DEADLIER THAN THE MALE. Universal, 1967. Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Nigel Green, Suzanna Leigh, Steve Carlson, Virginia North. Story & screenplay by Liz Charles-Williams, David D. Osborn & Jimmy Sangster, based on the characters created by Herman C. “Sapper” McNeile. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   Compared to the Dick Barton film (reviewed here ), there’s nothing as pre-adolescent in Deadlier Than the Male, which is firmly adolescent in its imitation-Bond fantasies.

   I must have seen this six times in my Senior year of High School, and I tried hard to convince my serious-film-student friends there was something really worthwhile there amid the sex, violence and Eastman Color. They told me that even I should be grown-up enough to reject this mindless rubbish, but it became available on video recently and I enjoyed it all over again.

   This was the first Bulldog Drummond movie in about 20 years, and the producers approached it with B-movie gusto, garnished it with sexy assassins (Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, whose un-self-conscious bad acting seems quite fitting here), a scar-faced Chinese bodyguard, a giant chess game and Nigel Green’s droll villainy, all splashed across colorful locations tricked out with James Bond-style fights and wise cracks.

   I have to agree with my old friends about its artistic merits, but the thing is infused with such a low-budget, gee-wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-make-a-movie elan that if you haven’t read any good comic books lately, you might like it.

   By the way, Bulldog Drummond is incarnated here by actor Richard Johnson, who also impersonated British Icons, Lord Nelson and Nayland Smith in films that were much less fun.

TIME LOCK. British Lion/Romulus, UK, 1957. Robert Beatty, Lee Patterson, Betty McDowall, Vincent Winter, Robert Ayres, Alan Gifford, Larry Cross, Sandra Francis, Sean Connery. Based on a play by Arthur Hailey. Director: Gerald Thomas.

   While this is a small scale British thriller, and filmed there, the story itself takes place in Canada, as a small boy gets trapped in a bank vault right at closing time on Friday. The lock on the vault is timed so that it cannot be opened until Monday morning.

   And that’s it. That’s all there is. The boy’s parents are there, as well as a couple of bank personnel, soon joined by more bank people, a police inspector, a radio news reporter, various doctors, and a supply of workmen with hammers and sledges (including Sean Connery, in what I’m informed was his first film speaking role).

   All very professional, all quite concerned and even more competent. The mother goes into near hysterics at one point, but she’s quickly quieted, allowing the men on the job to do their job.

   No side plots, no background on any of the people involved, and not a lot in the way of suspense either, even though that’s the category I put this film in.

   If that last sentence sounds a bit snarky, well, maybe, but it is interesting to see how good men can figure out a good puzzle that’s presented to them, and then doing a good job in carrying out their ideas. On the other hand, if Sean Connery didn’t happen to have been in it, or if he’d never played James Bond, no one would have ever heard of this film.

THE 39 STEPS. J. Arthur Rank, 1959. Kenneth More (Richard Hannay), Taina Elg, Brenda De Banzie, Barry Jones, Reginald Beckwith, Faith Brook, Michael Goodliffe, James Hayter, Joan Hickson, Sid James. Based on the book by James Buchan. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   Based on the book, naturally, just as it says, but if truth be told, this version of the several films made of Buchan’s novel follows the Hitchcock version of 1935, the one with Robert Donat, more than the original text. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course!

   So, how does it compare to the 1935 version? Can it possibly be better? It’s in color, which is somewhat of a plus, and even though the Scottish highlands are beautiful in color, there’s something to be said about the edge you get when you see them in black and white.

   Kenneth More in this later film is more than up to the role, but he’s still no Robert Donat. As for Finnish actress Taina Elg, she was also a ballet dancer, and her legs are certainly up the role – which leads us straight to one of the better scenes of the movie, if you were to ask me.

   The story: When a woman he knows to be a spy is killed in Hannay’s apartment, and knowing time is of the essence in terms of the undercover plot she was working on, and based on what he has learned and knowing that waiting for the police to sort things out will take too long , he decides to bolt and make his way to Scotland – with half of Scotland Yard hot on his trail, or so it seems.

   Whereby he connects up with the totally innocent Taina Elg (Fisher), first once on a train, then again later, whether she likes it or not, and of course she doesn’t, although she has no choice in the matter.

   Hannay also meets, in pasing, several well-known British character actors, which probably helped to make this movie very popular in England at the time. It’s now many years later, however, and if you — like me — are a long way from the British Isles, the cast may be mostly incidental.

