LIGHTNING BOLT (Operazione Goldman, 1966)

The American title of Antonio Margheriti's Eurospy film presumably has "lightning" in its title because the James Bond film Thunderball had only recently come out, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Woolner Brothers, who distributed the film here and partly financed it, worried that the original title would make the thing sound Jewish. As far as the original writers were concerned, or so Wikipedia tells us, the hero was called Goldman because of his unlimited expense account -- and as a play on Goldfinger, or course. For U.S. consumption he's "Lightning Bolt" but is mostly known by his real name, Harry Sennett (Anthony Eisley). He answers to Captain Pat Flanagan (Diana Lorys), who's introduced in a manner that teases that she'll be the dominant character. Her share of the action is relatively light, however, though she does get to save Harry by shooting an enemy female. At other times she may as well be a damsel in distress. While the judo-throwing lady on the U.S. poster hints at female empowerment, you don't really get much of that here.

Instead, Flanagan and Sennett are tasked with figuring out how recent failed space shots from Cape Kennedy -- represented by archival footage -- might have been sabotaged. While the globe-trotting storylines of 1960s spy films were a big part of their appeal, Lightning Bolt restricts itself to Florida and environs, where our protagonists pursue various leads on their way to discovering the saboteur.

Goldman makes up for its limited scope with an admirably absurd villain. Beer magnate Rehte, played by Italian actor Folco Lulli done up as the stereotypical crew-cut, "pig-eyed" German, has a hankering to rule the world. The key to his plan is installing a superweapon on the moon that will allow him to blackmail all nations with the threat of mass destruction. He can't have other countries landing anything on the moon before his plans are complete -- hence the sabotage. Director Margheriti tries to further make up for his film's lack of variety in locations by giving Rehte a relatively impressive villain's lair in an underwater complex that somehow was built near Florida without the Americans finding out about it until Sennett and Flanagan applied themselves. The omnipresent Rehte brand also gives the film a modest Pop Art touch.

It's not enough for Rehte to rule an underwater city, scheme for world rule and brew beer of uncertain quality. He also has ways of dealing with insubordinate or incompetent henchpeople. He puts them in cryogenic suspended animation, a fate close to death that leaves victims the hope of revival. Rehte keeps one of his henchwomen in line by keeping her father in this state, but when he punishes her by thawing dad out and reducing him to a rapidly-moldering corpse, it only drives her once and for all to the good guys' side. Their task is to rescue a Scots-American rocket scientist Rehte had kidnapped (Paco Sanz) while destroying the brewer's rocket and his entire complex while they're at it. There's a respectable amount of destruction in the end. but at the end of the day the villain isn't compelling enough for his downfall to really impress us. Eisley lacks the charisma or more plausible prowess of Brad Harris and Tony Kendall in the Komissar X films. Overall, Lightning Bolt barely manages to distinguish itself in a momentarily very crowded field.

KOMMISSAR X: THREE GOLDEN CATS (1966)

At the height of the Sixties spy-film craze the Germans made a series of seven films based on the pulp fiction character Kommissar X, who despite the name is neither a Communist nor even a spy but a globetrotting American private eye. Three Golden Cats (also known in the U.S. as Death is Nimble, Death is Quick) is the second film of the series. As they did throughout, Tony Kendall plays Joe "Kommissar X" Walker -- the nickname isn't used here -- and Brad Harris plays his sort of friend/sort of rival, policeman Tom Rowland. Co-directed by Rudolf Zehetgruber and Gianfranco Parolini, the latter later best known for the Sabata spaghetti westerns, the film benefits greatly from its Sri Lanka locations and the colorful cinematography of Klaus von Rautenfeld. Our heroes end up in the erstwhile Ceylon to protect an American heiress (Ann Smyrner) -- who seems resourceful enough not to need their help much -- from the kidnappers of the Golden Cats, a former anti-imperialist guerrilla group that turned into gangsters-for-hire after independence.

Behind the Golden Cats, we learn toward the end, is a mad scientist who wanted ransom money to finance the biological warfare projects that got him thrown out of the U.S. This Bondish sort of villain exists mostly to put some of the protagonists in a death trap and is completely eclipsed,  by the Cats' head karate killer, King (former Hercules Dan Vadis). This may be Vadis's finest hour on film. Bald and mustachioed and coolly glowering, making a fetish of donning a headband before a kill, King has an indisputable menacing charisma that upstages the ostensible stars on every occasion. Vadis and Harris staged their own fight scenes -- Rowland is also a karate expert -- and did many of their own stunts in this action-packed picture. They make it look more like a precocious martial-arts movie than a Eurospy film -- the training sequence involving scantily clad Sri Lankan policewomen definitely doesn't defuse that impression -- and their final showdown in the Cats' temple is a bravura blend of camp theatrics and succinct brutality from two plausible looking bruisers.

You also get an acid attack in a shower, an assistant assassin who specializes in nitro capsules, a cool boat chase with our heroes pursued by a futuristic vehicle through an exploding swamp and a climactic collision between a speeding car and an airplane on the tarmac. You also get ladies' man Walker getting kissed by an elephant and getting dumped at the end by the heiress, an equally capable Sri Lankan heroine (Michele Mahaut) and the elephant at the same time.

Kendall's horndog antics date the picture to its time, but Harris and Vadis's commitment to pure action make Three Golden Cats feel more like a contemporary action film than may of its actual contemporaries. Judged by the standard of any time period, it's an enjoyable piece of unrepentant pop trash that inspires confidence in the rest of the series.

