Tue 17 May 2011
Movie Review: TANGIER ASSIGNMENT (1955).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Suspense & espionage films[8] Comments
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!
May 19th, 2011 at 6:17 am
Synchronicity strikes back! I read this, then got in my car and turned on NPR where they were talking to stuntman Vic Armstrong, who mentioned Robert Simmons as an early influence on him!
May 19th, 2011 at 8:39 am
Dan
Very strange! But not surprising, considering how coincidental followup events like this happen to me all the time. Whenever I come across a new word, a new author, a new actor I hadn’t known about before, you can bet I’ll come across it or her or him again within the next couple of days.
I have to admit, though, that your turnaround time was a lot faster than most of mine!
— Steve
May 25th, 2011 at 11:28 am
So, was this part of a routine trade, or did you actually seek this one out for any reason?
May 25th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
There is a dealer from whom I buy large lots of “noir” movies at a time, 20-25 or so, and I don’t always know very much about the films ahead of time. The title sounded appealing!
October 6th, 2012 at 10:38 pm
FYI: My dad was DP on that movie. I was just a kid, living in England, from whence the movie originated, the “brainchild” of the director, Ted Leversuch, whom I knew personally. The movie was shot in Spain, because my father was not able to get into the British cinematographers’ union. I believe it was a closed cast system, very “old boy,” and naturally as my father was originally from Poland and spoke with an accent – well… I know it wasn’t the greatest movie in the world, and I only saw it once on television; but my dad needed to work. Hence…
Just FYI, for anyone in the movie business who has an interest in “antiquarian” movie trivia.
Mike
October 7th, 2012 at 2:14 am
Just the kind of connection to the movies we watch that we live for here, Mike. In spite of the problems I pointed out with the film, I had the sense that the people making it had a good time doing so.
June 4th, 2015 at 9:35 am
Perhaps art does imitate life and life imitates art. Could Tangier Assignment have been a double entendre ?
One of the (minor ?) actors on this film was Felix Sommery-Gade. His name appears in an investigation done by British Security on the British contacts of a Belgian by the name of Jean P. Keusters. Felix Sommery-Gade was one of them.
Keusters, aka ‘Johnny’ visited England before the war and was suspected of being a spy. His group used the pretext of movie-film work as part of their various covers.
Arrested by the French in 1939 and sentenced to death, Keusters somehow survived execution. Keusters was a dangerous Abwehr agent during the war involved in the arrest of SOE agent Edward Cleeren ‘Bravery’ and his group in Liege. Later he was identified as being involved in interrogating Allied prisoner airmen.
I don’t know if Felix Sommery-Gade worked in any other films or not but I would very much like to have a picture of him to add to Keuster’s file.
June 4th, 2015 at 11:54 am
According to IMDb, this is the only movie that Felix Sommery-Gade appeared in. Using Google, I couldn’t find a photo of him anywhere online, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist.