The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, released in 1960, was Fritz Lang’s third Dr Mabuse movie. Lang directed and co-wrote the screenplay. It was his final movie. The movies Lang made after his return to Germany are a major departure from his Hollywood movies. In some ways they saw Lang returning to his roots. He finally got to direct a version of The Indian Tomb (Lang had written the screenplay in 1920 with his wife Thea von Harbou but that first version was directed by Joe May) and he revived Dr Mabuse, nearly 30 years after his previous Mabuse film.

But in other ways The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is actually ahead of its time. It’s arguably the first full-blown techno-paranoia thriller, anticipating many of the paranoid themes of 1970s cinema.

This is also possibly the first movie to focus on all-pervasive technological surveillance. Everybody is being watched, and at times the watchers are being watched.

It opens with a reference to the previous Mabuse movie. At first it seems that this cannot be a Dr Mabuse movie - we are told that Dr Mabuse has been dead since 1932. But we know that being dead has not stopped Dr Mabuse in the past.

The opening sequence is the assassination of a TV reporter. It appears to be a heart attack but there never was a serious attempt to pass it off as death by natural causes. The autopsy will inevitably reveal the truth. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s a double deception. The police are being deceived but the intention is that they should discover the deception.

A young woman, Marion Menil (Dawn Addams) is about to throw herself off a ledge of te Hotel Luxor. American businessman Henry Travers (Peter van Eyck) saves her life. They are immediately attracted and he is drawn into her tangled personal life. She is trapped in an unhappy marriage. She is under treatment by psychiatrist Dr Jordan.

Travers is involved in business deals involving nuclear power and rockets.

A psychic named Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) has attracted the attention of Kriminalkommissar Kras (Gert Fröbe) by making predictions that come true. Kras is a hardheaded cop but his case is going nowhere and he’ll clutch at anything that might help.

The case involves a series of murder connected in a mysterious way with the Hotel Luxor.

We, the audience, know something the police don’t know. Everybody in the Hotel Luxor is under surveillance. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. We don’t know who or what is behind this.

It might be Dr Mabuse. But Dr Mabuse is long dead. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe there is a Dr Mabuse. Maybe Cornelius is Dr Mabuse. Maybe Dr Jordan is Dr Mabuse. Or Henry Travers. Or the shady hotel detective. Or the insurance salesman Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig (Werner Peters) who seems to turn up everywhere. Or Marion’s sinister husband Roberto (Reinhard Kolldehoff). Or the clubfooted man. The assassin No 2 (Howard Vernon) is probably just a henchman but it is impossible to be sure. Anyone could be Dr Mabuse. If there is a Dr Mabuse.

If you get halfway through the movie and realise that you don’t have a clue what’s going on don’t panic. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on. It’s not that the narrative is non-linear, but it is deliberately deceptive. It’s deceptive on multiple levels. This is a movie about being watched and of course we, the viewers, are engaged in watching but we cannot trust anything we see or hear.

There are conspiracies within conspiracies and characters tell lies while they themselves are being lied to. We cannot be sure of the real identities of any of the characters.

This may be a crime movie but it’s also a kind of proto-eurospy movie. Dr Mabuse would appear to be more of a Bond Villain than a master criminal. Always assuming that Dr Mabuse exists.

When Lang relocated to Hollywood in the late 30s he adapted remarkably well. He learnt that Hollywood filmmaking required discipline. He couldn’t make any more four hour movies. The convention of classical Hollywood filmmaking required tightly constructed movies with strong narrative drives. Lang mastered these techniques. But he never forget that this wasn’t the only way to make movies, and occasionally (in movies like Rancho Notorious and Moonfleet) he departed just a little from strict realism.

When he returned to Germany at the end of the 50s he abandoned many of the conventions he had mastered in Hollywood. It’s easy to see why French critics adored The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse. Lang seemed to be doing what the Cahiers du Cinema crowd wanted to see - adopting simplified streamlined techniques and getting a bit experimental with narrative and playing around with ambiguity. Making a movie in which the meaning has to be teased out. They hailed the 70-year-old Lang as a cinematic rebel!

German and American critics savaged the movie but it would be a mistake to see this as Lang ending his career with a failure. It was a huge hit in Germany. It spawned five sequels. It launched an entire franchise. In commercial terms it was a triumph. And its critical reputation has grown steadily.

It’s interesting that two radically different endings were shot. The earlier DVD releases had the ending of the French release. The Eureka Blu-Ray gives us the original ending from both the German and English versions.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is not just a worthy final film. This is a great Lang film, one of his best. Very highly recommended.

Topaz (1969)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz came out in 1969 and it’s a movie that was doomed from the start for various reasons that we’ll get to later.

It’s a spy thriller based on a novel by Leon Uris. He’s now entirely forgotten but was once hugely popular. His books were immensely long and there are good reasons that he’s forgotten.

It is 1962. The Americans have a top KBG defector and he’s told them how to get the information they need about what’s happening in Cuba. The problem is that the necessary contact cannot be made by an American. This contact will only deal with the French.

So CIA bigwig Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe) persuades his friend Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to make the contact. Devereaux is a French spy, but he can only act unofficially since the French have no desire to get mixed up in America’s problems.

Devereaux has to travel to Cuba, with unexpected personal consequences. He is having an illicit affair with the influential but fiercely anti-Castro Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor). She’s also involved with the Cuban chief of security, Rico Parra (John Vernon).

That KGB defector mentioned Topaz but refused to give any information. No-one knows who or what Topaz is, but it’s something very important. And Topaz will also have personal consequences for Andre Devereaux.

There are therefore two espionage plots running in parallel.

