Three Films Make A Post: They were divided by war. He united them in song.

The Choral (2025): This is the sort of very competently made, somewhat life-affirming drama that appear to only be made in the UK anymore. Some of its elements do strain historical believability a little – surely, the climactic choral performance is too modern(ist) in this context? – and there are a couple of scenes that don’t have the emotional impact they are supposed to have on me – the compassionate masturbation bit particularly comes to mind.

Otherwise, director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett evoke a time and a place and use this evocation to tell us something about people in times of social upheaval without it ever feeling didactic. Rather, this is done with grace, compassion, a sense of humour, and populated by actual characters brought to life by a brilliant cast – Ralph Fiennes really has quite a couple of years right now.

H Is for Hawk (2025): Staying in the UK, Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaption of an autobiographical book about a female academic (Claire Foy) who is avoiding coping with her grief about the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) by hyperfocusing on training a goshawk contains one of the most believable portrayals of a real depressive episode I’ve seen in cinema – at least the kind of depression I have experience with (your symptoms may vary). Foy’s performance here is quite brilliant, nuanced and very human indeed.

Even though the film gets a bit too third act dramatic for real life in (surprise) its third act, this turns out not to be a film about a woman “getting over” mental illness by getting close to a bird as you’d probably expect, but something much messier, more complicated and more real that feels much closer to actual mental illness and the ways we cope with it than the easier version would have been. Which doesn’t mean this isn’t also full of perfect footage of a goshawk doing goshawk things, for just because the bird won’t save your life doesn’t mean it is of no import to it.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025): Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s project of reflecting and intensifying the beautiful surfaces of European genre cinema of mostly the 60s and 70s – though in this one, there’s also quite a bit of Louis Feuillade added to the mix – until they turn even more abstract and weird than they already are continues. As with any good reflective surface, these films can be used as a mirror of whatever thematic interest or interpretative approach you prefer – I’m particularly fond of reading this one as a critique of the gender politics of European super spy films that still really likes looking at swankily dressed or nude, hot people; or as a meditation on the aesthetical losses of aging.

Though, honestly, I mostly prefer to fall into these films as dreams of exceeding, perhaps excessive, beauty.

Killer’s Mission (1969)

Original title: Shokin kasegi

The Dutch have sent a warship towards Shogunate Japan to incite a little civil war with a hold full of modern weapons. After first getting thrown out of the Shogun’s sphere, they start poking at a clan best suited for their plans. Not that everyone there’s completely into waltzing their country into an uprising and a civil war meant to soften its up for colonialist forces, but that’s what assassins are for.

The shogun’s usual spies are only of limited use in this situation, so the shogunate sends in spy-for-hire Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) to somehow resolve the situation. Ichibei is a physician, a ladies’ men, a great shot, a master swordsman, a total badass and the owner of a very big penis (as certified by the film’s comic relief ronin), but even he will have certain troubles with this mission.

Of course, there are various other characters of varying trustworthiness and loyalties involved, like the just as badass female Iga ninja Kagero (Yumiko Nogawa), said comic relief ronin, and so on.

By 1969, Toei’s producers weren’t too keen on making jidai geki anymore, not even of the more marketable chambara style, but provided with the proper selling points, they could still be convinced of the viability of such projects – Tomisaburo Wakayama’s particular love for the genre must certainly have helped, in combination with his popularity.

In the case of Killer’s Mission – the first part of the so-called Bounty Hunter Trilogy, which doesn’t feature its hero doing any bounty hunting at all – that selling point was to cross chambara-style sword fighting action with elements of the Italian western as well as spy shenanigans following the James Bond mode. If you think like an exploitation movie producer, that sort of thing makes total sense; if you watch Shigehiro Ozawa’s Killer’s Mission it does doubly so.

Ozawa was already a veteran filmmaker at this point, but one very willing to go with the stylistic tricks of the time and coming up with zoom and slo-motion variants of his own to add to them. This would soon turn him into one of Toei’s best hands at modern, pop, exploitation cinema independent of genre, and the merry way Killer’s Mission goes from comedy to action to high drama to treason and honour really shows why. There are, of course, given genre, country and time, moments of lovely insanity here, but the more straightforward action of sword and gun, Wakayama’s beloved jumps and so on are just as great.

