SINGAPORE. Universal Pictures, 1947. Fred MacMurray, Ava Gardner, Roland Culver, Richard Haydn, Spring Byington, Thomas Gomez. Director: John Brahm.

   Surely influenced by both The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942), John Brahm’s exotic noir Singapore has neither the grit of the former, nor the enrapturing romance of the latter. But it’s certainly not without its myriad charms. Truth be told, I find myself enjoying this lesser-known, sometimes clunky, film more than I thought I would.

   Fred MacMurray portrays Matt Gordon, a pearl smuggler who returns to Singapore after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War. His goal: to recover a quarter of a million dollars worth of illicit pearls that he stashed away in his hotel room. What he doesn’t expect is to encounter his former fiancee Linda Grahame (Ava Gardner) who he presumed died in a Japanese air raid.

   As it turns out, Linda is very much alive and physically well. Except for one thing. She has amnesia and has forgotten her past, including her love for Matt. Complicating matters for the heartbroken Matt is the unfortunate fact that Linda is now married to a Dutch plantation owner. Matt has to navigate that fraught situation at the same time that he has a police officer on his back and two rival seedy criminals gunning for his pearls.

   There are plenty of saccharine, downright maudlin moments in Singapore which only serve to remind the viewer that this is a product of a different era. But I found there was enough suspense and intrigue to keep me interested throughout the comparatively short proceedings. MacMurray does a fine job with the flawed source material and takes the role seriously enough that you want to root for him to get both the girl and the pearls.

   Overall assessment: decent sentimental escapism with some nefarious characters adding some spice to the mix.

THE EIGER SANCTION. Universal Pictures, 1975. Clint Eastwood, (Jonathan Hemlock), George Kennedy, Vonetta McGee, Jack Cassidy. Based on the novel by Trevanian. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

   There’s the visual of a man walking through the streets of Zurich, encountering another man who hands him something, and then making his way back to his apartment. Where he is promptly killed by an assassin.

   So begins The Eiger Sanction, a rather dated mid-1970s spy film directed by, and starring, Clint Eastwood. He portrays Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor and a retired killer for the government brought back into service to avenge the aforementioned Zurich murder of an American spy. It all sounds rather exciting on paper, but unfortunately the decidedly uneven pace of the movie makes it very difficult to stay fully engaged throughout the proceedings.

   That’s not to say that the movie is without its merits. One of the best things the film has going for it is its ensemble of oddball characters, misfits all, who work for C-2, a fictional spy agency tasked with double crosses, assassinations, and other dirty business.

   Leading the outfit is an albino ex-Nazi who goes by the name “Dragon” (Thayer David). There’s also his assistant Pope (Gregory Walcott) and a Black agent named (I kid you not) Jemima Brown (Vonetta McGee). And even though he may not be fully integrated with C-2, there’s also the smarmy and effeminate killer Miles Mellough (Jack Cassidy). All of these characters are one of a kind and will be rightfully remembered long after the plot is forgotten.

   What attracted viewers to The Eiger Sanction, however, was neither the cast nor the plot, but the action sequences. Yes, this is the one where Eastwood goes mountain climbing. It’s breathtaking, to be sure. But it’s not enough to overcome the movie’s weak points.

   What else? George Kennedy plays an important role in the film as Eastwood’s climbing instructor, but since I don’t want to give away spoilers, I’ll just say that his character is pivotal to the story’s ultimate outcome.

   My overall assessment is that this Eastwood outing tried too hard to make Clint the epitome of an affected 1970s cool and thus unintentionally relegated its status to being very much of that era. Hence, dated.
   

PASSAGE FROM HONG KONG. Warner Brothers, 1941. Lucile Fairbanks, Douglas Kennedy (as Keith Douglas), Paul Cavanagh, Richard Ainley, Marjorie Gateson, Gloria Holden, William Hopper (uncredited, as a worker at the US Consulate). Based on the novel The Agony Column, by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: D. Ross Lederman.

   Passage from Hong Kong takes place before the war and as foreign nationals are warned to leave Hong Kong. Finding a ship that will take them out of harm’s way is a problem, though, but in the chaos a young man (Douglas Kennedy) meets a young girl (Lucille Fairbanks) who catches his eye. She is traveling with her aunt (Marjorie Gateson) who disapproves of him.

   Not knowing the young lady’s name, the young man resorts to a local newspaper’s classified ads section. She responds, but playing it coy, she asks him to write her five letters first before she will decide to meet him or not.

