in this movie the character is renamed Charles Dobbs.

Dobbs/Smiley (who presumably works for MI5) has been given a very routine assignment. A senior Foreign Office functionary, Samuel Fennan, has been anonymously accused of having being a communist at Oxford in the 30s. Fennan points out that everybody at Oxford was a communist at that time and that half the current British Cabinet are ex-communists. Dobbs and Fennan have a laugh about this, it’s all very friendly, Dobbs assures Fennan that his security clearance is in no danger and that he has no need to worry. Fennan seems very cheerful. He then goes home and shoots himself.

Dobbs is mystified. He had given Fennan a clean bill of health. Why on earth would the fellow shoot himself? Now Dobbs has to speak with Fennan’s widow Elsa.

It’s the phone call that worries him. The early morning reminder call. The timing is odd, and why did Elsa Fennen lie about it?

Helping him out on the case is Inspector Mendel (Harry Andrews), the MI5 liaison officer with the local police.

And there’s something else worrying Dobbs. He’s being tailed. When someone tries to kill him he gets really interested.

The novel is a very good story but it’s not exactly cinematic and it’s rather talky. Attempts have been made to address that issue in the movie and to add a bit more excitement, with at least some success although it’s still very talky.

No-one will ever equal Alec Guinness’s performances as Smiley in the two BBC TV mini-series from 1979 and 1982 but I have to say that James Mason runs him a close second. Mason gets across Smiley’s ineptness in his personal life and his fussiness. Mason’s version has perhaps just a bit more edge. What makes the George Smiley of the novels so interesting is that he is a brilliant intelligence agent but outside of his professional life as a spy he is a total zero, a ludicrous failure, a man with no self-respect whatsoever. He’s not even a tragic failure. He wallows in his own humiliation and degradation. Presumably that’s how le Carré saw spies. Having been a spy himself he was presumably aware of their crippling psychological incompleteness.

Harry Andrews is excellent, as always. Roy Kinnear is very good as a sleazy pretty crook.

The women are more of a problem. Both the novel (not so much this novel but the George Smiley novels as a whole) and the movie put a lot of emphasis on Dobbs/Smiley’s sad pathetic personal life. Since their marriage his wife Ann has had more affairs than he’s had hot dinners. She sleeps with his friends and colleagues and in fact with any man who asks her. She is a thoroughly unpleasant woman, not because she’s promiscuous but because she enjoys humiliating her husband. He seems to enjoy being humiliated. You could call it a relationship based on emotional sadomasochism.

Dobbs/Smiley’s personal life is important since it emphasises the unhealthiness of the world of espionage. No-one who is psychologically or emotional healthy would become a spy. Harriet Andersson makes Ann Dobbs a very very unsympathetic character, which is the right way to play her. Unfortunately her performance is stilted and artificial and totally unconvincing.

Simone Signoret is all self-pity as Elsa Fennan. The one actress who really shines is Lynn Redgrave as Virgin Bumpus (yes, that’s her name). Virgin works in a theatre and may be able to give Dobbs some information. Lynn Redgrave is charming, ditzy and crazy but she does add a lighter touch which doesn’t hurt in an otherwise very serious and grim movie.

The major plot twist is something you should be able to see coming a mile away, which is a definite weakness in the storytelling.

It’s interesting that while le Carré depicted espionage as unglamorous and often nasty and was aware of the moral dubiousness of the spy world he was also a dedicated Cold Warrior. For le Carré the communists were most definitely the bad guys. And as pathetic and contemptible as Smiley might have been he was one of the good guys. You don’t get quite the same level of moral equivalence that you get in the Callan TV series which was also made in 1967.

This is a movie that was clearly intended to look drab and depressing and claustrophobic. It would have worked much much better in black-and-white but sadly by 1967 that was no longer a commercially viable option. Lumet wanted to shoot in black-and-white, was overruled by Columbia and asked cinematographer Freddie Young to come up with a way of shooting in colour but with much of the colour drained out. Which Young did, very successfully.