   All in all, this is an enjoyable diversion, but in its running time of barely 90 minutes (the same as the 1935 version) the story seems rushed and out of breath for most of its time on the screen. It’s one of those cases, I suppose, where the reviewer ends by saying, “Your mileage may vary.”

THE 39 STEPS. Made for British TV movie: BBC, 28 December 2008. Rupert Penry-Jones (Richard Hannay), Lydia Leonard, David Haig, Patrick Malahide, Patrick Kennedy, Hellory Sinclair, Eddie Marsan. Screenplay: Lizzie Mickery, based on the novel by John Buchan. Director: James Hawes.

   This more recent version of Buchan’s book follows the novel more closely than Hitchcock did, and consequently, more than the film with Kenneth More. (See above.) Of course there has to be a romantic interest in any adaptation of the book – doesn’t there? – and so there is in this one as well.

   Which makes the gender of the screenwriter important, or so it seems. The girl, or rather the very capable woman Richard Hannay meets in this BBC production is a suffragette, a grand champion for the right of women to vote in this dramatic adventure taking place in Britain in the dark days before World War I. It’s all about German spies, German sympathizers, a coded notebook and (eventually) a reference to the mysterious thirty-nine steps.

   The novel, once again, rather than Hitchcock’s version is therefore the model, but only the model. (There is a scene, however, in which Hannay is fired upon by a wonderfully antique cropduster biplane while he’s being chased against the Scottish countryside, just to remind the viewer, that the master director was not entirely forgotten.)

   But twist follows upon delightful twist, so much so that I guarantee you that your head will be spinning by the time you get to the end of the film. Delightful, I repeat, and I mean it (most TV critics did not think highly of it at the time, and that’s an understatement), but in retrospect there’s at least one and a half twists too many. I fear that if I were to watch it again (and I may) the story line would not make any sense at all.

   Most of the cast will be unfamiliar to audiences in the US, so again there are no distractions there. Hannay is played by Rupert Penry-Jones, previously the star of the British TV espionage thriller MI-5. He was also said to be in the running to play James Bond at one time , but while he’s very definitely athletic and handsome, he doesn’t seem to have the magnetism and screen presence of, say, a Daniel Craig.

   The other of the two leading characters constantly paired off with each other throughout the movie, the very capable Victoria Sinclair (I know, I’m repeating myself), well played by Lydia Leonard, a relative unknown, is often … let’s say extremely efficient and effective and say no more.

   There is a scene, by the way, in which the pair are handcuffed together – no surprise there? – but its significance is cut short, alas, by a resolution that comes far too quickly, while the ending asks more questions than are answered, but to my mind, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Trailer: 1935 version (poor sound).

Trailer: 1959 version.

Video clips: 2008 version.

DICK BARTON STRIKES BACK. Hammer Films, UK, 1949. Don Stannard, Sebastian Cabot, Jean Lodge, James Raglan, Bruce Walker, Humphrey Kent. Director: Godfrey Grayson.

   On the same enjoyably juvenile level as the pair of adventure serials reviewed here a while back, there’s Dick Barton Strikes Back, starring square jawed Don Stannard as square-jawed Dick Barton, world famous secret agent.

   This is a little kid’s idea of a Spy Movie, with transparent trickery, obvious “surprise” villains and character development just below the level of a CLUE game, but it was clearly also the precursor of the James Bond films, with the suave, hard-fighting hero flung in and out of the clutches of sinister villains and predatory females with equal aplomb.

   It’s a time-waster, sure, but a fun thing, with death rays, a sinister carnival and a really gripping final set-to up and down a (rather unsettlingly phallic) tower.

   There’s also Sebastian Cabot, unrecognizable sans his beard, sporting a slimy moustache and the definitive Gloating Laugh: a rich, hammy, belly-jiggling, touch-of-madness cascade of sound that usually follows lines like, “Unfortunately, you vill not liff to vitness our triumph. Mwah-hu-huh-haaahh!”

   Delivering a laugh like that with a straight face is generally beyond actors of his calibre, but Cabot enters into the spirit of the thing with a childish glee I found infectious.

DR. NO. United Artists, 1962. Sean Connery, James Bond, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Bernard Lee, Anthony Dawson, Zena Marshall, John Kitzmuller, Eunice Gayson, Lois Maxwell. Director: Terence Young.