While the action is getting increasingly crazy and a Morricone trumpet blows through the score, the spy plot works rather well, too, with many a betrayal but also acts of honour you’d never see James Bond and co get up to. In fact, despite its closeness to several particularly cynical genres, this isn’t a very cynical movie at all. Rather it still believes in the possibility of honour even in dishonourable situations. Consequently, Ichibei may bluster and bluff like a hardened cynic – which Wakayama does of course excel at – but he also shows moments of compassion and genuine kindness the actor sells equally well.

Other attractions in this highly attractive movie are Kagero, who can match Ichibei at basically everything and does so with vigour;  and a scene where Ichibei for reasons best known to himself pretends to be a blind masseur. The latter is of course a broad parody of everyone’s favourite sword-swinging blind masseur Zatoichi, who just happened to be played by Wakayama’s younger brother Shintaro Katsu. And of course there are buckets – fountains - of artificial blood, but then, it’s a chambara, and a pretty damn fun one at that, so that nearly goes without saying.

In short: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This time around, aging super spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of little buddies (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) who are actually allowed to do something in this outing are fighting two enemies: first, a CIA director (Alex Baldwin) who shuts down the IMF with the reasoning that they cause more harm than they prevent. Which, given the fact that the villains in three of the other four Mission Impossible movies were rogue or traitorous IMF agents, has the ring of truth to it.

Enemy number two is a sort of anti-IMF made up of a world-wide network of disgruntled spies disgusted with keeping up the status quo following the leadership of the reptilian Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). As all Mission Impossible villains, Lane is a bit obsessed with Ethan, of course.

Seemingly playing both sides – like a proper spy – is the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

In an ideal world, this fifth Mission Impossible movie would of course hinge on the fact that its villains are absolutely right – the IMF is a bunch of idiots causing problems it then solves with grand gestures and considerable loss of life, and the status quo it is bound to uphold and its methods to do this are morally unsupportable. This being a modern blockbuster and Tom Cruise vehicle instead, Baldwin’s character is a well-meaning fool, and Lane is a movie villain.

This isn’t something I actually condemn Christopher McQuarrie’s film for, but it is something so remarkably obvious, I couldn’t help but comment on it. Coming to the film the filmmakers actually made, this is a marked improvement on the horrors of the fourth Mission Impossible, featuring interesting villains actually allowed and able to make an impression on the audience – Harris is just great – a twisty plot line that might not hold up to too much logical scrutiny but is very fun when you’re just willing to go with it, and some genuinely great action and suspense set pieces. The opera sequence alone would be worth the price of admission as a piece of high drama suspense filmmaking, but the rest of the set pieces is just as fun, well directed and exciting as it.

Coming to our the “state of the Cruise” segment, I can gladly report that the close-up hogging isn’t painfully egregious anymore, and that the movie actually has quite a few scenes for other actors to shine in during which Cruise doesn’t even make an appearance. A personal appearance, I should say, for everyone here has a curious habit of throwing in a sentence or three about how awesome/sexy/breathtakingly dangerous Ethan Hunt is, even if that’s not a pertinent question at all right then. Vanity’s an interesting thing.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field agent life, and now teaches the next generation of IMF superspies. He does this for love, for between the last film and now, he has not just apparently dropped a certain thief, never to be mentioned by the movie, but is also now very happily engaged to nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who does know nothing of espionage or his true job.

Because that’s always the way, Ethan is drawn back into field service for a rescue operation of one Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), his former favourite spy pupil who has gotten herself into a spot of bother. Somehow some quiet observations has resulted in her getting kidnapped by the insane international arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan and his team – this time around Ving Rhames and Maggie Q with a bit of hometown help from Simon Pegg – manage to extract Lindsey, but she dies from an explosive capsule implanted in her head. Ethan’s out for revenge now, and while he’s at it, he might as well also grab a dangerous biological agent in Davian’s possession.

Davian’s not a man to be thwarted or threatened, however, and what’s a better move to make than threaten a superspy’s loved one? Further complications, including yet another traitor in the IMF, do of course ensue.

In Cruise years, we have now reached the point where he had acquired most of the needed acting tools for the kind of star he probably always wanted to be, and has allowed directors to tune down the frequency of shots of him grinning smugly for no good reason. Because we haven’t yet reached the 2010s, trying to come over like more of a human being – if an utterly perfect one who is good at everything, inhumanely hot, and so on, and so forth – is apparently of interest, too. Doing this by giving him a fiancée in one of those jobs Hollywood people would probably describe as “grounded” and “human”, and then threatening her is probably the least original way to go about that, apart from teaming him up with a monkey or a little child, but damn me if J.J. Abrams doesn’t do this efficiently as well as effectively. In part, the trick works as well as it does because Michelle Monaghan is really, really, good at projecting humanity back at unlikable male stars that isn’t actually coming from them, convincing us that something must actually be perfectly alright and decent with those guys. It’s a curious ability, but it works.