The Deadly Affair got very good reviews and did very poorly at the box office. It’s easy to see why. The film has very real virtues. The drab depressing visual style is totally appropriate for le Carré’s world. The downbeat mood and the atmosphere of despair and defeat are also appropriate. There’s also the emphasis on moral complexities rather than action. These are all things that critics would love and audiences would hate. And it has none of the elements audiences would crave. There’s not a single full-blooded action set-piece.

Most of all there’s no memorable leading lady. Harriet Andersson was a darling of the art-house crowd but totally unknown outside Sweden. She’s not glamorous, she’s not sexy (she’s the most unsexy nymphomaniac in history), she’s not charismatic. She was uncomfortable acting in English. Her performance is confused and unconvincing. Call me crazy if you like but I can’t help thinking that the right actress to play Ann would have been Joan Collins. If you watch Joan Collins in Warning Shot, made a year earlier, I think you’ll see what I mean. And The Deadly Affair desperately needed some glamour and some erotic heat to balance the downbeat stuff if it was going to draw in audiences.

I think The Deadly Affair is pretty good and I recommend it but it was always going to be box-office poison.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray looks pretty good.

I reviewed John le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead not too long ago (and I was very impressed by it).

Blue Panther (1965)

Claude Chabrol’s Blue Panther (the original title is Marie-Chantal contre Dr Kha) is a lighthearted 1965 eurospy romp, or at least that’s what you might assume.

It opens with a murder on a train heading for Switzerland. Then Bruno Kerrien (Roger Hanin), who claims to be an advertising man, meets Hubert de Ronsac (François Moro-Giafferi) and his pretty cousin Marie-Chantal (Marie Laforêt) in the dining car. Bruno gets jumpy when he realises he is being watched. He asks Marie-Chantal to do him a favour. He wants her to hold on to a piece of jewellery for him for a day or two. The jewel is a blue panther with ruby eyes.

Marie-Chantal senses some kind of intrigue here and that sounds like fun so she agrees.

Later on the ski slopes she encounters reporter who tells her he is in Switzerland in pursuit of a story about international espionage. She guesses that the blue panther is involved.

There are all sorts of shady characters at the hotel. And pretty soon there’s a murder. And Marie-Chantal makes a dying man a promise.

She now realises that she’s playing a dangerous game but she’s kind of excited. At least having people chasing you and tying to kill you isn’t boring.

The Blue Panther is of course the movie’s McGuffin. Marie-Chantal has no idea what its significance is and neither does the audience. But there’s a bewildering assortment of people who want that jewel. Some might be good guys but we figure that most are bad guys and there’s no way of knowing which are which. There are two Soviet agents, one of whom is a young boy. He’s the boss. There’s a guy who could be a CIA assassin. Another guy might be working for an African terrorist organisation. And there’s the mysterious Dr Kha, presumably a diabolical criminal mastermind.

Plus there’s Olga (Stéphane Audran). She could be working for Dr Kha or she could be a freelancer. And Paco (Francisco Rabal). We have no idea what his affiliation might be. He seems like a good guy but it would be dangerous to jump to conclusions.

Luckily Marie-Chantal is a judo expert. She also seems comfortable with handguns. As innocent bystanders caught up accidentally in espionage go she’s pretty competent. She’s a smart girl - she’s suspicious of everybody. She never panics. She’s breezily confident that she can outsmart all these spies. She behaves as if getting caught in the middle of a web of espionage is just one of those things that a sophisticated girl should be able to handle. And the spies find themselves having to dance to her tune.

Marie Laforêt really dominates the movie in an effortless fashion. It’s an odd detached performance but it’s intriguing.