TARGET FOR KILLING (Der Geheimnis der gelben Moenche, 1966)

Manfred R. Köhler's "The Secret of the Golden Monks" plays out like a hybrid movie, part Bond-inspired Eurospy action, part Edgar Wallace inspired plotting as befits the film's largely Germanic origin. While there's an unavoidable acknowledgment of the Cold War, with emphasis on both sides' dabbling in the paranormal, it's a crime story at heart. Stewart Granger, who seems to be having a good time howevermuch he despised the genre stuff he made in the Sixties, is James Vine, introduced meeting cute with a pretty girl, Sandra Perkins (Karin Dor), whom he recruits into helping him land a jetliner after the crew (including pilot Klaus Kinski) ditch it, their plan being to crash the plane with no survivors.

Kinski & Co. work for "the Giant" (Kurt Jurgens), whose inner circle includes a vaguely Asiatic hypnotist and the sadistic female operative, Tiger (Scilla Gabel). While they've collaborated with the Eastern bloc, their motives now are purely mercenary. The Giant has been hired by Sandra's uncle (Adolfo "Largo" Celi) to kill her for reasons that become clear only when Uncle himself is captured and put to the torture. It turns out that he wanted Sandra dead before she could come into her $70,000,000 inheritance, which would fall to him as her guardian. It occurs to the Giant that with a hypnotist at hand, he could get Sandra under his power and have control over her fortune rather than take whatever pittance Uncle had offered him. An interesting aspect of this otherwise unambitious story is how nearly all the villains are looking to get out of the game. The Kinski character is a particularly reluctant villain and ends up sacrificing his life to save someone else, while the Giant himself longs to retire on the proceeds of this last big score. There's something almost noirish about that, amid all the Eurospy trappings from the golden monks of the German title occupying an old cathedral to the inevitable storming of the villain's headquarters and the slaughter of his singularly incompetent troops -- the sort who'll descend an exterior staircase without cover to engage with the troop climbing upward, rather than rest on their high ground.

When it really counts, James Vine saves the day with timely explosives and by turning a mirror on a hypnotist. None of it can be taken very seriously and no one on screen really does, possibly excepting future Bond-villain Jurgens, whose low-key, businesslike villainy can be taken as a refreshing departure from genre cliche or the work of a bored performer. Granger is never less than a pro and seems to do a fair amount of his own fighting, and his apparent willingness to get into the spirit of the proceedings helps make Target For Killing a mostly pleasant diversion for an hour and a half or thereabouts.

On the Big Screen: ATOMIC BLONDE (2017)

This is a movie that stages a fight behind a movie screen projecting Stalker, perhaps so the filmmakers can boast that they got people who came to see Charlize Theron beat up people to learn about Andrei Tarkovsky on Google. It's a film that casts Barbara Sukowa in a bit part as if it were a homage to New German Cinema. It is, as I mentioned in passing, a film in which Charlize Theron beats people up, but that doesn't mean it can't be pretentious in its own fashion.

As a movie star, Theron was born in violence. In 2 Days in the Valley she was not just the hot new hottie but the one who got attention for bare-knuckle brawling with Terri Hatcher. She's always been something of an Amazon, and that  probably made it easier for her to earn acclaim and awards playing a Ms. Hyde version of the type, an uglyfied man-hating murderer in Monster. It has long seemed like her destiny to be an action star, especially as she advances into her forties past leading-lady territory. She made a move in that direction right after Monster, but Aeon Flux set back her cause for a while. More recently she's become an A-level genre fixture, finally established as an action goddess by Mad Max: Fury Road. I don't know what the hell she was doing in the last Fast and Furious movie, but for her latest star vehicle she's teamed with some of the people who miraculously transformed Keanu Reeves into a midlife badass in the John Wick films. The promise of Atomic Blonde is that Charlize Theron will not only beat people up, but will do so with style and devastating force and little winks to the movie nerds in the audience.

Stuntman turned director David Leitch has filmed a screenplay adapted from one of those obscure graphic novels that Hollywood pays people to read -- don't envy them until you read a few hundred -- by screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who most recently wrote the second 300 movie -- the really bad one. I don't know whether he or the original writer deserves the "credit" for Atomic Blonde's utterly generic spy story, which depends on that old standby, the List. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbles, the intelligence agencies of several nations are fighting over one of those lists, the existence of which automatically endangers vast numbers of operatives and assets. MI6's contender in this deadly sweepstakes is Lorraine Broughton (Theron), whose sole useful attribute, from what we see, is her versatility in hand-to-hand combat. She replaces a British agent who was killed, presumably by a traitor known as Satchel. She is to be assisted by David Percival (James McAvoy) an agent working on the other side of the Wall as a black marketeer. Percival has a back-up for the list: the German agent who created the list and has memorized all of it. If all else fails, this man is to be smuggled out of East Berlin. Broughton and Percival have a prickly relationship that happily doesn't consummate in romance, as might have been taken for granted a few years ago. Instead, our heroine has her very own Bond Girl in the form of a French agent (Sofia "The Mummy" Boutella). None of this can be told straightforwardly, of course, because this is the 21st century. Instead, the details are related after the fact during a framing-device debriefing that preempts any suspense about Broughton in Berlin. MI6 has been taken over by Hydra, it seems, since Broughton must answer for her actions to Arnim Zola and his U.S. counterpart (John Goodman). Any narrative (or erotic) momentum the film works up is broken up by its constant return to the inert framing device -- but let's face it. The narrative isn't really meant to have momentum of its own; it only has to transport us from one action setpiece to another, and while the story of the film is pretty tedious, and eventually predictable, those setpieces mostly live up to the advance hype. I'm not going to bother describing them, apart from citing one that plays out during a lengthy Rope-style "single take" as the piece de resistance. It will do to recommend Atomic Blonde as an action film that puts Theron over as an opportunistic, resilient brawler in a relatively realistic style. If Wonder Woman is too fantastic for your tastes, Atomic Blonde should end up your female action movie of the year, though it may try your patience at times when it tries to tell a story instead of doing what it's really good at.

