OSS 117 Murder for Sale (1968)

Original title: Niente rose per OSS 117

aka OSS 117: Double Agent

aka No Roses for OSS 117

An organization cleverly known as The Organization is successfully committing a good number of high profile political assassinations. US secret agent OSS 117 (John Gavin), Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath to his friends, decides to do something against it. He does the logical thing and gets some plastic surgery to look like the most wanted international killer of them all, sleeps with a random beautiful woman so she can rat him out to the police, and then awaits rescue by The Organization. Which somehow really does work, so our hero – such as he is – ends up in the palazzo and headquarters of The Organization’s boss, The Major (Curd Jürgens hamming it up lovingly). Situated there, 117 has a fine opportunity to get bored by classical music (philistine!), bed the place’s doctor (Luciana Paluzzi), make enemies with the Major’s right hand man Karas (George Eastman in all his hairy glory), and spy a bit. Eventually, he is sent on a mission, during which he will be poisoned by Robert Hossein, have more sex (this time around with Margaret Lee), come up with plans that make no sense at all, and get involved in fisticuffs and mild car chases.

André Hunebelle’s Murder for Sale is the only time John Gavin was playing the title role in a film about agent OSS 117 (based on a long running series of French pulpy spy novels), and I’m not terribly surprised by it. Now, unlike your serious John Le Carré-style espionage material, Eurospy movies of the sillier Bond-affine variety – to which the film at hand absolutely belongs – don’t live or die on the merits of their lead actors. These guys are mostly there to punch uglier guys and look good in a suit, so basically any more or less handsome visage will do. However, Gavin’s not a terribly convincing puncher, while his acting approach here seems like an attempt to channel Alain Delon’s patented icy coolness, perhaps with an added wink from time to time, which might have sounded like a good idea at the time but mostly results in this OSS 117 feeling very bland rather than cool.

Fortunately, that’s not terribly important, and the rest of the film is a perfectly entertaining example of its style, and one that doesn’t have the slapdash feel of many a Eurospy movie either. Hunebelle had quite a bit of experience with genre movies of all types, and he manages to take the very silly script, pump up the right bits of silly business yet also provide all the minor thrills of face-punching, car chasing and perfectly awkward sexiness one comes for in these films.

The director keeps the pacing up admirably even when there’s no action happening, too. He seems to have particular fun with all the side business that makes a Eurospy movie, like The Major’s version of the dancing troupe you find in so many villain lairs: a string quartet playing Schubert. One can’t help but think that’s quite good for the lair’s security too, for while you can man-dance your way through a Bollywood dance number (just look at Sonny Deol), no vengeful hero’s going to take the time and study the cello to infiltrate your base. And hey, The Major even has a neat self-destruct device for the place, though he doesn’t quite manage to use it, alas.

Not terribly typical for the genre is the film’s aesthetic emphasis not on the pop art culture much more common in Eurospy films but what I can’t help but call posh art – there’s the Schubert, the somewhat tacky old school rich people beauty of the Major’s lair, and a general tendency of everyone furnishing a home here to go for mock Greek statuary to behold. It makes for a nice change from other films of the genre, and must certainly have jibed well with director Hunebelle’s experience with swashbucklers.

It’s all rather lovely to look at, particularly since the director is also rather good with pretty postcard shots for cars to mid-tempo chase one another in and dubious heroes to strut around in front of, nicely leaning into the travelogue aspects so many Eurospy films feature.


Obviously, there’s no depth at all to anything here – unless you make like George Eastman and drop from a roof, of course – and the film’s sexual and social politics are a bit dubious to modern eyes, but for light action and very pretty pictures, Murder for Sale is an excellent choice.

The Assassination Bureau (1969)

1914. Suffragette and all-purpose feminist Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg) attempts to break into that vestige of the patriarchy we know as journalism. To reach her goal, she finds out how to contact the elusive international group of assassin’s known as The Assassination Bureau, and proposes to make contact with them and write about it to Lord Bostwick (Telly “Most British Man Alive” Savalas), owner of quite a popular London newspaper. Even a bit to Miss Winter’s surprise, Bostwick agrees.

Soon, Miss Winter finds herself in front of the boss of The Assassination Bureau (Limited), charming crazy man Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed). Because she’s a public minded person with a sarcastic streak, Miss Winter declares she wishes to hire the Assassination Bureau to kill one Ivan Dragomiloff. Dragomiloff agrees to take on the job, because he thinks his organization has fallen far from its former ideal of just killings for money to just killing for money, and having a kind of mass duel between himself and the regional leaders of the organization – as played by people like Curd Jürgens and Philippe Noiret – would be a good way to clean up their act.

What Miss Winter doesn’t know is that Lord Bostwick is actually the vice chairman of the Bureau and this is his – rather idiotic – plan to get himself on the chairman’s seat. From here on out, it’s all Miss Winter following and romancing Ivan around the world (he’s no fool though, and soon just takes her with him, because she’s Diana Rigg in 1969), Ivan donning ridiculous costumes to kill people in ridiculous ways, and Telly Savalas and Curd Jürgens chewing scenery in the most enthusiastic manner.