This is a strange movie. It seems on the surface to belong to the eurospy genre but it doesn’t really. It’s more like Chabrol was embarrassed by having to make such a movie so he decided to approach it in an off-kilter mocking sort of way. It never develops the energy or the sense of fun that you expect in a eurospy movie. There is some violence but there are no action set-pieces. There’s no suspense. It’s the sort of movie you’d get if you asked an intellectual who despises spy movies to make a spy movie.

Chabrol was associated with the Nouvelle Vague and this movie has all the flaws that one associates with that movement. It’s more like an intellectual exercise than a movie. Chabrol was clearly trying to avoid doing anything sordid like making a popular commercial movie. And it’s self-consciously clever. If you enjoy clever-clever self-referential movies that deconstruct the genre and get all meta and play elaborate games with audience expectations then you’ll enjoy it. But this sort of thing has been done a lot more effectively. If you want to see this sort of thing done really well watch Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express instead. It’s a much better and much more enjoyable movie than Blue Panther and it’s cleverer and wittier as well.

Blue Panther often gets compared to Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise, made a year later. You could say it’s Modesty Blaise without the crazy outrageous fun elements.

As a spy movie or a spy spoof Blue Panther just doesn’t spark.

And then it just ends. Which I’m sure is very clever and avant-garde but I’m old-fashioned enough to enjoy movies with actual endings.

Of course Chabrol was not trying to make a spy movie, and he was not trying to make a spy spoof. He wasn’t interested in telling anything even resembling a coherent story. He was trying to deconstruct the genre and turn it inside out and make a movie about movies so if you’re looking for a spy movie you’ve picked the wrong movie.

Whether you enjoy this movie or not depends on whether you’re prepared to accept it for what it is. If so you’ll probably enjoy the game that Chabrol is playing, assuming that you like those sorts of cinematic games. Blue Panther is recommended if you’re a fan of this sort of thing. If such cinematic games are not your thing then you’ll be extremely bored.

Kino Lorber’s DVD provides a very nice transfer and there’s an audio commentary with Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson.

Ladies' Man (1962)

I’m a huge fan of the French Lemmy Caution movies of the 50s and early 60s. Ladies' Man (Lemmy pour les dames), directed as usual by Bernard Borderie and released in 1962, was the second last of the proper Lemmy Caution movies. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville has its merits but I don’t count it as a real Lemmy Caution movie.

Ace FBI agent Lemmy Caution was created by English writer Peter Cheyney in the 1930s. Cheyney was immensely popular at one time, particularly in France.

The star of these movies was granite-faced gravel-voiced American actor Eddie Constantine who became a major pop culture icon in France as a result.

Ladies' Man opens with Lemmy enjoying vacation in France but wherever Lemmy goes trouble is sure to follow. At the moment it’s not trouble that is following him but a woman. In Lemmy’s world trouble and women tend to go together. The woman seems to wan to talk and then clams up.

Lemmy soon finds himself with a murder on his hands.

Lemmy has not one but three glamorous possibly dangerous dames to deal with. Three female friends. The curious thing is that at one time there were five of them but two met with unfortunate accidents. This interests Lemmy. He has a suspicious mind.

When somebody tries to gun him down from a speedboat Lemmy becomes even more interested.

Lemmy has plenty of suspects but the big problem is figuring out a possible motive. And the motive in this case is more complicated than it seems.

The plot is serviceable enough. Lemmy is pretty sure that one of the three women is either a murderess or an accomplice to murder and both Lemmy and the audience are kept guessing as to her identity (and there’s always the slight possibility all three women are innocent).

Eddie Constantine is terrific as usual. He had exactly the right devil-may-care attitude and he had charisma to burn. And a certain rough charm.

It’s certainly a bonus having the lovely Françoise Brion as one of the three ladies. Brion’s most memorable performance was in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s strange perplexing and fascinating L’immortelle (1963). The other cast members are perfectly adequate, with Paul Mercey as the long-suffering rather cynical Inspector Boumègue and Robert Berri as Lemmy’s good-natured but not overly smart wartime buddy Dombie being quite good and adding some comic relief. Thankfully the comic relief is kept to a minimum - it’s not needed since Lemmy Caution provides more than enough amusemnt with his hardboiled one-liners.