   We do not know this until later, but the young man is a writer of thriller novels, and following the old adage of “write what you know,” the letters he sends her are a series of chapter installments of an serious scrape  he gets into involving both murder and international intrigue.

   It’s all totally fictitious, of course, but the story he tells her, to get into her good graces, as well as her aunt’s, is dramatized for us on the screen, making this a full-fledged adventure film as well as a romance, with a considerable amount of frothy comedy thrown in to boot.

   The Agony Column, the story by Earl Derr Biggers that the movie is based on, takes place in England before World War I, but as in the film, the communications between two would-be lovers takes place through a series of a newspaper’s “agony column,” so there is some similarity. (I’ve not read the book. I’m only stating what I found out about it online.)

   The movie is no classic, far from it. Once watched, quickly forgotten, the players as well as the story line. Especially the story line.
   

THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN. Universal International Pictures, 1957. Zza Zza Gabor, Lex Barker, Jeffrey Stone, Maurice Manson, Kurt Katch. Screenplay by Gene L. Coon & Robert Hill. Story by DeWitt Bodeen & Harry Ruskin. Directed by Russell Birdwell. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   
   This twisty and twisted little thriller mostly from the Universal back-lot and sets from the horror movies is something of a cross between a Men’s Sweat Mag, the National Enquirer, Sterling Noel’s bestselling I Killed Stalin, and a government propaganda short.

   We open in Moscow at Joseph Stalin (Maurice Manson)’s deathwatch. A team of surgeons, including a noted plastic surgeon and nurse Greta Grisenko (Zza Zza Gabor) are there to operate on Stalin, but first he has to indulge his fetish for watching women have their heads shaved and oversee the murder of his double before the operation and the announcement of his death as he absconds from the USSR with half the national treasury.

   Several years have passed and we are in West Berlin where American Private Eye Steve Anderson (Lex Barker) and ex-OSS agent meets Lili Grisenko (also Zza) a naturalized American who hires him to find her sister who went missing in Russia after they were separated as war refugees and who was known to have been a nurse for Stalin.

   Steve’s friend, one-armed Mischa (Jeffrey Stone), who runs an underground group of Russian expatriates, informs Steve and Lili that he believes Stalin is still alive and that their best chance to find Greta is to find Stalin. That best chance to find the dictator turns out to be his son Jacob (William Schallert) who defected to the West in the War to escape the influence of his evil father and now hides out in a small German village trying to forget his Father, protected by Mischa and his friends.

   Meanwhile both Stalin in his hideout and the Russians in Moscow who don’t want his treachery out  send assassins to kill Anderson before he can find the dictator.

   Stalin’s son (a surprisingly sensitive performance by Schallert for this film) provides them the clue they need to find Stalin, and Anderson polishes off one of the assassins and neutralizes the other (a once wartime friend), while he and Mischa are off to find Stalin who is planning to return to Russia and take power again for a finale of suggested kinky sex (Greta allows Stalin to shave her head for kicks and tortures Steve) and a retribution ending to that first line I quoted.

   
   The Girl in the Kremlin is more interesting than good, sensational and exploitative without ever achieving the kind of pulp level garishness required for that to work and despite a few kinky flourishes –- notably the really disturbing and near pornographic scene in the opening when a peasant girl’s (Natalie Daryll who allowed her waist length hair to be shaved) hair is graphically shorn while Stalin watches intently — it never really manages to wallow in the depths it seeks. It is far too polite for that.

   Barker is appropriately tough in the lead, and Zza Zza is actually fairly good in the twin role, avoiding too much scenery chewing as the evil sister in her bald cap, the big reveal of the film’s second half, along with Barker, bare-chested of course, being whipped by two women. There is even a touch of mystery as we don’t know until the end which of the men is Stalin in his new face.

   This does capture the feel of those popular Men’s Sweat Mags of the era where the garish covers and provocative illustrations and article titles always promised more than the prose dared to deliver. This film is like that but, to borrow a line from Ian Fleming, it reads better than it lives, ending with a title card to inform us piously that man reaps what he sows.

   That sums up this one. You went for Rocky Horror Picture Show and you ended up with Scooby Doo.
   