   What can I say? This was one of those movies that hit me at an impressionable age and gave me the notion that it might be fun to Fight Crime for a living. Watching it now, in the Wisdom of my advancing years, I tried to figure out just how it got so dated; I mean, here’s the Hero, running around in a button-down suit, with a dumb hat like my Uncle Wayne used to wear, cracking corny jokes and slicking his hair down with Vitalis.

   Then I realized just how long it has been since I was Young and Impressionable.

   Let me try to put it in Historical Context: The Movies learned to talk somewhere around 1930. This film was made in 1962, some 32 years later. How much time has elapsed since the making of Dr. No and the writing of this piece?

   I tell you, it’s enough to make a man think.

   It may be, then, that in not so many more years, Dr. No will seem as charmingly energetic as The Westland Case and The Mystery of the Hooded Horsemen. It certainly has a lot going for it, what with fights, car crashes, bad back-projection and the improbably-cantilevered Ursula Andress in her screen debut.

   Maybe so.

ROGUES’ REGIMENT. Universal International, 1948. Dick Powell, Märta Torén, Vincent Price, Stephen McNally, Edgar Barrier, Henry Rowland, Carol Thurston, James Millican, Richard Loo, Philip Ahn. Director: Robert Florey.

   Search and Destroy, the most recent movie I happen to have reviewed on this blog, appeared some four years after the end of the Viet Nam war. Most of Rogues’ Regiment, on the other hand, takes place in Viet Nam (aka French Indo-China) at the beginning of the conflict, as it originally took place.

   The premise is that one of the would-be defendants at the Nuremburg Trials, one Martin Bruener, had made his escape from Germany and was never found. As his photograph had never been taken, except for one in which only the back of his head can be seen, no one even knows what he looks like.

   The trail, though meager and cold, leads one man, Whit Corbett (Dick Powell), to Indo-China, where the French and the Foreign Legion are desperately fighting to keep control there. So desperate are they that they are accepting former WW2 soldiers from all over the world — including Germany — as new recruits. Hence the title of the film, Rogues’ Regiment.

   Powell goes so far as to sign up for a tour of duty with the Legion, and although we do not know this right away, so does his quarry (Stephen McNally). Aiding the latter is Vincent Price, a German posing as a Dutch importer of antiques (and guns for the Vietnamese revolutionaries).

   Aiding Powell, though, is a French operative (Märta Torén) posing as a nightclub singer, and the latter are more than a match for the former. Quite predictably Powell falls for Miss Torén, who also gets to sing a song or two. Powell does not.

   The movie is enjoyable enough — there is no major skimping on the cast or the production values — but the biggest problem I had with the film is that it makes everything involved with catching ex-Nazis all too easy. Nearly a one-man job, in fact, if the one man happened to be Dick Powell.

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES. Gaumont, 2006. Music Box Films (US), 2008. Original title: OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions. Subtitled. Jean Dujardin (Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath, alias OSS 117), Bérénice Bejo (Larmina), Aure Atika (Princess Al Tarouk). Scenario by Jean-François Halin, based on the novel OSS 117 by Jean Bruce. Adaptation & dialogue by Jean-François Halin & Michel Hazanavicius. Music by Ludovic Bource & Kamle Ech Cheikh. Director: Michel Hazanavicius.

   Cairo, 1955. The Cold War is hot here. The British struggle to keep control of the Suez Canal. There is a rising Arab nation seeking freedom from the West. Toss in some Muslim terrorists, some Nazis, a missing Russian ship full of weapons, and a missing French spy OSS 238 and the Middle East is ready to explode. The French government turn to OSS 117 to make the Middle East safe.

    “No problem,” responds the smug spy.

   Billed as a spy spoof featuring the French James Bond, the hilarious parody undersells itself. Cairo, Nest of Spies is also a wonderful comedy satirizing the insensitivity of the West to other cultures such as the Muslims.

   Hubert tells his beautiful Egyptian assistant that he always learns the language of the native people in every country he visits. For his trip to Egypt he learned hieroglyphics and ignored Arabic. OSS 117 stops a Muezzin from conducting the Muslim Morning prayer because the noise was keeping him awake, and he is clueless to why anyone is upset by his actions.

   Never too serious, the film does take its always successful shots at Bond, as well as the 60’s Eurospy genre that includes the original OSS 117 films. Those who find Sean Connery’s 007 too perfect, from his repeated escapes from sure death to his expert attitude about everything, will enjoy OSS 117 ‘s version of those qualities.

   Jean Dujardin is the perfect mimic of Connery’s Bond. From a raise of an eyebrow to the way he stands before he is attacked, Dujardin looks the part of Bond. The only difference between the two is Dujardin’s version makes you laugh.