Finding the Lemmy Caution movies in decent English-friendly versions has always been quite a challenge and without the grey market they would have been impossible to see. It would be really nice if somebody were to release a boxed set of restored versions of these films but sadly there’s still no sign of that happening.

Ladies' Man is part crime thriller and part eurospy movie. It’s a typical entry in the series. In other words it’s an immense amount of fun and highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Lemmy Caution movies - the excellent Poison Ivy (1953) and Women Are Like That (1960).

The Secret Ways (1961)

The Secret Ways is a 1961 Cold War spy movie based on Alistair MacLean’s 1959 novel The Last Frontier (which also appeared under the title The Secret Ways). Richard Widmark stars and also produced the picture.

It has to be said that the novel and the movie have little in common. All the elements that made the novel such an interesting and surprising spy novel for its time have been removed. All the elements that made the hero such an interesting protagonist have been removed as well. What we’re left with is a grindingly conventional Cold War spy thriller.

It is however visually very impressive. It’s done in pure film noir style. The film noir style and the spy movie are of course perfectly compatible so this was by no means a bad idea.

A two bit American hoodlum and total loser named Michael Reynolds (Richard Widmark) is employed to get a man called Jansci out of Hungary. In the novel Reynolds is British and a professional spy and that dramatic change is an immediate signal to the viewer that this movie is going to bear no resemblance to the novel.

Reynolds first has to find a young woman named Julia. She’s Jansci’s daughter and she will be the bait to persuade Jansci to leave Hungary.

Reynolds travels to Hungary with Julia. He finds Jansci, he and Jansci are captured by the secret police and tortured. They all have various narrow escapes and we get a very conventional ending. There’s no need to say any more about the very dull plot.

Jean Hazlewood wrote the screenplay. She takes MacLean’s clever intelligent plot with its unexpected psychological twists and turns it into a totally predictable stock-standard spy plot. She eliminates one of the key characters (the scientist Jennings) but unfortunately without that character the plot not only becomes a lot less interesting, it becomes entirely pointless. There’s simply no reason for any of the characters to do any of the things they do.

She also eliminates all of the provocative intelligent aspects of the book - the moral ambiguity, the way the protagonists is forced to re-evaluate his whole life, the complicated conflicts of loyalty. In fact her screenplay eliminates all of the motivations of all of the characters.

We never find out who it is who wants to get Jansci out of Hungary or why.

Hazlewood really was a genius of sorts, because she also manages to eliminate most of the suspense. The suspense in the novel stems from our uncertainty as to exactly how the various characters will react. Their reactions depend on conflicted motivations and are therefore not perfectly predictable.

I can now see why MacLean started writing the screenplays for adaptations of his movies. He was clearly determined not to have any more of his books butchered by third-rate hacks like Jean Hazlewood. This was Hazlewood’s only screenwriting credit and I’m not surprised. Based on this movie I wouldn’t have hired her to write a shopping list. Hazlewood was at the time married to Richard Widmark which obviously explains how she got to write the script.

Richard Widmark could be effective in the right part but he was entirely incapable of subtlety. In this case it doesn’t matter because this is a movie totally lacking in subtlety.

The acting overall is rather flat and lifeless but that could be because the screenplay makes the characters so extraordinarily uninteresting.

On the plus side the movie looks terrific. It has the film noir look in spades. Director Phil Karlson knew how to do film noir and he knew how to shoot action. The movie benefits from the fine cinematography of Mutz Greenbaum. They are also obviously trying for some of the feel of Carol Reed’s spy/suspense movies such as The Third Man and The Man Between, and visually they do succeed to a considerable extent. They’re definitely going for a very European vibe.

Kino Lorber have released this movie on DVD and Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent and there’s an audio commentary.