On the Big Screen: BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)

Steven Spielberg now directs movies for old people. It was an overwhelmingly gray-haired crowd at the neighborhood art house where I saw his newest film -- and I'm not exactly young myself. You could believe that these people have grown old with Spielberg, and you could more easily believe that only they could have much interest in Bridge of Spies. It was a good-sized crowd of old people, but I don't know what the screenings look like at the malls where the kids go. Spielberg isn't the brand name he used to be. That's partly because Spielberg has strayed more often recently from special effects and pre-sold genre material. Bridge is another of his adult pictures, another attempt to reach beyond his supposed limitations. As if acknowledging a need for help in this venture, he reached out to the Coen brothers, of all people, to re-write Matt Charman's original script. They make an unlikely team: the arch manipulator of emotions and the brothers often accused of cold, contemptuously satiric superiority to their subjects. Then again, Spielberg took it upon himself to make a Stanley Kubrick movie once, so maybe he recognizes an affinity inside himself with the "cold" auteurs that others miss. I'm guessing that he called the Coens in to give the dialogue some period authenticity as well as a certain snap that the brothers alone, arguably, can supply. They were certainly a gift to Tom Hanks, and perhaps they owed something to him after putting him through The Ladykillers. Hanks has a field day here in a role that's half lawyer, half salesman, and his crafty glibness as James Donovan plays well off the laconic stoicism of Mark (Thomas Cromwell) Rylance as Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy Donovan is recruited to defend in a U.S. court. Acting isn't the problem with Bridge of Spies; if it had been the two-hander it appeared to be initially everyone probably would have been better off. But whatever the Coens did to polish the script, they were apparently of no help with a story structured to subvert its intended moral.

The moral seems to be that every person counts. Donovan is reluctant to take on Abel's defense for any number of reasons, but once he accepts the task he goes beyond the call of duty -- by which I mean he gives Abel more of a defense than the government actually intended. A demonstration was intended to show that in the U.S. everyone gets a fair trial, but all that's really expected of Donovan is a "capable defense" that won't change the obvious outcome. The outcome should be obvious because there's no doubt that Abel was a spy, but Donovan takes his work seriously and looks for irregularities that might get Abel off, only to find that the courts aren't interested. Even after Donovan persuades the judge to spare Abel's life with the pragmatic, prophetic argument that he could be traded down the line for some captive American spy, he carries the appeals process all the way to the Supreme Court, losing his ultimate appeal by a 4-5 vote. For this, the film tells us, Donovan was vilified and threatened by a hysterical public. Spielberg almost certainly overdoes this, to the point of having someone fire shots through Donovan's window, frightening his children, when in fact Donovan was so far from vilified that in 1961 he became vice president of the New York Board of Education. Presumably Spielberg exaggerates Donovan's ordeal in order to make him an exceptional figure, a heroic exception to the era's Cold War hysteria but also an exception that in inverse fashion vindicates his country. As long as the exceptional man lives up to the principles that presumably justify the Cold War, even when the majority seems to fail, he still affirms Hollywood's version of American exceptionalism. Through Donovan Spielberg (and the Coens) can affirm American exceptionalism while maintaining an ambivalent attitude toward the Cold War. On the one hand, to get ahead of myself, Donovan witnesses the Soviet Bloc at its worst when people trying to jump the Berlin Wall are mowed down mercilessly. On the other, Bridge of Spies is determined not to make Rudolf Abel a villain. We're clearly meant to accept Donovan's apolitical assessment of Abel as a "good soldier" -- one who never says an ideological word in the entire picture -- over the bloodthirsty indignation of his fellow Americans. We're also meant to see Abel as a political if not moral equivalent of Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 spy pilot for whom he's eventually traded through Donovan's negotiations -- and Spielberg's attempts to illustrate that equivalence just about sink his movie.

Spielberg's attempt to make Powers (Austin Stowell) a character in the story is a classic case of too much and not enough. Abel may not have much of an internal life apart from his hobby of painting, but Rylance's mannered stoicism bring the character to life, while Powers is never more than a cipher. But once Donovan raises the possibility of trading Abel for a future captive American Spielberg introduces the cipher and keeps going back to him, developing the character not at all and killing much of the dramatic momentum the Hanks-Rylance team had built up. At his worst, he crosscuts between a Powers takeoff and Donovan arguing before the Supreme Court for no sensible reason. The inevitable destruction of Powers's plane and his narrow escape by parachute is spectacularly pointless; the plot would be served as well if the pilot's capture and trial were reported to our protagonist as a fait accompli. An interesting point is raised when Donovan observes that he, Abel and Powers are three of a kind, the most hated men in America -- Powers joining the club because he'd gone against orders and allowed himself to be captured and used in a presumed show trial -- but neither script nor Stowell do anything to make that observation meaningful.