At least, this is the only one of the Mission Impossible movies that actually manages to make me root for Ethan instead of just watching the crazy plot contortions and absurd plans, explosions and shoot-outs he’s getting into while raising eyebrows at his boring perfection. So, while humanization by threatened significant other may be a primitive move, it does at least work.

Also livelier than in the movies before is the villain. On paper, Seymour Hoffman doesn’t actually have that much more to do than his predecessors, yet his precise performance and the greater pull of the plot sell him not just as an actual threat but also as a great counterpoint to Hunt, again making a protagonist who isn’t generally likeable more so by contrast.

The action set pieces make as little sense as we’ve grown used to from the series, but make up for that by a general sense of awesomeness and Abrams’s typical ability to shoot loud and obnoxiously conceived scenes as if they were sensible and natural. That he’s actually good with the spy bits of the superspy formula is another point in Mission Impossible III’s favour, leaving this a fine way to while away a few others.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning was just the beginning.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021): If the first Escape Room didn’t feel random and contrived enough to you, Adam Robitel’s sequel has you covered. The characters are even thinner than in the first movie – and what good is a diverse cast when none of the diverse characters is even the least bit interesting? – the plot is non-existent, and the film’s attempt at a big reveal in the final act is so stupid, it’s laughable.

The escape rooms themselves manage to be at once implausible, random and just ever so faintly stupid, showing as much imagination as the rest of the film, which is to say, none. That its idea of excitement mostly seems to consist of random editing tics and screeching actresses is only par for the course for this one.

Ek Tha Tiger aka Once There Was a Tiger (2012): Despite not being much of a fan of its lead couple Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as far as I know their bodies of work, I had quite a bit of fun with this Bollywood spy romance by Kabir Khan. The film puts heavy emphasis on the romance, so much so, the handful of action sequences and the rest of the spy business sometimes feel as if they’ve slipped in from another movie. Since the action is still good fun, and the romance actually works pretty well, that’s not really a problem, though – one does not venture into an early 2010s Bollywood hit expecting the same ideas about tonal consistency you’d find in Hollywood at the same time, and blaming a film for not following rules it doesn’t actually set out to follow seems pointless, and a bit boring, like complaining about the lack of veggies in your ice cream.

Plus, there’s something deeply likeable about a Hindi movie that uses the enmity between India and Pakistan without ever becoming jingoistic (because love beats politics, here, obviously), and whose romance actually affords its female lead some agency.

Street View aka Reikai no tobira Street View (2011): A curious figure in street view seems connected to the disappearance of our protagonist’s sister. A lot of only mildly changed beats from old Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata movies follow. Alas, director Soichiro Koga doesn’t really manage to turn his cobbled together bits of great movies into a decent one of its own.

From time to time, there’s a scene or a moment here that manages to create something of a frisson, a suggestion of something truly ghastly lurking on the other side of one’s monitor, but more often than not, this looks and feels like a cheap rip-off of much better things, without the thought that could have turned it into something special, or even just interesting.

House of Cards (1968)

These last few years, American Reno Davis (George Peppard) has made his living as a middling boxer on the European circuit. He’s coming to the end of his rope here, though. So it’s an ironically nice twist of fate when a little boy (Barnaby Shaw) we will soon enough learn to be called Paul de Villemont nearly shoots Davis by accident. Well, perhaps the nearly dying bit’s not that nice, but Paul’s mother likes the cut of Davis’s jib, and certainly his American manliness, and decides he’s just the kind of man who should be her son’s new tutor, and rock of sanity against the family of her late husband.

Turns out the family is the core of an international fascist conspiracy out to create a new world order of particular shittiness; whereas Davis is pretty good at punching Nazis.

John Guillermin’s House of Cards never gets quite as crazy as the spy movies his Italian colleagues made in the wake of James Bond Mania, and its hipness and fashion sense is more on the down to Earth side of the late 60s, so I wouldn’t exactly compare this to a Eurospy movie, though the film certainly is part of the family. Nominally, this is a US production, but directed by a Brit and shot in France and Italy with a cast mostly consisting of Europeans, the vibe isn’t exactly Hollywood.