THE LEOPARD MAN. RKO, 1943. Cast: Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabell Jewell, Marguerite Silva, Abner Biberman, James Bell, Margaret Landry, Fely Franquelli, Ariel Heath, Tuulikki Paananen. Producer: Val Lewton. Writers: Ardel Wray and Edward Dein, based on the novel Black Alibi (1942) by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   Despite what everybody says about The Leopard Man, it’s not really a horror film. Of course it looks and even sounds like one most of the time, and it’s true producer Val Lewton specialized in horror films (e.g., Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, etc.). Nevertheless, when you eliminate all the terror trappings, what’s left isn’t just a crime movie but an actual mystery film.

   It’s clear the intention was to ratchet up the suspense as much as possible — and then go beyond that. So it’s surprising to realize that just about every moment of violence is off screen; lighting and sound effects do the job of suggesting the horrors we don’t see.

   When someone is attacked and murdered on one side of a door, we and another person on this side of it hear the violent scuffle but only see the victim’s blood oozing under the door.

   In a darkened cemetery dimly lit by a hazy moon, another victim is stalked by something unseen up in the trees. The camera focuses on the tree limbs as they creak downward and then spring up, with the attacker just out of visual range. All we hear is a muffled scream.

   The Leopard Man has many moments like that. The source material was Black Alibi, a 1942 novel by Cornell Woolrich.

       ****

   Numerous books and stories by Cornell Woolrich have been adapted for other media, such as these films: ‘Convicted’ (1938), ‘Street of Chance’ (1942), ‘Phantom Lady’ (1944), ‘The Mark of the Whistler’ (1944), ‘Deadline at Dawn’ (1946), ‘Black Angel’ (1946), ‘The Chase’ (1946), ‘Fall Guy’ (1947), ‘The Guilty’ (1947), ‘Fear in the Night’ (1947), ‘The Return of the Whistler’ (1948), ‘I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes’ (1948), ‘Night Has a Thousand Eyes’ (1948), ‘The Window (1949), ‘No Man of Her Own’ (1950), 6 episodes of the ‘Suspense’ TV series (1949-50), 3 segments of ‘Robert Montgomery Presents’ (1950-51), ‘Rear Window’ (1954), ‘Obsession’ (1954), ‘Nightmare’ (1956); 3 installments each of ‘Lux Video Theatre’ (1954-57), ‘The Ford Television Theatre’ (1955-57), ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ (1956-58), and ‘Thriller’ (1961); ‘The Bride Wore Black’ (1968), ‘You’ll Never See Me Again’ (1973, TVM), even ‘Mrs. Winterbourne’ (1996) — and this list of media adaptations is hardly exhaustive.

WATCHER. IFCMidnight, 2022. Maika Monroe as Julia, Karl Glusman as Francis, Burn Gorman as Daniel Weber, Madalina Anea as Irina. Director: Chloe Okuno.

   I’m glad I didn’t read anything about Watcher before I went to see it recently at an independent movie theater in North Hollywood. That is to say: I knew nothing beyond the basic premise: a woman has a watcher/stalker problem. It’s a plot as old as time, especially when it’s a young woman who moves into a new apartment. This is territory that has been fodder for countless thrillers and slashers, some memorable. Many decidedly not.

   Does Watcher have anything it in that sets it apart from the dozens of similar movies that have come before it? Before I can answer this question, I must point out that the film doesn’t necessarily break new ground and that it wears its myriad influences on its sleeve. There’s Hitchcock, of course. Particularly Rear Window (1954).

   There’s also Roman Polanski. I’ve seen one reviewer make references to both Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1967), but the film that came immediately to my mind was Polanski’s later thriller, Frantic (1988) in which Harrison Ford portrayed a doctor out of his element in Paris, searching for his missing wife. One salient aspect from that exceptionally well-crafted film that continues to stick in my mind is how Ford’s character finds the language barrier – he doesn’t speak French – to be a deeply threatening psychological barrier to his quest.

   That’s even more the case in Watcher, in which a youthful married couple moves from New York City to Bucharest, Romania. Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman) seem to be very much in love and eager for a new chapter in their lives. Francis, who speaks Romanian, has been promoted to a marketing agency’s Romanian office. Julia, who we know was an “actress,” doesn’t speak a word. She is basically left alone to fend for herself in the couple’s apartment while Francis is off at work, making money and interacting with colleagues.

   What begins innocuously enough (or does it?) ends up as a waking nightmare. Julia, soon after moving into the decently outfitted apartment, sees what she thinks is a man staring at her from the building across the street. It doesn’t help her growing sense of isolation when she learns that there’s a serial killer – the media calls him “The Spider” – attacking young women in the neighborhood.