Worse still, Spielberg compounds his error once Donovan goes to Berlin, ostensibly unofficial but at the government's behest, to negotiate the Abel-Powers exchange. In Berlin Spielberg introduces another major character, the American student Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who gets arrested in East Berlin for trying to smuggle his German girlfriend to the West before the Wall is finished. Learning of Pryor's plight, Donovan is determined to get him released along with Powers in return for Abel, without considering that the East Germans who hold Pryor have different priorities from their putative Soviet masters, who hold Powers. If anything by virtue of having a girlfriend in East Berlin Pryor is instantly a more interesting character than Powers, but he still isn't interesting enough to justify looking in on him, much less Powers, when we want to stick with Donovan. The movie tells us that these two matter, but fails to show it. Neither Powers nor Pryor is part of the real story, which is Donovan's often desperate, always cunning dealings with the Communists, but Spielberg thinks differently. They're his proof that every person counts, but at the same time they're exceptions in a way we've seen before in Spielberg's serious pictures. Because for Spielberg the exception is the essence, he can affirm human goodness in a Holocaust picture because one guy saved some Jews, and he can make Saving Private Ryan  a victory because a bunch of guys die to send Matt Damon home. I don't bring this up to denounce two of Spielberg's best pictures, but I'm pointing out why some people do denounce them and may also denounce Bridge of Spies. If I've correctly diagnosed a Spielberg Fallacy in all these films, I find it most glaring in Bridge because his superfluous preoccupation with Powers and Pryor, or else his (or the Coens') complacent failure to earn concern for them, mars the dramatic balance of this picture more severely.

That's a shame because Bridge sure is a lovely film to look at. It's another pictorial triumph for Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. Just about every frame here is a thing of beauty, for which production designer Adam Stockhausen deserves a fair share of credit. The film isn't quite so easy on the ear; while John Williams arguably hasn't contributed much to Spielberg's movies in quite a while, his absence for the sake of Star Wars is felt if only because Thomas Newman's score is banal rather than merely predictable. Overall, I'm tempted to credit the Coens with whatever dramatic energy or occasional wit the picture has, though they should also take the blame for including or failing to remove some corny bits. Was giving Abel "Would it help?" as a catchphrase whenever Donovan asks whether he worries about things their idea? What about that supposedly soul-stirring story Abel tells about a man getting beat up by partisans but earning their respect, that you know as soon as you hear it will payoff later in the picture, as it does when Abel comes to Donovan's aid in a standoff? I suppose the brothers couldn't rewrite every word, but surely they could have done more with this script, or else the dramatic structure determined by Spielberg was irreparably flawed. For all that, I can't help imagining that had they directed it Bridge of Spies might have been a less compassionate but better picture.

SKYFALL (2012)

Once upon a time James Bond 007 was in Turkey fighting an assassin atop a moving train when his assistant accidentally shot him. Bond fell from a great height into the water, but he did not die. The river goddess grabbed him with her great hand and Bond was pulled through ... I guess we must call it her hole. He saw many strange things and when he emerged miraculously unhurt -- or minimally hurt -- he took to drink. He could afford to drink because he had a bank account unknown to and untrackable by MI6, his employer. While he was drinking he saw on television that someone had set off a bomb at MI6 headquarters. Now he felt bad. He came home and swore to find the bad people who did this thing. The same assistant went with him but didn't shoot him any more. Bond found the very bad man who had the bomb planted on a mysterious island that looked like Inception had been filmed there. This bad man told Bond a story about rats and shot a woman. Then he was captured. The bad man had been an agent like James Bond 007 but had been turned over to the Chinese. This hurt his feelings, and he became a supervillain. He got all Hannibal Lecter on his guards and ran away. Bond tried to catch him but the bad man dropped a subway train on top of him. Bond got away. The bad man tried to shoot the old lady who used to be his boss because she threw him to the Chinese and he had mommy issues. Bond put the old lady in an old car and drove to Scotland. He found a fat old man in his house and they got all Home Alone about the place because the bad man was coming with a lot more bad men and a helicopter....

Skyfall (that's the house as well as the title) can seem a bit phantasmagorical, thanks in part to Roger Deakins's Oscar-nominated cinematography and a trippy title sequence set to Adele's Oscar-nominated song. It's the first Bond film in 50 years to boast an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame, who had directed star Daniel Craig previously in Road to Perdition. If that all makes the film more pictorially ambitious than its predecessors, the story remains as much a comic-book affair as others in the series. Bond's resilience and the villain Silva's resources are simply unbelievable. Yet this was supposed to be a more serious Bond film in the way Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy were more serious comic-book films. The creators have cited The Dark Knight in particular as an influence on their project, Nolan's blockbuster enabling them to make Skyfall "darker" and more relevant while remaining essentially a fantasy. There's a convergence at work, since Nolan's most recent films show plenty of Bond influences, from the ski-slope firefights of Inception to Bane as an amalgam of Goldfinger and Oddjob in one person. Both Nolan and the Skyfall team partake of a modern (or postmodern) rejection of the normalization of genre heroism. Nolan's films could not simply be three adventures of Batman, but had to be a sequence of life-changing events culminating in Bruce Wayne's apparently permanent retirement from crimefighting. Likewise, before Mendes came along the first Craig Bond film, Casino Royale, was basically "Bond Begins," a reboot and origin story for the storied franchise, and the first sequel, Quantum of Solace, picked up immediately where Casino Royale left off. It's not enough now, it seems, to show us a hero and what he does, with the understanding that he'll always do it. You might think the scale of production might have something to do with it, but you see the same or related phenomena in other media. Long gone is the lone hero who visits a place, meets some people, does his thing and moves on. That doesn't satisfy in our age of "shipping." We want to see relationships and we expect them to evolve constantly. Obviously you can argue that something is gained but something else is lost. To a certain extent that something is story or, more correctly, plot. 