The Secret Ways looks good and it’s a beautifully crafted movie. The problem is that the story isn’t at all interesting and the characters are not at all interesting. The relationships between the characters are uninteresting. It had potential but the lacklustre script sinks it. It isn’t terrible but it’s just a very routine spy movie. Maybe worth seeing for the visuals.

I’ve reviewed the superb Alistair MacLean novel on which the film is based, The Last Frontier, on Vintage Pop Fictions.

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

Billion Dollar Brain (1967) is a spy movie directed by Ken Russell, and that in itself is pretty interesting. Russell was a very successful TV director looking to break into movies and this seemed like the kind of obviously commercial property which would aid that project.

It’s also one of the Harry Palmer spy movies starring Michael Caine, based on Len Deighton’s unnamed spy novels, and that makes it even more interesting.

And it’s based on a particularly interesting Deighton novel. It’s rather more extravagantly plotted than the three earlier unnamed spy novels. Which is obviously why it appealed to Ken Russell. It would offer him the opportunity to show what he could do in the way of spectacular visuals.

Since it’s a Ken Russell movie (and even though in this case he was working as a director for hire he still gives the movie a certain Ken Russell flavour) it won’t surprise you to know that not everyone likes this movie. For some spy fans at the time it was a bit too over-the-top. And some Deighton fans thought it was too James Bondian and not Deighton-ish enough. In fact it’s nothing like the Bond films (which by the way I love).

But with Harry Saltzman producing and with Maurice Binder contributing the excellent opening titles I can see why some assumed this was going to be a very Bondian spy movie. In fact that may have been what the producers were hoping for. It does have Bond touches but it has its own distinctive flavour.

Former British spy Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is now working as a private detective. He’s not doing too well, in fact he’s broke, but at least he’s not working for the government any more. He considers that to be a major plus. And he’s not working for Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman) any more, another plus.

But for some reason Colonel Ross wants him back. Harry isn’t interested.

Harry gets what seems to be a very simple job. All he has to do is deliver a package to Helsinki. The package is a thermos flask. Harry, being a former spy and having a suspicious mind, has the package x-rayed. It contains eggs. Odd. But two hundred pounds is two hundred pounds and Harry needs the money.

In Helsinki he discovers that Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden) is mixed up in all this. Newbigen was a CIA agent and is totally untrustworthy. If Newbigen is involved than it’s something murky. Harry also meets Newbigen’s hot young girlfriend Anya (Françoise Dorléac).

Newbigen is working for General Midwinter (Ed Begley), a crazy Texan billionaire who is conducting a personal crusade against communism.

Harry also runs into Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka). Stok is a very senior KGB officer. He and Harry are old enemies, but they’re old friends as well. Harry likes Colonel Stok a lot more than he likes his own boss, Colonel Ross.

General Midwinter is totally insane (it’s a fine scenery-chewing performance by Ed Begley) and he’s dangerous. Colonel Stok wants Harry to stop him, and Harry is also inclined to think that stopping General Midwinter would be very good idea. He’s just not sure how to do it. He’s not sure what Leo Newbigen is likely to do and he’s a bit suspicious of Anya after she tries to kill him.

It builds to an extraordinary climax on the ice.

Michael Caine is, as always, perfect as Harry Palmer. Karl Malden is great as the rogue CIA agent. Françoise Dorléac, in her final film rôle before her tragic death, is very good. Vladek Sheybal, a wonderful character actor, is excellent as a mad scientist type working for Midwinter. Look out for Donald Sutherland and Susan George in small rôles.

I can understand why when the studio execs saw the finished film they anticipated problems promoting the movie in America. After all the Soviets are the good guys while General Midwinter’s anti-communist forces are unequivocally the bad guys, determined to start World War 3. I don’t think this is the movie the studio was expecting, which probably accounts for its lack of commercial success. And it was probably just too unconventional spy movie for 1967 audiences.