   Hubert is a clueless colonialist who gives pictures of French President Rene Coty for tips to native workers. He is in denial about his sexuality, while he can verbally seduce any woman, he prefers fighting with men over sex with women. He is not stupid. OSS 117 can learn any language, dance, or musical instrument almost immediately. He is just blind to any culture or belief outside his own male Western world.

   While filmed in 2006, Cairo, Nest of Spies has the visual look of a 1950s-60s spy film such as Dr. No and Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. As you view this clip from IMDb.com, notice how the look and music mimics early Bond films and John Barry’s music.

   Those who want to learn more about OSS 117’s past, how he pre-dates Fleming’s Bond, his 265 novels, his other films and attempts at television, I recommend a visit to the Double O Section website.

   The OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies official website offers some more trailers to view as well as more information about the makings of the film.

   YouTube has trailers and samples of the other OSS 117 films. Most are in French except for this trailer for the American release of OSS 117 Is Not Dead (1957).

A LADY WITHOUT PASSPORT. MGM, 1950. Hedy Lamarr, John Hodiak, James Craig, George Macready, Steven Geray, Bruce Cowling, Nedrick Young, Steven Hill, Richard Crane. Director: Joseph H. Lewis.

   This is one of those black and white semi-documentary movies about one of the various US law enforcement services that were common in the late 1940s and early 50s, in this case the Immigration Service.

   While the story value is rather low, if you were to ask me, that the director was Joseph H. Lewis means that there’s lots of entertainment value to be found in the staging, the lighting, the settings, the camera angles – everything that a director can do to make a dull thud of a movie interesting, Joseph Lewis (no relation) does.

   John Hodiak is sent to Havana to get the goods on a sophisticated operation of smuggling illegal immigrants into the US through that port of entry, and in particular mastermind George Macready, who plays his part to the hilt. No one can act in as slick, sinister and evil a fashion as he!

   The would-be immigrants are mostly refugees from war-torn Europe or criminals of various persuasions, and among them is Hedy Lamarr, as radiantly beautiful as she always was as a former prisoner of Nazi concentration camp.

   John Hodiak falls in love with her, of course, as who wouldn’t, and is even willing to give up his job for her, in light of the obviously untenable situation they find themselves in.

   The problem is, from the viewer’s point of view, is that Miss Lamarr is far too beautiful, with far too many fashionable clothes, to ever be accepted as a refugee from the Nazis with no legal place to escape to. Accept her at face value, for the sake of the story, or not at all. While I don’t know about you, I went with the first choice, but full honesty in reviewing, according to my Guild notes, requires me to point this particular dilemma out to you.

   Havana makes a nice place to film a movie – many shots are on location – but speaking of unusual camera angles, as I was earlier, two scenes are most worthy of note:

   First, an confrontation on a busy Manhattan street at the beginning of the film, one that ends in the death of one of the participants, is filmed from inside an automobile, looking outward through the windows as the camera tracks the action; a second one, looking straight down from above as the passengers like ants make their way out of a downed plane in the Everglades and form themselves into groups, is a scene I’ve never seen from this particular perspective before.

TANGIER ASSIGNMENT. Rock Pictures, 1955. Filmed and originally released in Spain as Billete para Tánger. Robert Simmons, June Powell, Fernando Rey. Director: Ted Leversuch.

   Everyone else in the cast appears to be Spanish, and as such, all of them are unknown to me. Even of the three of those above in leading roles, the only one I might have seen in a movie before is Fernando Rey.

   I’ll take that back. Bob Simmons, who plays an international undercover agent named Valentine in this film, I have seen many times before and so have you.

   He was mostly a stunt man over his lengthy movie-making career (1939-1985), including long stints doubling for Sean Connery in many of the James Bond films. He was, in fact, the figure you saw in opening gun-barrel sequences of the first three of them.

   Tangier Assignment (to use the English title) was filmed on location, either in Tangiers or outlying areas of Morocco, which means that (A) the settings are authentic, and (B) it really ought to have filmed in color. So far all to the good, but let’s put it this way. I am trying to say something positive about the story, but … it’s not easy.

   Not that it’s terrible, exactly, and I’ll get back to that, but the story itself is awfully ordinary if not outright dull. Valentine is in Tangiers on the trail of some smugglers, but when he enters the small apartment of the man he is to contact there, he finds him dead on the floor, with a knife in his back. You might think that as far as the next step is concerned, calling the police, he is going to be in trouble, but (and this I concede is a surprise) the local police inspector (Fernando Rey) is amiable, friendly and understanding.