After a somewhat slow start, the film becomes increasingly fun. Guillermin first makes an enjoyable time out of Peppard acting like the proverbial hammer in search of a nail in any situation where subtlety would be called for, pretending horrible male chauvinist nonsense is charm in so drastic a manner I couldn’t help but see the film making fun of it when nobody’s looking, only to then turn up the paranoia. Why, for twenty minutes or so, this even seems to prefigure the paranoia of 70s conspiracy thrillers, to surprisingly gripping effect. After which, because this certainly isn’t a film made to bore anyone by staying too constant in tone and mood, our hero finds himself captured and encounters a parade of dysfunctional fascists, whose portrayal is about as sardonic as possible. The bad guy actors do milk their scenery chewing opportunities with excellence, so Davis eventually getting the better of them is very satisfying indeed, particularly since Peppard manages to make his somewhat thuggish and pretty misogynistic character likeable beyond the “everybody is better than a Nazi” rule. I’m still not quite sure how he does it, but it certainly works.

The only one looking a bit bored on screen is Orson Welles, who clearly only pops in for a couple of scenes to collect a pay check for alimonies or doomed film projects, but at least he’s trying to convince George Peppard’s little tutee to gun our hero down for real this time, while being all hypnotic and malevolently low-angled.

House of Cards’ production values are higher than you’d get from the more cardboard oriented Italian Eurospy arm, so Guillermin has quite a few opportunities to impress the audience with very pretty shots of France and Italy. Particularly the castle our hero finds himself trapped in for quite a stretch looks rather impressive. But as an old veteran of these things, I’m already delighted when doors at least look as if they were made of wood, and the same shot of a car isn’t repeated ad nauseam throughout a chase, so sane viewers’ mileage may vary.

Speaking of chases, while this wasn’t made with the set piece loving heart of even the early Bond movies, the action sequences generally flow very well and have a nice sense of physicality to them, even though all Nazi goons do have glass chins. The last point only adds to the fun, of course, for what is more entertaining than seeing a Nazi getting punched by George Peppard in action hero mode?

The Death of Me Yet (1971)

The Cold War. A man at that point going by the name of Edward Young (Doug McClure) is trained full-immersion style in a fake US small town to become something of a perfect infiltrator for the Soviets. He seems to be rather good at this sort of roleplay; at least, he’s the favourite of the father of the program that trains him, one Barnes (Richard Basehart).

When we meet him again, he is living in – you’ve guessed it – a US small town under the name of Paul Towers. He has become a bit of a pillar of the community in his role as newspaper owner and writer of anti-war commentaries, and is married – apparently happily - to Sibby (Rosemary Forsyth). As we will learn soon enough, Paul – let’s keep that name – has defected from the Soviet cause, using a fortunate (for him) plane accident to make his handlers believe he is dead. His love for Sibby is clearly real, though Paul hasn’t told her anything about her past, putting some strain on the marriage. Otherwise, his life seems pretty perfect.

That is, until his old masters find out he is still alive and try to murder him, repeatedly. Further complicating matters is some proper espionage that has been going on at the company of Paul’s brother in law. This puts Joe Chalk (Darren McGavin), the most fed looking fed this side of Edgar J. Hoover, rather closer to Paul than he’d like.

This John Llewellyn Moxey TV film is, despite an open ending that suggests ambitions for a sequel (or for a follow-up TV show) that never came, a nice example of the form. Casting the all-American Doug McClure as our Soviet deep cover spy on the run is certainly a nice touch, particularly since McClure (mostly known for his magic fists around here) is pretty good at projecting the character’s underlying ruthlessness without making his actual humanity unbelievable.

The plot – based on a Whit Masterson novel, apparently – is not terribly original and rather too straightforward in its clarity about Paul’s true, decent and upstanding character, but does still build a nice net of differing emotional loyalties for him to get caught in. Moxey, as was his wont, manages to pack a lot of incident and character work into a seventy minute running time, even finding time for a bit of 70s kitchen sink psychology in between the espionage shenanigans without things ever feeling too superficial or the plot too cramped.

As a McGavin fan, I got a bit of a kick of the specific kind of asshole he’s playing here, with his haircut fifteen years out of style, his unempathetic character, all squinty little eyes suggesting a man of limited intelligence who mostly gets through life by rote, a badge, ruthlessness and a total lack of belief in his fellow man. Which is a weird and interesting way to portray the US intelligence community in a film about a highly capable Soviet spy who retired himself for moral reasons.