Plot matters less, and writers need less creative ingenuity, when their stories are basically about the hero(es) and his/their relationships, and this brings us to how hackneyed an affair Skyfall's story is. Mendes has basically invited us to see the disgruntled Silva as Bond's Joker, and in Javier (Anton Chigurh) Bardem he had an actor apparently up for the challenge that entailed. But I found him dull, and Bardem's almost whimsical performance set the wrong tone immediately. Silva is one of those villains who have no real motive except to make a point to the hero, his having something to do with the treachery of their common "mommy," Judi Dench's M, and their own shared identity as cannibalistic rats. I'm not the biggest Bond expert, but have the stakes in a Bond movie ever been lower? The plot of the picture is that Silva has acquired one of those fatally compromising lists of undercover field agents that spy agencies are always compiling and putting into dangerously portable form, and is going to publicize the names on YouTube until M thinks on her sins. So some spies we'll never know are going to get killed, while Silva probably does more collateral damage in his desperate attempts to get M. We're supposed to believe he's a criminal mastermind, the evidence being, as is often the case, that he allows himself to be captured so he can strike from nearer the heart of the enemy. But while I invoked Dr. Lecter above in discussing Silva's escape we never see how he does it -- there must be a deleted scene somewhere having to do with his dentures -- and we never see Silva get into a proper fight scene with Bond. His demise is particularly, pathetically lame, though Bardem does well enacting his character's (and the actor's own?) annoyance at how easily he goes down. Silva's best scene is the most traditionally Bondian, on an urban island he evacuated with a contamination hoax, when he forces a shaky Bond to play William Tell with one of this film's Bond Girls. Apart from that, Bardem is this film' s biggest disappointment.

But if Skyfall doesn't live to its portentous hype, it really isn't that bad a Bond film. It has some extraordinary spectacle, from Silva's island to a sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper to that opening railroad chase. Some of the action on the train might earn the filmmakers a tip of Buster Keaton's porkpie hat. The acting is nothing great, with Craig somewhat more wooden than before -- though some of this is a principled refusal to be as indignant as Silva wants Bond to be -- and Dench no longer plausible as a powerful bureaucrat. Naomie Harris as that hapless field agent who shoots but later saves Bond steals plenty of scenes, and her own final revelation is a cute moment fitting this film's commemorative aspect. In the end, Skyfall has it both ways rather like The Dark Knight did, giving the hero a life-changing event but really leaving the legend in what we might recognize as a timeless default state. A counterpart to The Dark Knight Rises really isn't an option for the franchise, so where Eon Productions goes from here should be interesting. That leaves Skyfall as a Bond film for our cultural moment, and as long as you don't expect too much from the bad guy, a fairly diverting one as well.

THE DEMOCRATIC TERRORIST (Den demokratiske terroristen, 1992)

Pound for pound, or proportionate to its size, Sweden may be the world's superpower of mystery fiction. In the U.S. we see countless translations of Swedish mystery and crime novels, with the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series just the tip of the iceberg. My impression is that we don't see so much of Swedish spy fiction. Maybe the Swedes don't write so much in that genre, or maybe their attitude toward the Cold War made their stories untranslatable in the U.S. Nevertheless, Sweden has its own pop spy fiction, and if not the Swedish James Bond, Jan Guillou's Carl Hamilton seems to be one of the country's most popular fictional spies, adapted often into TV and film. Per Berglund's film is the second adaptation of the second novel in Guillou's series, and you can see why, despite the effort to film as much of this movie in English as possible, Carl Hamilton might not appeal to Americans. Democratic Terrorist has a familiar enough story: the spy must infiltrate a leftist terror cell of the German Red Army Faction to prevent an attack on the American embassy in Stockholm. But Hamilton himself (Stellan Skarsgard) has a reputation as a leftist, and one of his greatest exploits before this was to wipe out an Israeli hit team that had attacked a Swedish office of the Palestine Liberation Organization. While this makes him an ideal infiltrator, it raises the risk that he might go native, if you will.

Democratic Terrorist nevertheless seems aimed at a U.S. audience, if only because English is spoken more than Swedish or German. In story terms, that's because Hamilton knows only "ein bisschen" of German, and the Germans know even less Swedish. English thus becomes a kind of lingua franca of Europe, since it seems to be everyone's second language. Skarsgard handles the task easily enough; the future Dr. Selvig of Avengers fame had already made inroads in Hollywood by this time, and it's fun to see him kicking ass in his prime here. The other cast members may all be dubbed, for all I know.