So what went wrong? Firstly, there’s no star power here. No star power at all. John Forsythe is the only cast member who had any profile at all in the U.S. and he’s OK but it’s a minor supporting role. Frederick Stafford is dull. He has no charisma. In fact he has negative charisma. John Vernon is great fun but he was not an A-list star. Karin Dor was a huge star in Germany and a fine actress but was pretty much unknown to American audiences. Dany Robin (as Andre Devereaux’s wife Nicole) was a minor star in France.

With zero star power there was no way of effectively marketing this movie. There is a fascinating rumour that Hitchcock wanted Sean Connery and Catherine Deneuve.

The second problem is that it feels so old-fashioned. Hitchcock revolutionised the spy genre with North by Northwest in 1959 but three years later the first Bond movie, Dr No, came out and immediately made Hitchcock’s style of spy movie seem ridiculously old-fashioned. Dr No felt faster, more energetic, cooler and sexier. And Dr No helped to usher in the whole Swinging London thing.

Hitchcock’s 1960s spy movies, Torn Curtain and Topaz, feel very 1950s.

In Topaz the problem is made worse by the fact that it was made in 1969 but set in 1962 which made it seem even more outdated.

The third problem is that at 2 hours and 23 minutes it’s very very long.

A lot of the problems probably go back to the source material. Leon Uris saw everything in simplistic good vs evil terms. As a result the Cubans are portrayed as cartoonish villains, there’s no questioning of the morality of the manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of the appalling manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of Nordstrom’s manipulation of a man who is supposed to be a friend. I get the impression that Hitchcock was trying here to make a serious hard-hitting spy movie but I think the script needed more work.

On the other hand it’s a superbly crafted movie. There are so many very Hitchcockian very stylish visual set-pieces. They’re not violent action set-pieces and they are perhaps the sorts of subtle visual flourishes that a mainstream audience will miss. The initial escape is very nicely done. And there’s that one superb moment which I won’t spoil for you, involving the use Hitchcock makes of a blue dress.

On more than one occasion Hitchcock shoots dialogue scenes in which we cannot hear a single word. It’s a clever touch and it works. We can imagine what is being said.

And then there are the endings. Three of them were shot. There’s a ridiculous cartoonish ending, the “duel” ending. That was the original ending but preview audiences hated it. Hitchcock shot a different much bolder ending (the “airport” ending) which he preferred to the original. Eventually a third very conventional ending was chosen. The Blu-Ray gives us the airport ending which makes sense since it’s the one Hitch liked. The others are included as extras. Depending on which ending is used Topaz becomes three different movies, with the airport ending version being by far the best.

Topaz is superbly crafted. Hitchcock had lost none of his visual touch. It’s not a bad movie at all but it’s too slow and it needed more energy and it desperately needed some star power. Certainly not top-tier Hitchcock but worth a look.

Ransom (1974)

Ransom (AKA The Terrorists) is a 1974 British thriller. It was shot in Norway but apparently it was felt that it was best to make the setting a mythical Scandinavian country called Scandinavia. It had a Finnish director (Casper Wrede) and a Swedish cinematographer (Sven Nykvist) but an entirely British cast headed up by Sean Connery. It’s a largely forgotten movie but it’s at least moderately effective.

It’s a hijacking hostage drama made at a time when hijackings and terrorist outrages were regular occurrences.

A British terrorist named Shepherd, along with several of his cohorts, has kidnapped the British ambassador to Scandinavia. They are demanding the release by the British Government of other members of the terrorist gang currently in custody. The British Government intends to accede to Shepherd’s demands but there’s a complication. Other members of this terrorist gang, led by Petrie (Ian McShane), have hijacked a Scandinavian airliner. They are demanding free passage for Shepherd and his accomplices to the airport so that they can all make their escape by air to destinations unknown.

So the hijacking comes under Scandinavian jurisdiction and the Scandinavians intend to accept the terrorists’ demands but double-cross them.

The task of apprehending all of these terrorists without risking any civilian casualties is handed to the Scandinavian chief of security, Colonel Tahlvik (Sean Connery). He thinks that his task is impossible but he’s a soldier and he intends to do the best he can and he most definitely does not like the idea of letting terrorists get away with outrages on Scandinavian soil.

It’s a double hostage drama, with two sets of hostages held in different locations.

The plot gets complicated but it’s perfectly coherent and includes some sound ideas.

There is of course a major twist and it’s signposted by subtle clues scattered throughout the movie. It’s still a pretty decent twist.

Connery as usual exudes charisma.

It should have turned out better than it did. The potential was there. It ends up feeling a bit too much like a TV-movie.

One major problem is that Colonel Tahlvik is the only interesting character. We don’t get any insights into the motivations of Shepherd and Petrie and they’re just not sufficiently menacing. This is a movie that really needed a memorable villain to provide a worthy adversary for Tahlvik, and he needed to be played by an actor with enough charisma not to get totally overshadowed by Connery.

Ian McShane is in fact a fine actor but his performance fails to build up enough steam. He just doesn’t seem to be fully engaged.

John Quentin as Shepherd is a total washout and that is a major weakness.

Most of the movie’s problems would seem to have stemmed from the fact that as director of an action/suspense thriller Casper Wrede was just not up to the job. The action scenes are not exciting enough, the suspense doesn’t build the way it should and there’s a general lack of energy and urgency.

There is some 70s cynicism but it needed to be given a bit more bite.

Visually it’s a fairly impressive film.

This is not by any means a bad movie. It’s decent entertainment but in a TV-movie time-killer sort of way rather than in a nail-biting adrenalin-fuelled feature film sort of way. Worth a look if you can pick it up really cheap or if you’re a Sean Connery completist.

Network’s Blu-Ray lacks extras but looks very good.

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.