   Pretty soon, Julia is certain she is being stalked as prey. But no one believes her; at times, she almost doesn’t seem to believe herself. The movie skillfully plays with this ambiguity. What does it mean when someone who thinks they are being stalked begins to stalk their purported stalker? Is Julia being watched or is she the watcher?

   There’s very little actual violence in Watcher, but when it comes it comes brutally and most of all, loudly. Most of the time, what envelops the viewer is not blood and gore, but atmosphere. Dread, isolation, and madness are the name of the game here.

   The director makes the most of the on-location filming. Bucharest is as much a character in the film as Paris was in Frantic. The streets, museums, and the subway system all feature prominently in the visual narrative. Monroe’s acting is top notch, although it’s the subtly hidden interplay between her and the camera that makes her performance stand out. It’s well worth a look. One might even say it’s worth watching.

WINDFALL. Netflix, 2022. Jason Segel, Lily Collins, Jesse Plemons, Omar Leyva. Director: Charlie McDowell.

   “Chekhov’s gun” is the principle, attributed to the eponymous Russian playwright, that every element introduced into a play should be necessary and extraneous elements should be removed. The gun aspect is largely understood to mean that, if the audience is going to see a gun at the opening of a play, it should be a key element in how the action unfolds later in the play.

   I couldn’t help but think of this while watching Netflix’s Windfall, a satisfying, if incomplete, thriller and black comedy directed by Charlie McDowell (son of actor Malcolm). At the very beginning of the film – in the first 10 minutes or so – the audience witnesses a man (Jason Segel) exploring and rummaging through a beautiful California country house that clearly is not his own.

   We don’t know why he is there, nor what his motivations are. But he seems to be taken with the place and its natural beauty. It also seems as if he is looking for cash. And, perhaps most significantly, he finds a handgun in a drawer.

   Pretty soon, though, Segel’s character is not alone. An upscale couple (Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins) arrives at the home. The break-in turns into a hostage situation. Over the next hour or so, tensions unfold between the three characters – who are never named – with the intruder asking for a giant financial sum from the wealthy husband.

   All of this puts great strain on the computer mogul’s wife, who seemingly has been unhappily living in her philandering husband’s shadow lo these many years. If this sounds like a chamber piece – like a play – you’d be absolutely on the mark. For this is a movie script that could have been written by Chekhov himself.

   Windfall is most certainly a slow burn; it doesn’t offer instantaneous thrills. What it does offer is atmosphere – a sunny quasi-noir disposition that you feel like you have been transported to the French countryside – and a quirky, offbeat sensibility.

   It’s well directed and certainly well cast, with Segel showing that he has a lot of potential for more dramatic roles that don’t require him to be quite so goofy. It just is that the film doesn’t add up to all that much. It certainly aims to be a little more highbrow than many Netflix offerings and, on that level, it succeeds.

   But there’s nothing all that new under the California sun here for those well immersed in the thriller genre. One last note: the aforementioned gun is ultimately fired. More than once.

THE NOVEMBER MAN. Relativity Media, 2014. Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Smitrovich, Amila Terzimehic. Will Patton. Director: Roger Donaldson.

   The concept is compelling; it’s the execution that’s flawed. That’s pretty much how I would describe The November Man to anyone who wanted a brief, succinct answer to the question: “What did you think of the movie?”

   Adapted from Bill Granger’s espionage thriller There Are No Spies, the seventh entry in the author’s “November Man” series, the movie is grounded in the realities of the post-Cold War world and has a solid, reliable lead in Pierce Brosnan. But it ultimately ends up being nothing more than a stunningly average spy film, one that relies on twists and turns that are – for those familiar with the genre, at least – clearly visible from miles away.

   The movie opens at a fast clip, with the viewer immediately thrust into the action. CIA operative Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) and junior partner, David Mason (Luke Bracey) are in Montenegro and are on an assassination mission. Things don’t go according to plan. Brosnan is hit. And a young child is wounded, perhaps fatally.

   Years pass and we find a retired Devereaux (the spy in retirement trope!) living in Lausanne, Switzerland. That’s when his former boss, John Hanley (Bill Smitrovich) shows up, asking Devereaux to take on one last mission: to extract a CIA asset from Russia by the name of Natalia Ulanova. She’s currently working for Arkady Fedorov, a former Russian Army general who is on his way to becoming president of the Russian Federation and has information that supposedly could bring Federov crashing down.