Whatever Guillou's novel was like, Berglund's movie offers a campy caricature of Germany, from the sleaze and grunge of Hamburg's red-light district to the dilletante fanaticism of the young guerrillas Hamilton seeks out. Knowing that they're looking for a Swede to aid them in setting up their plan, he takes a room in a no-tell motel and lurks the mean streets while the director observes the freaks and slobs around him. After Hamilton picks a fight over a pinball machine and shows off his fighting prowess and his Swedishness, he's approached by the RAF people and taken to their spacious pad. After promptly taking charge and chiding them all for their amateurishness, he solidifies his credentials by leading them in a bank robbery. Before long, he's falling in love with one of the pretty young terrorists who has a wealthy background. He's also entrusted to accompany two of the gang on a weapons-buying trip to Syria (played here by the Kingdom of Morocco) that goes sour when the PLO gets wind of what the Germans are up to. The Palestinians feel, as Hamilton does, that the attack on the Americans in Stockholm will only damage the international anti-imperialist cause. Worse, it'll probably be blamed on them. Their solution is to kill the Germans, but to save himself Hamilton blows his cover, explaining that only he can thwart the attack at this point. The Palestinians check his references and respect his way with Israelis, but insist that he prove his sincerity on this occasion by killing his German companions. As they curse him as a traitor, he cuts the Germans' throats; Berglund illustrates this with a suggestively gruesome shot from Hamilton's hip as blood suddenly gushes from above. But that's not the end of his Syrian sojourn. To convince his marks back in Germany that he'd been tortured but escaped, he has to let the Palestinians shoot him and otherwise mess him up.

What follows is fairly predictable as far as both the spy and romance plots are concerned, but the film's main point has been made. All institutions, even ostensibly revolutionary entities, act according to self-interest first before considering principles. The Palestinians readily sell-out their German sympathizers and justify that betrayal of solidarity with appeals to realpolitik. Individuals are expendable, as Hamilton will learn when he tries to spare one from the retribution the German police are planning. This is espionage as tragedy rather than romance. Nations may win, individuals may not. Beyond that, Berglund's movie is nothing special. The plot is by the numbers except for that PLO twist, and the script has too many terrorists to deal with to develop many of them adequately as personalities. But I found it worth watching if only for the different perspective it provided on terror wars back. The Hamburg scenes are amusing in a way that may not have been intended, but Skarsgard gives just the performance the material demands. He does enough to get you empathizing with him despite the film's faults, and you can see why Hollywood grabbed him. And if the novel's in English somewhere, I might even read it someday.

MATCHLESS (1967)

 

With the rediscovery of his 1962 crime comedy Mafioso, Alberto Lattuada got his foot in the door of cinematic history. Previously known internationally only for co-directing Variety Lights with Federico Fellini, Lattuada looked like another master from a golden age of Italian movie comedy, the years when "Italian Style" became a global brand. Lattuada had 40 directing credits in a career of nearly 50 years, but nothing of Mafioso's prestige has emerged lately. Instead, you can find some of his pictures streaming on Netflix, including his entry in the spy-parody sweepstakes that followed in the wake of the James Bond phenomenon. The director joined forces with four other writers to come up with a story that's sometimes sharply satiric toward the Cold War, and sometimes hopelessly childish.

Somewhere in Red China, Perry Liston (Patrick O'Neal) is being tortured on a machine that spins him like a top. He's a journalist, but the Chinese are convinced that he's a spy. Sharing his cell are Hank Norris (Henry Silva), who actually is a sort of freelance spy, and an elderly Chinese man who's happened to hold on to a valuable ring. In an unconscious cross between J.R.R. Tolkien and the origin of Iron Man, this dying sage bestows upon Liston a magic ring. Actually, it secretes a liquid which, when absorbed into the skin, makes a person invisible for exactly twenty minutes, but this can be done only once every ten hours. Hank scoffs at the whole idea, but when Liston vanishes in front of a firing squad he yells for the guard -- he now has valuable information to sell.

With the aid of a Chinese general's wife, Liston flies back to the Free World, where we next see him being tortured on exactly the same machine the Chicoms used on him -- the Americans later admit that they bought it from China. Matchless plays occasionally with the essential similarity of all the superpowers. The Chinese have surgically altered some of their citizens to pass for American; the Americans have apparently done the reverse. Later, we watch the Americans watching Liston on a spy camera, only for Lattuada to pull back to reveal that the Russians are watching the Americans. Again, he pulls back to show the Chinese watching the Russians on another screen. I may have forgotten the correct order, but you get the idea. Mocking the Cold War is arguably a mature approach to the spy parody, but most of the time Matchless plays like a bad B movie out of old-time Hollywood. Its invisibility effects are no advance on what John P. Fulton had been doing since the 1930s and the concept of an invisibility ring itself seems too primitive for the spy genre.

Likewise, later in the picture, after the Americans have recruited Liston to take down the eccentric millionaire Andreanu (the coincidentally cast Donald Pleasence -- You Only Live Twice came out that same summer), our hero's first move is to break up the villain's fight-fixing racket. The racket consists of having a hypnotist in the stands to mesmerize the opposing fighter so Andreanu's man will win. Liston takes care of the hypnotist by invisibly throwing ashes in his face, and to make things more certain gets into the ring to distract Andreanu's fighter, finally holding his legs in place so the other fellow can flatten him. Andreanu's mansion is staffed by robots that wouldn't look out of place in a Republic serial, apart from the 18th century livery they wear.

While robots keep his guests liquored up, Donald Pleasence enjoys a night at the fights -- but not for long.

Maybe there's a point to these juvenile gimmicks. Maybe for someone of Lattuada's age the whole Bond phenomenon was the stuff of comic books or Italy's counterparts of the pulps. But if a spy-parody picture is to some extent supposed to ape the style or supposed sophistication of the actual Bond pictures, Matchless fails except on the most superficial level of snazzy location shoots and attractive women. O'Neal and Silva get to chase each other around New York City and Hamburg, among other locales, and Lattuada got to film impressively on the roof of the Pan Am Building. The women are Princess Ira von Furstenberg, whom many ads promoted as the star of the picture, as Liston's artistic ally, and Nicoletta Machiavelli as Hank Norris's eventual sidekick.