   Which means he takes the killing on his turf totally in stride, even when (no surprise) they go back to the apartment to find … no dead body on the floor.

   June Powell, who made one other movie besides this one (and one episode of one British TV show, is a nightclub singer who attracts Valentine’s attention and seems to tag along on some of his forays along the coast to find spots (caves) the smugglers might be using as a base of operations – the obligatory female role, you might say, and you might be right.

   According to IMDB, and here is where a big problem with the story may lie, the film is supposed to be some 80 minutes long. The copy I have, on a collector-to-collector DVD, barely makes it much over 60. This may explain why, even with a brief burst of action at the end, the primary bad guy is a guy we’ve barely seen before.

   I think some intervening material may have gotten chopped out, perhaps to fit a time slot at some time or another on TV. And if so, and this is pure supposition, of course, I’d rather they had cut some of the early musical numbers, of which there are more than one, rather than story.

   But to get back to the good, though, and I’ve been sitting here at the keyboard long enough to remember to tell you this, Bob Simmons is a wonder. He is one of most active undercover agents I have ever seen. He leapfrogs over his opponents, literally, jumps out windows, makes flying leaps over walls, vaults fences, jumps down terraces, then two at a time, somersaulting as he falls before dashing off, with none of the large cast of villains able to follow, totally winded if not seriously injured in their endeavors. Marvelous!

MIRAGE. Universal Pictures, 1965, Gregory Peck, Diane Baker, Walter Matthau, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Weston, Leif Erickson, Walter Abel, George Kennedy, Robert H. Harris, House B. Jameson, Hari Rhodes. Screenplay by Peter Stone, based on the novel Fallen Angel by Howard Fast, writing under the pen name of Walter Ericson. Director: Edward Dmytryk.

   If you’ll check back nearly a year ago on this blog, you’ll find a list David Vineyard did of films that involve amnesia as a major portion of their plots. Mirage is the 16th film listed, but I don’t believe that David had rankings in mind when he came up with the list. I may be wrong, but I believe the list consists of those movies in order as they came in mind to him.

   The reason for pointing this out is that I’d personally have to put this movie in the top five, if not one of the top three. What Mirage is about, and almost nothing else, is what happens to David Stillwell (Gregory Peck’s character) after the lights go out in the New York City skyscraper he’s in when the lights go out and he has to make his way down the stairs in darkness, accompanied by a woman who recognizes him only when they reach the bottom and he has no idea who she is.

   But no one knows who he is either, nor can he find the fourth subfloor in the building again, the one he followed Diane Baker down after she ran away from him. His office, where’s he worked as a cost accountant for the past two years is no longer there; the tender behind the bar at his favorite watering hole does not recognize him; the refrigerator in his apartment is empty – two years of his life, in fact and as he discovers are Gone.

   Openings like these are never match up with the endings, no matter how clever they are, but Mirage is almost, but not quite, an exception. As Stillwell gradually learns, his predicament is closely tied to the death of a noted peace activist, who fell to his death just about the same time as his memory left him.

   Gregory Peck is stolidly confused and annoyed at himself and the situation he finds himself in, while Diane Baker does her best to care for him (apparently) and at the same time not tell him anything substantial about his past.

   The best performances are reserved to the character actors in the film, beginning with Walter Matthau as PI Ted Caselle, whose first case this is when Stillwell hires him out of sheer desperation and no one else to turn to. Add Robert H. Harris as a psychiatrist who thinks Stillwell is pulling some kind of fraud and throws him out of his office; George Kennedy as a bespectacled man with a gun who’s not afraid to use it; Kevin McCarthy as a sniveling sycophant (he always plays this role well); and House Jameson as a boozy doorway derelict with a purpose.

   Matthau is absolutely marvelous in his role, by the way, witty and far from pretentious; his was a part I remember vividly from the first time I watched this movie some 45 years ago. Over the time that’s passed, though, I discovered I’d pretty much forgotten the ending, which I think makes sense, although I’d have to watch the movie again to be sure.

   Filmed in black and white, Mirage veers close to the film noir category, but never quite makes it. The outdoor scenes are fine, but the indoor ones have the same production values at TV did at the time: cardboardy and dull.

   Overall, if you’ve read this far into the review, this is a film you should not miss. It’s no masterpiece, but as a crime drama with some sparks, it will certainly more than do until one that is comes along. (And who knows how long that will be.)