In short: Eye of the Needle (1981)

World War II. A highly ruthless and dangerous spy known to British Intelligence only as “The Needle” (Donald Sutherland) has been doing the bad work without being caught for quite some time, leaking important information and leaving a line of dead bodies behind.

The British side – chiefly represented by one Godliman (Ian Bannen) – is getting closer to the Needle just when he manages to make photos that prove that the Allied Invasion can only occur in Normandy. Fortunately for the Allies, for some contrived reason that makes little sense, the German spy must deliver this information directly to Hitler, and so has to catch a ride on a German U-boat. Thanks to a storm, his attempt at reaching his ride via boat is rudely interrupted and he is stranded on a small island, population 4. From here on out, Needle stumbles right into an early D.H. Lawrence novel about the unhappy marriage between Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and the husband who lost his legs and the opportunity to die in the Battle of Britain on their marriage day in a car accident (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy lets herself be seduced by the mysterious stranger before you can even say “why, this is starting to get a bit improbable, old chap!”.

Though things might not end up to happily for our spy once Lucy cops to having been emotionally manipulated, her husband getting murdered and her child threatened.

Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle (based on a Ken Follett novel) is generally highly regarded by mid-brow critics, but I can’t say the film does much for me, independent of today’s eye-brow position. Sure, there’s an obvious high level of technical accomplishment on display, Marquand using old-fashioned and brand new cinematic techniques in tandem to create an artificial yet highly effective sense of time and place, but the film’s emotional content, as well as its slow, slow pacing does not work for me at all. Its tendency to repeat beats that are supposed to convince us how ruthless and shitty Faber/The Needle is, does not help there at all. I really got it the first two times around, so repeating this with a different victim after that just seems like a waste of my time. There’s a lack of subtlety here, as everywhere else in the movie, that just doesn’t connect with me, particularly not in combination with the pomposity of the film’s tone that confuses the pose of having depth with actually having it.

As central as it is, I never found the D.H. Lawrence with more melodrama marriage crisis of the Roses convincing or involving, either. Despite the actors doing their very best (which is considerable), the film replaces believable humanity with melodramatic posturing. Worse, it isn’t actually terribly good at this posturing, forgetting that good melodrama isn’t just meant to perform heightened emotion but also to draw the viewer into these emotional with the characters. Eye of the Needle never does, at least for me.

In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

Three Films Make A Post: Everybody loves Otley…well, almost everybody

Otley (1969): I can’t say I love Dick Clement’s Otley, either. As a spy comedy about a ne'er-do-well played by Tom Courtenay stumbling into a complicated and somewhat cynical spy plot, the film’s simply not terribly interesting. It does very little you won’t have seen done better in other spy comedies.

Fortunately, the film does have an ace in the hole as another kind of movie: a perfect time capsule of London of its time, focussing on the bits populated by more everyday people, and showing no interest at all in the touristy parts of the City. There’s also a lot of pretty awesome fashion to gawk at. All of which doesn’t make the movie better as a spy comedy, but certainly does turn it into an interesting watch if you do like this time capsule aspect as much as I did.

The Cursed aka Eight for Silver (2021): Despite a handful of atmospheric shots and a couple of neat and creepy ideas, this film by writer/director/producer/cinematographer and potential hobby cook Sean Ellis, is rather a drag that suffers from a pretty terrible script. There’s a completely unnecessary framing device without a payoff, pacing that drags endlessly thanks to a lot of needless repetition of already established concepts, a bizarre problem with creating scene transitions in a movie already this slow, characterisation that’s paper-thin while also being portentous, and writing that’s generally so lazy, the film even felt the need to put the Beast of Gévaudan affair that’s a plot point a hundred years into the future (unless our protagonist is meant to be 135 years old).

There are also riffs on various better movies (hey, John Carpenter, how are you?), an awkward attempt at ingratiating itself to the social justice oriented parts of the audience that comes over as gratuitous rather than meaningful, and a lot of characters, most of whom have nothing to do. The practical effects are rather great, to be fair; the digital ones, on the other hand, are on the level of the script.

Misono Universe aka La La La at Rock Bottom (ugh) (2015): This one’s probably not one of the better movies of Japanese indie movie veteran Nobuhiro Yamashita (who started out with the great wave of this sort of thing in the middle-aughts, making movies like the glorious Linda Linda Linda and never stopped making films), though it is still a movie that makes emotionally affecting use of all of the hallmarks of its style: a minimal plot, elegant and meaningful framing and blocking, a sense of humour of the driest kind, and a deep understanding of how to make a slow-paced movie that’s slow-paced for a reason and not because the writer has no clue on how to pace something.