Above, Princess von Furstenberg explains modern art to Patrick O'Neal -- and there is an explanation. Below, she gets the drop on Nicoletta Machiavelli.

Only Pleasence and the ladies, the former understandably, seem to understand what the genre requires. Pleasence gets to throw fussy tantrums and display an obsession with sunglasses, while the Matchless Girls are effortlessly charismatic. O'Neal, on the other hand, gives a cranky performance that does little to win an audience over, while Silva gives just about the worst performance I've ever seen from him. His Hank Norris is a buffoon from beginning to end and Silva plays him as an absolute barking idiot, clapping like a child while watching cartoons or gibbering like a lunatic after O'Neal eludes him yet again. In short, the role does not play to the actor's strengths, though he seems to have had fun playing a moron. At times, he seems like the only person having fun in the picture, and he's definitely having more fun than the audience.

I don't regret watching Matchless because it was often very pretty to look at as a virtual tourist of the past. Italian films from this period will usually look great if they have nothing else going for them, and cinematographer Alessandro D'Eva and art director Enzo Del Prato meet that minimal obligation with ease. But Matchless really tests how long you can watch pretty pictures without your intelligence feeling insulted, and it raises a question for future study: was this or Mafioso more typical of Alberto Lattuada's career?

On the Big Screen: HAYWIRE (2012)

Here is Gina Carano in her element: the fenced confines of the mixed martial arts battleground. The video was uploaded by ginacaranodotorg.



A star was not born last weekend after Steven Soderbergh's Haywire opened weakly at the box office. It was telling that more people wanted to see Kate Beckinsale fight than went to see a real woman fighter -- but who goes to movies to see a real fight? Soderbergh's error in thinking he could make a star of Carano, at least in the film Lem Dobbs wrote for her, becomes apparent when we think about movies and mixed martial arts. MMA has been the backdrop for several films by now, but Haywire may be the first non-exploitation, non-straight-to-video movie to cast an MMA fighter as an action hero. While MMA promoters would like you to imagine the sport as a constant battle of kicks and punches, most people realize by now that grappling and "ground and pound" prevail much of the time -- and ground-and-pound just isn't cinematic. Granted, Soderbergh doesn't film Carano using much ground-and-pound technique, though she does get to choke out at least one of her co-stars. Nevertheless, the director is part of the problem. He undercuts Carano's credibility somewhat by resorting to heavy editing, perhaps to accommodate such opponents as Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor. Watching it reminded me of the way insensitive directors of musicals disrupt the virtuoso flow of dance by impulsively cutting within a number. If you think about it, people like Hermes Pan and Yuen Woo-ping are in the same business. Like dance, cinematic martial arts is all about choreography, but Soderbergh, perhaps out of some misguided commitment to realistic fight techniques, gives us fight sequences with occasionally impressive bursts of Carano's indisputable power but none of the sustained physical spectacle that make great martial-arts scenes memorable. Again, doing that might not have been true to Carano's true talent, but that brings us back to the question of MMA's cinematic potential, and around to the larger question of whether Soderbergh, despite his stated intention of making this MMArtist a star, actually meant to make a "martial arts" movie.

Soderbergh and Dobbs last teamed up for The Limey, and like that film Haywire is a revenge story. But while the earlier film's title Brit was avenging a lost daughter, Carano's Mallory Kane is only avenging herself. She's an "added value" operative for some sort of private espionage contractor hired to rescue a kidnapped Chinese dissident journalist in Barcelona. Moving on to Dublin, she learns that the same journalist has been murdered, and she's been framed on the assumption that she won't leave Ireland alive. As in The Limey, this is all told in flashback. The film actually opens somewhere in upstate New York with the shock sight of personable Channing Tatum throwing a cup of fresh hot coffee in Carano's face. The subsequent flashbacking explains how she got there, though Tatum's role (he was one of her partners in Barcelona) remains ambiguous. Echoes of The Limey persist in the hilltop mansion of Mallory's military-buff dad (Bill Paxton) and a climactic confrontation on a beach. But Haywire has none of the gravitas Terence Stamp brought to Limey because we know next to nothing about Mallory Kane's past, how she got to be (and got to be accepted as) a super-agent fighting machine, while neither the dissident's death nor the collateral corpses that accumulate along the way weigh on the heroine's conscience the way the Limey's daughter's death did on his. Nor does Soderbergh ever really give Carano the kind of awe-inspiring badass spotlight that shined on Stamp. Her story is simply too irrelevantly complicated. I found myself not caring who was ultimately to blame (McGregor? Antonio Banderas? Michael Douglas?) for setting Mallory up. Once the story proved uncompelling, the film's shortcomings as martial-arts spectacle became more glaring. What this film needed above all was a scene in which Mallory faced someone we could believe as her equal or possible superior. It never happened, and if we were to understand that the Tatum or Fassbender characters are her martial peers, Soderbergh does nothing to establish their credentials.