   That’s where the twists and turns begin. Can Devereaux really trust that he is taking on a legitimate mission or has he been set up? Things get interesting when we learn that Federov apparently kidnapped and sexually assaulted a young girl during the Second Chechen War.

   Things get more interesting when we learn that this girl may still be alive and that she may have been witness to a meeting between a CIA Agent and Federov that set into motion that deadly conflict.

   Most of the film follows Devereaux as he attempts to make sense of a confusing, fast-moving situation. He not only finds himself at odds with Mason, his former protegee, but having to protect a social worker (Olga Kurylenko) who supposedly knows the whereabouts of Federov’s victim.

   Now don’t get me wrong. I like Roger Donaldson’s work and consider his thriller, No Way Out (1987) one of the best, if consistently underappreciated, spy films ever. But here he feels as if he was just going through the motions. While there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the direction, there’s nothing particularly captivating about it either. The action sequences, filmed on the streets of Belgrade, are about as ordinary as can be. If it weren’t for Brosnan, one wouldn’t really pay much attention to them at all.

WITNESS IN THE DARK. Alliance Films, UK, 1959. NBC, US, 1961 (TV). Patricia Dainton, Conrad Phillips, Madge Ryan, Nigel Green. Director: Wolf Rilla. Currently available on YouTube here.

   Most stories relay on relatable, often primal instincts to engage an audience. In thrillers, fear is the one most filmmakers try to evoke, and it can never be more acute than those times in which we are least in control. We feel especially vulnerable when we are incapacitated in some way and the most dramatic method of conveying this is injuring the protagonist. This usually happens towards the end of the third act, during the final confrontation when it seems as though the hero is about to perish. Sometimes, however, the injury is built into the story from the start in order to bring maximum intensity.

   The most famous example of this is Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which James Stewart’s photojournalist breaks his leg and is forced to remain in his Greenwich Village apartment with nothing to do but stare out of the window and suspect people of murdering their wives. In Witness in the Dark, the injury is blindness. This had already been explored in 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) and would be again in Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn and See No Evil with Mia Farrow.

   Jane Pringle (Patricia Dainton) was blinded five years ago in a car accident in France which also killed her fiancé. She now continues to work as a switchboard operator and even teaches a young boy how to read Braille. However, one night, alone in her flat, she hears a disturbance downstairs. She investigates, moving into the hall, and encounters a thief (Nigel Green) on the staircase. Fortunately for the thief, Jane is unable to see him and will not, therefore, be able to identify him later.

   The thief does not attack her and instead escapes. Inspector Coates (Conrad Phillips) investigates and discovers that the thief had also murdered Mrs Temple, the old lady whose flat had been burgled. Jane, realising that she came so near to the culprit, believes she can help. Things get charged, however, when the thief decides he must return and tie up one or two loose ends…

   A brisk, involving thriller, Witness in the Dark succeeds in what all such films must do and makes the audience care for the character in danger. Jane is a pragmatic, brave, independent and compassionate woman who clearly has not let the tragedy in her life define it, and Dainton convincingly portrays someone without sight, sans glasses. Nigel Green, unsurprisingly, makes for a dauntingly sinister villain and, in the final scenes, maintains dignity and tension in what might otherwise have seemed vaguely farcical.

   Conrad Phillips gives his usual best, here appearing after thirty-nine episodes of ITV’s The Adventures of William Tell. I’m always interested – though not morbidly so – in how long such actors ended up living, and Phillips left us five years ago at the age of 90, after publishing his autobiography Aiming True online.

   There is also some amiable comedy involving Jane’s neighbours Mr and Mrs Finch, in which the former is hoping to retain the stolen pocket watch he has recently bought down the pub and not relinquish it to the investigating officer. Elsewhere, eagle-eyed viewers will spot Man About the House and Robin’s Nest star Richard O’Sullivan, only fifteen as the young blind boy Jane coaches, while there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role from future Doctor Who and Emmerdale Farm star Frazier Hines as a newspaper boy.

Rating: ***
   

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE. Rank, UK, 1966. Universal, US, 1967. Richard Johnson (Hugh Drummond), Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Nigel Green, Suzanna Leigh, Steve Carlson. Screenwriters: Jimmy Sangster, David Osborn) & Liz Charles-Williams, based on a original story by Jimmy Sangster and the character Bulldog Drummond created by Herman C. McNeile (as Sapper) & Gerard Fairlie. Directed by Ralph Thomas.