It’s a movie which is ripe for rediscovery but that’s never really happened. It’s great that Kino Lorber released it on Blu-Ray (and the Blu-Ray looks fabulous) but disappointing that there are no extras. It’s a movie that really needs an audio commentary to put into the context of the careers of both Ken Russell and Len Deighton.

Billion Dollar Brain is an eccentric wildly unconventional spy movie. It’s not in the gritty style of the earlier Harry Palmer movies and it’s not in the Bond style, but it’s also not quite a spy spoof. It’s quirky and original and fascinating, and entrancing once you get into the groove of it. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first Harry Palmer movie, The Ipcress File. And I've reviewed the Len Deighton Billion Dollar Brain novel.

Operation Diplomat (1953)

Operation Diplomat is a 1953 British B-movie crime thriller and the title suggest that we might get a hint of international intrigue as well. That turns out to be the case.

Mark Fenton (Guy Rolfe) is a prominent surgeon. He’s a bit surprised when he’s approached by a nurse and told to get into the back of an ambulance but she tells him there’s a very seriously ill man in the ambulance. Mark Fenton takes being a doctor very seriously. He’s not going to refuse such an urgent request. When he gets into the ambulance there’s no patient but he gets a gun pointed at him and he’s driven to a remote house in the country.

That’s where his patient is but Wade (Sydney Tafler), the man with the gun, has no intention of revealing the name of the patient. He does offer Fenton a very fat fee to treat the patient and keep his mouth shut.

Then lots of perplexing things start to happen to Mark Fenton. He is drugged. He is introduced to the prospective daughter-in-law of one of his patients, a girl named Lisa (Lisa Daniely), and he’s sure he saw her at that mysterious country house. He is interrogated by a man from the Foreign Office, but maybe he’s not from the Foreign Office at all. He finds out the identity of the man on whom he operated, but the identification must be wrong. Corpses star to accumulate around him. The police don’t believe a word of his story.

This is one of those thrillers in which a very ordinary man is caught in a web of intrigue which he doesn’t understand, he can’t ask the police for help and if he wants to survive he’ll have to somehow untangle that web himself.

Mark Fenton is neither a detective nor a spy but he’s an intelligent man and he doesn’t enjoy being manipulated.

He’s also annoyed when a nurse at the hospital, Sister Rogers (Patricia Dainton), gets drawn into the situation. He’s also annoyed that some of the accumulating corpses seem to belong to innocent bystanders. He’s dealing with ruthless people who will kill without hesitation.

He doesn’t have many clues to go on. Just something about a golden valley, which he comes to suspect is a location in Hampshire.

It would help if he knew where that mysterious house is, but he has no idea.

It’s pretty obvious what the bad guys are up to but who are the bad guys? Wade is clearly a bad guy but it’s equally clear that he’s a minor player and that someone else is pulling the strings.

There’s mystery and suspense and at least one good action sequence.

This movie has a really fine cast. Guy Rolfe’s gaunt looks made him a successful character actor but here he shows that he could handle leading roles very well indeed. He brings a certain determined sincerity to his performance. Lisa Daniely and Patricia Dainton were fine actresses. There’s Anton Diffring, who revelled in rôles that allowed him to play a sinister foreigner (in British movies of this period all foreigners are considered sinister unless proven otherwise).

Sydney Tafler is a particular favourite of mine. He was equally adept in comic and serious parts and always brought that little something extra to his performances.

This movie was based on a Francis Durbridge story and it’s very much typical of the Durbridge approach to the thriller genre, with the hero having to deal with lots of nasty little plot twists. Operation Diplomat is also reminiscent of the Eric Ambler approach - take an ordinary sort of guy and plunge him into a world of crime or espionage in which he is hopelessly out of his depth. Durbridge’s most famous character is crime writer-amateur detective Paul Temple who appeared in numerous radio plays, novels (the first being Send for Paul Temple), several movies (beginning with Send for Paul Temple in 1946) and the excellent 1969-71 BBC Paul Temple TV series. Durbridge also did lots of TV serials for the BBC, including A Game of Murder (1966), A Man Called Harry Brent (1965) and The Doll (1975). Anything Francis Durbridge wrote is going to be thoroughly enjoyable twisted entertainment.