The acting is of the sparse and naturalistic kind you’d expect, too, with Subaru Shibutani, Fumi Nikaido and a lot of faces you’ll know when you’ve seen Japanese movies of this style doing their things very well indeed.

The film also is a good example of how different stylistic treatments can change the meaning and effect of a plot: an American movie would take the same plot of an amnesiac Yakuza turned singer in an amateur band, and turn it into something at least slightly triumphalist, loudly praising the human spirit; the Japanese indie approach turns the same material into something that’s somewhat hopeful, and quietly human that would just shake its head in unbelief at the less quiet approach.

Three Films Make A Post: His bride was EVERYTHING he thought she was…and an air-raid warden besides!

British Intelligence (1940): This propagandistic little spy thriller is actually rather good fun, if you can cope with the limits of its budget and scope. The script is a bit dry and does include not just one but three big didactic speeches about the coming of Hitler (this taking place during World War I to enable a protagonist who is a German spy), but it works as a decently constructed spy mystery.

The film also features fine performances by Margaret Lindsay as our semi-heroine and Boris Karloff. The latter clearly has a lot of fun changing his body language and accent depending on whomever he’s talking to. Which is also a rather neat embodiment of the shifting identity of the kind of double, triple, multiple agent he’s playing here.

The Tomorrow War (2021): That’s a lot more than you can say about this monumental SF action stinker by Chris McKay, a film with a script so unsure about what it is actually about it goes on for thirty minutes after its core plot and relationship has been resolved. Adding insult to the injury of wasting my time by being about half an hour too long, the world building is preposterous – apparently, this takes place in a world where you can easily organize a worldwide draft, but nobody but our heroes thinks about where the enemy is actually coming from - and makes very little sense (even with some timey-whimey hand-waving). I could forgive all of this, if the film’s production design were less blandly generic (the monsters are a particularly boring example of badly digested Giger) and its big action set pieces were a bit more interesting. The direction and production values aren’t bad of course, there’s too much money pumped into the thing, but they also lack any spark of creativity or joy.

Hi Diddle Diddle (1943): This screwball comedy by Andrew L. Stone is a Tarantino favourite, and it’s easy to see why. The moments of meta fourth wall breaking and the play with generic tropes of the style of comedy this is are obvious points to haul the man in – and they do work for me too – but there are also very funny performances by Adolphe Menjou, Pola Negri (as a terrifying Wagnerian opera singer, and Menjou’s wife, no less) and June Havoc. Stylistically, this is as playful as it gets, with many short sharp little asides that bring the film to mind as a guy who just had a brilliant idea and now must tell you all about it. This distractibility in approach could kill any comedy’s pacing stone dead, if not for the fact that most of the distractions the film finds are funny and charming as all get out, enhancing instead of distracting.

In short: Legacy of Lies (2020)

Twelve years ago, a mission in Kiev to retrieve documents concerning a secret Russian assassination program went very badly indeed for MI-6 agent Martin Baxter (Scott Adkins), not just ending with him losing the documents but also with the death of the mother of his child through one of his own bullets.

Now, a retired Baxter moves across Britain with his precocious twelve year old daughter Lisa (Honor Kneafsay), earning their keep with underground fights (it’s a Scott Adkins movie, remember) and work as a bouncer. The last few months seem to have been particularly hard for Baxter, his PTSD symptoms now even including waking visions of his dead wife. That’s a timely development, too, for Sacha (Yuliia Sobol), the daughter of one of the people killed during that very bad mission seeks Baxter out looking for help in acquiring the same old documents of twelve years ago.

Of course, she’s not the only one looking for them – Baxter’s old colleagues from MI-6, the CIA (or maybe the NSA) as well as the Russians are also very much still interested in them. When the Russians kidnap Lisa, Baxter really has no other choice than to resolve the issues of his past violently.

Among the considerable number of low budget movies starring the great Scott Adkins, Adrian Bol’s espionage action movie has a decent place somewhere in the quality middle. Even though it is not as much of a cheap and awesome action extravaganza as some films featuring Adkins are, there’s more than enough of the fun violence to keep me happy. Most of it is choreographed and shot very well, too, but the emphasis of the film is elsewhere. For this one seems genuinely interested in Adkins’s tragic past, and the way it shapes his relationship with his daughter as more than just a device to keep the action going. It doesn’t come to any startling new insights about these things, but I can’t help but respect when a movie like this that could get away with simply showing Adkins punching and shooting people puts actual effort into characters and their relationships. This doesn’t keep Legacy of Lies from having some pretty silly ideas, but those, you can really only read as the film trying not to be boring.