The Assassination Bureau isn’t one of director Basil Dearden’s best works, but it is quite an entertaining black comedy that generally is at its best when it lets house favourites Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg – here quite at the heights of their powers - do their respective things while various European character actors around them gloat, die, and explode (not necessarily in this order) in more or less effective ways.

All this takes place in fine, stylized and colourful sets and locations,  with Dearden milking everything he gets his camera on for purposefully ridiculous and clichéd local and temporal colour, clearly basing the film’s world not on the actual 1910s but on the pop cultural idea of them, leaving us with a film that contains an awesome (in the old sense of the word) bordello that defies description in – of course – Paris, a pretty gondolier who sings a pre-recorded piece of schmaltz after dropping off the bodies his lover (frequent giallo actress Annabella Incontrera) has poisoned, and a finale that sees a European peace conference threatened by a bomb carrying zeppelin. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with these things, particularly when they are presented with as much ironic delight and verve as Dearden shows here.

In fact, Dearden is so convincing a director I found it easy to ignore two of the film’s three main flaws. Firstly, the fact that the film’s idea of humour can be more broad and slapstick-y than I generally prefer, with rather a lot of these “comical chases” I usually only read about; though most of them end with dead people, so that’s still quite alright.

Secondly, it’s a bit of a shame how little the film really does with its historical background. Even when it (rather tastelessly) integrates the actual starting occasion of World War I in slightly fictionalized form (with added blood sausage), there’s never the impression it actually has something to say about the historical era it is taking place in. Again, it seems to be more interested in the era as pop cultural colour than as anything deeper.

Thirdly, and quite impossible to overlook, is the sad fact that the film gives all the swashbuckling action scenes (and, despite the wrong historical era, this is very much a swashbuckling comedy in its nature) to Reed, with Rigg fortunately not cast as a helpless girlie yet also generally side-lined when it comes to the action. Which is a bit (or a mountain) of a shame, really.

Still, The Assassination Bureau is a highly enjoyable bit of British humour that doesn’t contain one boring second, and that certainly counts for a lot in my book, flaws or no flaws.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,comedy,adventure,basil dearden,oliver reed,diana rigg,telly savalas,curd jürgens,philippe noiret,annabella incontrera

Three Films Make A Post: Hell Hath No Fury...Like

Fieras Sin Jaula aka 2 Masks For Alexa (1971): When millionaire Ronald Marvelling's (Curd Jürgens) marriage to the much younger Alexa (Rosalba Neri) doesn't work out too well, he does the obvious - turning the bedroom in his vacation house in the Normandy into a steel cage where he commits suicide and imprisons Alexa and her lover Pietro (Juan Luis Galiardo).

Juan Logar's film may sound like a thriller or a giallo, but the whole middle part of its narrative is a long, long flashback that strictly belongs in the realm of the melodrama. Some of that is quite effective, presented with just the right sense of unreality, but there's an unpleasant tendency for moralizing finger-wagging that's never effective in an exploitation movie (see also: hypocrisy). The movie's final act then turns into a full-grown low budget delirium of sledgehammer visual metaphors, off-screen monologues, and arty ambitions that probably doesn't work like Logar wanted it to, but sure keeps things interesting enough.

And "interesting" is the word here: you'd be hard-pressed to call Fieras a good or a artistically successful movie, but interesting, it sure is.

The House In Marsh Road aka Invisible Creature (1960): It's the old chestnut about a husband trying to murder his wife for money (though the stakes here are comparatively low, financially speaking) and another woman (though the passion driving him looks not very passionate to me). To change things up a little, the heroine (Patricia Dainton) is protected by the family poltergeist.

Still, poltergeist or not, this is an exceedingly routine movie, directed by routine director Montgomery Tully, featuring routine actors, routine music and a routine script. There are certainly worse ways to spend seventy minutes, but excitement lives elsewhere.

Shirome (2010): One of the core questions of modern horror film is of course how to use the by now hoary old form of the fake documentary and still innovate. Koji Shiraishi (usually one of my favourites among the second tier of contemporary Japanese horror directors) isn't afraid of being a real innovator, and so gives us a fake documentary about the adventures of a teen idol girl group (played by a real-life teen idol girl group) in a haunted house, boldly uniting POV horror and idolsploitation. In some of his other films, Shiraishi had quite a bit of luck with using actresses and elements of idol culture (see Noroi), but those idols weren't a gaggle (or corps? a troupe? a squeal?) of teenage girls.

Not surprisingly, the movie at hand is pretty horrible, for the simple reason that, whenever it threatens to become even slightly creepy (Shiraishi, as you might know, can do "creepy" well), half a dozen teenage girls start to cry, squeak, shout, gibber, moan and play patty cake in the most headache-inducing manner and quite, quite independent of the creepiness or not-creepiness of what's happening around them, until nobody in their right minds wouldn't want these horrible, horrible girls to shut up forever (and probably die in a fire, silently).

On the positive side, at least the film's not in 3D.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,british movies,japanese movies,giallo,melodrama,horror,curd jürgens,rosalba neri,juan logar,koji shiraishi,in short