Operation Diplomat was adapted from a Durbridge-penned TV serial which was probably a new benefit - having to compress the action into 70 minutes means the pacing is pleasingly brisk. It probably also explains why the occasional plot strand is left hanging (we never really find out about the painting which initially seems like it’s going to be a vital clue).

Director John Guillermin would go on to helm blockbusters such as The Towering Inferno and King Kong but even more interesting (to me at least) is that he directed one of the best-ever Tarzan movies, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), and the very underrated WW1 aerial combat movie The Blue Max.

This movie is included in the Renown Pictures Crime Collection Volume 4 DVD boxed set. The transfer is extremely good. A brief introduction to the film by star Patricia Dainton is the only extra.

Operation Diplomat is fast-moving lightweight entertainment. Don’t think too much about the plot, just sit back and enjoy the fun and the fine performances. Recommended.

Beyond the Curtain (1960)

Beyond the Curtain is a 1960 British spy movie and a very obscure one.

Captain Jim Kyle (Richard Greene) is an English pilot working for an American airline in West Germany. His girlfriend Karin (Eva Bartok) is a stewardess. They are intending to marry. Karin is East German. She ran away to the West six years earlier. Now she’s flying the Frankfurt-Berlin route which means flying through the air corridor established by agreement between East and West.

Her latest flight ends in disaster. The aircraft drifts off-course into East German air space and is forced down in East Germany. A few hours later the plane is allowed to take off again, but without Karin.

Karin expects to be imprisoned or at least punished in some way and she’s surprised when the East German authorities allow her to return to her mother’s home in Dresden. They won’t allow her to return to the West but otherwise she’s free to do whatever she likes.

Of course the evil commies have a dastardly motive for all this. They intend to use Karin as bait, to trap her brother (an anti-communist political agitator). Karin doesn’t know this yet.

While this is happening Jim Kyle is hatching a plan to rescue Karin. He travels to East Germany under a false name and is surprised to find that Karin doesn’t appear to want to return to the West. She has her reasons.

It all gets complicated as Jim Kyle tries to find a way to get Karin, her brother and perhaps even her elderly mother to the western zone. He’s going to have to come up with something before the East Germans close the net on Karin’s brother.

This is the kind of spy movie that was still common in 1960. Two years later the release of the first Bond movie Dr No would make these earlier spy movies seem very stodgy. And this one really is a bit stodgy. It does however feature a pretty effective extended action finale, a tense chase through a maze of tunnels under Berlin which I imagine was inspired by the similar finale in The Third Man. Obviously there’s none of the artistry that a director like Carol Reed could bring to such a sequence but it’s still effectively atmospheric and exciting.

This movie was made at the height of Cold War hysteria and it really lays the propaganda on good and thick. The East Germans are all humourless evil soulless monsters. They’re cartoon villains.

Richard Greene was the leading man you got for an action adventure movie if you couldn’t afford a real star. He was always pretty reliable but just a bit lacking in the charisma department.

Eva Bartok is much better. A fine actress who does a good job of conveying Karin’s confusion as her emotions tug her this way and that. Marius Goring plays the enigmatic and treacherous Hans, an old family friend.

The most interesting thing about the movie is the use of the air corridor as a device to set the plot in motion. And Karin does manage to be a fairly interesting character with believable emotional conflicts.

Renown’s DVD presentation is quite OK but not fantastic. There are no extras.

Beyond the Curtain is a very 1950s-style low-key spy thriller. It doesn’t reach any great heights but it’s competently made. Worth a look if you can pick it up cheaply.