While the action stays fun bread and butter stuff, and the plot makes just as much sense as it needs to be, it’s the character work that throws some interesting curveballs. Of particular interest is how the completely ruthless Russian agent (Anna Butkevich) in charge of Lisa treats her, acting like a genuine human being with hang-ups and an inner life, the film daring to turn one of its villains into something amounting to a human being without getting all soppy or pretending she’s just a nice decent woman at heart. Rather, the film says, she’s complicated. Which may not sound like much, but is a pretty fine thing to see in any low budget action movie.

In short: Rendezvous (1935)

1917. Former newshound William Gordon (William Powell), freshly commissioned as a Lieutenant in the US Army is rather keen on getting to the front. On his last day before getting on the proverbial train, he meet-cutes rich gal Joel Carter (Rosalind Russell). Both are smitten instantly, and when Gordon tells her he once wrote a book about cryptography under a pseudonym, and is now trying to avoid the military finding out so they won’t commission him to a desk job at home – he just finds the thought to be slaughtered in the trenches irresistible I suppose – Joel tells on him to her papa, who just happens to be the Assistant Secretary of War.

There’s some friendly bickering between the couple still to come, but mostly, William will soon be disabused of his idea of a desk job being not dangerous enough. For a German spy ring has involved itself in the US cryptography business, having gotten rather close to striking a dangerous blow. Of course, the Germans are perfectly willing to commit rather a lot of murders to make their plans work. It’s easy enough, too, what with the Ministry of Defense apparently having so little security that a spy can simply waltz in and assassinate a scientist there.

For the first twenty minutes or so of its running time, William K. Howard’s Rendezvous seems to start a slightly more sober wartime variation on The Thin Man, which had after all been a considerable success of the kind no Hollywood studio wouldn’t want to repeat or copy by putting Powell together with a different actress but going for a mix of proto-screwball humour, romance, and espionage. Powell and Russell have a good bit of chemistry between them, so things start out pretty charming indeed.

However, once Powell’s character is set up as code breaker, the spy potboiler business takes over nearly completely, and Joel is relegated to a minor character. Powell – still charming and entertaining to watch as always – has to walk through a rather stiff and melodramatic spy plot nearly alone, romance taking a back seat to the business of espionage and war, even though Howard as a director seems to be really rather better at the romance and the comedy.

The longer the film follows the espionage plot, the less sense it makes, the spies’ plans only nearly succeeding because everyone working for the US government not played by Powell is painfully dense.


Thanks to Powell, it’s not exactly a chore to get through the final two thirds of the film, but it’s not a joy either. The bait and switch of promising a very different film from the one we get isn’t exactly making one happier with the affair either.

In short: Termination Man (1998)

Evil-bad Serbian terrorist Yurdovich (Aleksandr Ilin) has acquired some sort of extra toxic nerve gas; he threatens to use it on a large scale, unless all UN troops leave the former Yugoslavia, so that he and his cronies can claim the whole country, certainly not using that nerve gas in doing so. That cannot stand, of course, so the US sends in their top agent Dylan Pope (Steve Railsback). Pope – not to be confused with the Pope as the film will indeed joke – has been “enhanced” via some mysterious technological wizardry, and also gets a pocketful of gadgets even Roger Moore phase James Bond would have called “lame”. Together with mandatory woman with big silicon implants Delilah Shane (Athena Massey) and soon-to-be traitor Ted Marks (Eb Lottimer) it’s off to save the world.

Not that anyone has any actual plan for going about that world saving business, but that’s clearly as optional as OPSEC in the world of this movie.

Which would be perfectly okay, even potentially awesome for an action movie with espionage and Six Million Dollar Man elements like this, but if a film wants to distract an audience from its perfectly empty head, it needs a director able to actually stage an action sequence. And I gotta tell you, Termination Man’s director and co-writer Fred Gallo isn’t that guy. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of many films whose action direction, staging and editing is quite as bad as here. Gallo never seems to be able to frame anything going on in an effective or even just efficient manner, so what looks as if it were perfectly decent stunt work has zero impact or rhythm. It’s not even as if Gallo were trying to be “edgy” or stylish and obfuscating what’s going on for that matter. This is attempted bread and butter filmmaking that never manages to point the camera quite into the right direction, regularly cuts away too soon or too late, and seems not to have been kissed by whatever fairy is responsible for kissing directors to teach them how to frame action properly on the screen. It’s all a bit embarrassing.