Haywire is a weak rather than bad film. It's technically competent and well-acted overall -- Carano herself is at least adequate for her role. You might not gripe if you don't have to pay first-run prices to see the thing. It may be a victim of misplaced expectations, since I may have been expecting a different movie from the one Soderbergh intended. But if you declare your intent to make Gina Carano a star, that creates a certain expectation immediately whether Soderbergh realizes it or not. The most I can say is that I saw enough of Carano onscreen to think she should get another chance. It's a shame that people might leave the multiplex this week thinking that Kate Beckinsale could kick Carano's ass. But in a medium where Beckinsale can do what she does in her movies, that outcome might be inevitable.

THE DEADLY AFFAIR (1966)

The Albany Public Library, already an eclectic trove of DVDs, has further endeared itself to me by beginning to acquire films from Sony's burn-on-demand library of Columbia Pictures releases. One of their first acquisitions from this growing collection gives me an opportunity to look at one of the lesser-known films of the late Sidney Lumet, who died last April. This adaptation by screenwriter Paul Dehn of the John le Carre novel Call For the Dead came to fruition just after one of my favorite periods of Lumet's long career, following such brutally intense black and white films as Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker and The Hill. The director works in color here, with innovative cinematography by Freddie Young, but this is still a pretty dark and intense film, and in some ways perhaps Lumet's most European film.

The story strikes me as standard le Carre stuff. James Mason stars as Charlie Dobbs, who we first see casually interviewing some bureaucrat in a park about his Communist past. Dobbs decides that the man is over his youthful dalliance with radicalism and recommends that he be given security clearance for a promotion. Naturally, he's stunned to learn that the man has killed himself. His superiors fear embarrassment if anyone assumes that the poor man had been hounded to death by Red-hunters, while his widow (Simone Signoret) reproaches Dobbs for doing just that. Dobbs's impression had been that theirs had been a friendly interview, but the widow, a Holocaust survivor, tells him otherwise. It's as if everyone wants to throw Dobbs under the bus for this fiasco, and just at a time when his private life is falling apart. His marriage to an apparent nymphomaniac (Harriet Andersson) has been understandably uneasy, but Dobbs has felt that it would remain bearable as long as Ann didn't fall in love with anyone else. But he soon learns that Ann has fallen in love with a protege of his from World War II days, Dieter Frei (Maximillian Schell). We appreciate Dobbs's eye for detail when he deduces the affair from the fact that Dieter kisses Ann's hand when she offered him her cheek instead. That was the act of someone with something to hide.

Dobbs may have noticed something else: the damning suicide note may have been typed on the same Olivetti machine as the anonymous letter denouncing the bureaucrat that provoked Dobbs's interview with him. Frustrated with a lack of higher-up cooperation, Dobbs resigns from the agency, while still receiving help from a friendly colleague, and hires a retired police detective, Mendel, (Harry Andrews) to do some investigating for him. Andrews had been Lumet's monster martinet in The Hill, and he's the best thing in The Deadly Affair. Mendel seems very retiring, easily lost in his hobbies and prone to falling asleep. But he has ways of getting information, and some of those are pretty brutal. After raging through the entirety of The Hill, Andrews runs hot and cold here in a tautly modulated performance, dozing comically at one moment and in another beating the snot out of a blubbery Roy Kinnear. For Lumet, Andrews in his bowler and overcoat is a special effect, an iconic silhouette and a constant promise of violence who heightens our suspense just by walking around. Lumet films Andrews's violence violently, shooting the attack on Kinnear with a handheld camera slowly advancing on the action. Poor Kinnear takes a lot of abuse in this picture. After Andrews is through with him, the mystery man named "Blondie," to whom the Kinnear character had rented his car, beats the slob some more and dumps him to his death.

Blondie had been following Dobbs around suspiciously, but the film would end too soon if he were the main menace of the picture. This is the sort of film where a suicide has to be suspect, and anyone involved with the victim -- and Dobbs -- becomes a suspect. In fact, the story resolves itself a bit too neatly for my taste once Dobbs's personal and work crises prove to be intimately related, but The Deadly Affair can be enjoyed as an exercise in style and emotional substance. I've already praised Andrews, but Mason deserves a lot of credit for making his hapless but not hopeless character credibly vulnerable and intellectually resourceful. While Andersson is something of a stereotype and Schell is little more than a pretty face, Signoret impresses with an aggressively poker-faced performance that keeps her character an enigma throughout. Somehow Lumet makes a scene that consists of nothing more than Andrews following Signoret onto a bus and through the streets of London one of the film's most thrilling episodes simply because you know what Andrews is capable of and you don't know yet about Signoret. But there's another element in that scene that bears mentioning.

What makes The Deadly Affair feel very much like a European film -- a continental film, that is -- is the soundtrack by all-American pop composer Quincy Jones. Jones and Lumet use music much like European genre filmmakers were, or would. The music is tuneful, light yet soulful, with some of the bachelor pad flavor yet restrained well short of Austin Powers-inspiring excess. Sometimes the music has an on-screen source (a record player in Dobbs's home) and sometimes its pure soundtrack. Sometimes it works as wistful counterpoint to the Dobbses' crumbling marriage, and sometimes it works to heighten suspense simply by picking up the pace in scenes like the Signoret-Andrews walkabout I mentioned above. Like many a Euro score to American ears, it sounds almost inappropriate to the story yet entrancingly atmospheric at the same time. In short, it's great stuff, and The Deadly Affair might have been more deadly (in a bad way) without it. As it is, the film is middling Lumet, coming between those harsh films of a few years before and the Seventies films from his return to America that form the core of his canon. But it's still a fine piece of craftsmanship with an overall feeling that's something more than the sum of its parts, and a fine representative of its cinematic time and place.