   By the late 1960s, almost everyone was cashing in on the wildly successful Bond films and seeing if they could make their own without breaking the international copyright laws. This splurge of spy movies gave us the two Derek Flint films with James Coburn, the four Matt Helm films, questionably starring Dean Martin, and – closer to home – the so-called ‘Euro-spy’ films. These were badly-dubbed Italian and French films which featured a Bond-like character.

   Here in Britain, we also had the Harry Palmer films, The Quiller Memorandum, Hot Enough for June and Modesty Blaise, along with comedies like Carry On Spying and that one with Morcambe & Wise.

   So it was only expected that some bright spark would dust off the old Bulldog Drummond adventure novels by 1920s writer ‘Sapper’ which were partly responsible for Bond in the first place. The original character is considered to be a racist bigot now, but he was more or less Bertie Wooster with a penchant for brutal justice and initially went up against criminal mastermind Carl Peterson.

   This film, however, strips Drummond of his nick-name, military rank, character, backstory, supporting cast and storylines and makes him a smooth, wryly-amusing insurance investigator with a Rolls Royce and a passion for karate. Richard Johnson would always be a respected actor and is perfectly likeable here as Drummond, but he was clearly cast because he bears a passing resemblance to Sean Connery.

   That’s no bad thing, of course. I would’ve cast someone who looked like Connery too (I wouldn’t, however, have cast Connery’s brother, as Italian director Alberto De Martino did that same year).

   I had big hopes for this film, not least because it managed to spawn a sequel, but mainly because I had seen so much love for it on the internet.

   First, the good: there’s the two glamorous female assassins, Irma and Penelope, played by Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina. There’s an outrageously Avengers-like scene near the beginning in which they emerge from the ocean, clad in bikinis and armed with spear-guns, and kill a sunbather. There’s a cigar which fires bullets into whoever smokes it. There is the excellent Nigel Green.

   Also, Leonard Rossiter (whose ability and work, of course, there isn’t a superlative strong enough to describe) dies in another Avengers-like scene in which our pair of saucy slaughterers paralyses him with a mysterious spy-fi drug and send him tumbling off the balcony of his fifteen-storey apartment building.

   There’s also a great bit where Drummond meets his old army friend, the crime boss Boxer, who is lying low in a tropically-themed flat after faking his own death. It’s one of those instances in which the character seems to live beyond the confines of the scene he’s in.

   Finally, there’s the climax, where Drummond and his nemesis creep around a life-size chess board in a duel to the death. Again, very Avengers. So, how come I don’t like the film as a whole?

   Well, the plot is dull and unimaginative. It’s all about a company named Phoenecian Oil and a merger which one man on the board of directors, Henry Keller, opposes. A third party has offered to resolve the issue, via an undisclosed method, within six months and asks to receive a million pounds in return. Subsequently, Keller dies in a plane explosion, the merger can go ahead and this mysterious problem-solver demands payment. It is, of course, villain Carl Peterson and he wants to take his murderous solution to every corporation in the world.

   Drummond is tasked with finding out what is going on. His only lead is an inch of audio tape which Keller had recorded a message, but only half of one sentence remains. It could well reveal the answer to the mystery, if Drummond can only make sense of the jumble of words.

   Unfortunately for Drummond, and indeed the viewer, his American nephew Robert has come to stay with him. Now, in order to secure distribution in the states, many British films cast an American actor in a role. This is one such example. As the ‘60s was a decade obsessed with youth, perhaps it seemed like a good idea to cast one in the film. Arguably, the result isn’t a good one, as the Robert character brings next to nothing to the film and distracts from the story it is trying to tell.

   The whole movie can be divided between the first half, set in London, and the second half, which moves to Northern Italy. Here, the film seems to come to a crashing halt. Drummond meets Peterson, yes, and we get to see his castle lair, but nothing really happens. It’s this half which I have always struggled with during three previous efforts to appreciate the film.

   I must reiterate, however, that the film seems popular enough with other people, and is certainly better than a couple of other Bond-pastiches of the era, such as Death Is a Woman (1966) and Hot Enough for June (1964), both of which I found to be utterly unwatchable.

   Despite this, I’ll check out the sequel [Some Girls Do (1969) was the second], while I’m always in the mood to watch the older Bulldog Drummond films, and indeed the books.

Rating: **