It is also rather frustrating, for Termination Man does have perfectly decent production values to show off, with a bunch of attractive Russian locations standing in for whichever part of the former Yugoslavia this is supposed to take place in, for the film to play in; much more than your typical impoverished action film can afford. Too bad nobody involved seems to have had any clue on how to make use of them.

The acting’s terrible, too, Railsback, not the greatest thespian on Earth at the best of times, seems completely zoned out, mumbling and grinning uncomfortably, while everybody else mostly seems to want to get through their lines as quickly as possible. One might come to the conclusion that the proper handling of actors isn’t in the filmmakers’ area of expertise either.


But then, what is?

Three Films Make A Post: One hell of a rodeo.

Lasso (2017): If you can’t beat the competition in the backwoods slasher space with your movie’s quality, there’s always the time honoured use of the gimmick. So, as the title promises/threatens, Evan Cecil’s Lasso is indeed a backwoods slasher movie with rodeo and cowboy themed kills. Some of them are even pretty fun in an at once pleasantly nasty and ridiculous way. But alas, that’s all the film has to offer, for the characters are as bland and generic as you’d expect – having one arm isn’t a character trait, you know –, the plotting is by the numbers at best and stretches out nothing to great lengths at its worst, while actual suspense is absent.

Still, this one could have been much, much worse.

Spy Game (2001): For a Tony Scott movie, this spy affair with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt (two guys who managed to get impressive careers out of pretty faces, an understanding of how to best utilize their limited ranges as actors, and clever choice of roles) is downright sedate. It’s clear that Scott at times tries to emulate the style of classic 70s spy films with early 2000s technology, but he’s still not a terribly great choice for a spy film that isn’t going bigger than James Bond all of the time. Scott’s too showy a director to provide the subtlety a good espionage movie needs, even the sort that’s a third of an action movie, and simply not thoughtful (as a Scott detractor, I’m tempted to say not intelligent, but I didn’t know the guy, so…) enough to get into the questions of personal ethics, political expediency and morals the best of these movies explore. Though he is clearly trying, and not vomiting stupid camera tricks into my eyes for most of the film’s running time, so that’s a plus.

(Tyler Rake) Extraction (2020): I’m actually rather happy that Netflix is putting money into higher budget action movie fare like this, but Sam Hargrave’s Extraction doesn’t really scratch the action itch like Netflix’s Indonesian and Filipino examples of the last few years do for me. It is clearly trying to go as all out as these films, but there’s a strangely bland quality to the action, rather as if you were watching drafts for a nasty, bloody action movie than the actual thing.


The by-the-numbers script by Joe Russo (who has done much, much better in the in theory much more restrictive superhero genre) certainly doesn’t help, nor does Chris Hemsworth’s not exactly exciting lead performance. And at this point, Hemsworth is good when he has the right script to work from, but can’t make a film look better than it actually is.

Three Films Make A Post: If you use it, you'll lose it...

Porno (2019): A handful of teenagers alone at night in the cinema of their evangelically Christian dominated town accidentally summon up a succubus. A teeny bit of nudity, some penis shots, and gore ensue. As do some moments when the film nearly turns into a more complicated discussion about the sort of Christianity these people have grown into, only to get distracted by jokes about the same thing, penises and gore again. Which is perfectly alright for what it is, director Keola Racela having a nice feel this sort of thing, as well as for friendly nods towards the Italian style of horror.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005): Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary about the late great, haunted and sad Daniel Johnston is certainly one of the great documentaries about music and mental illness, clearly coming from a position of love towards its subject, but never trying to pave over complications nor the very bad stuff. It’s also never just pandering to the romantic idea of the troubled genius, looking for humanity instead of grand gestures. If you love people with mental illness or have problems there yourself, the film may hit very close to home and watching this can hit you like a hammer, not because the film is going for cheap effects but because it absolutely refuses to look down.

The Rhythm Section (2020): Reed Morano’s thriller about revenge, the spy business and the problems with guilt and alienation these things bring with them doesn’t seem to be terribly well-loved. I, perfectly willing to overlook some plot contrivances as I am, found myself rather happy with the film. It certainly features a fine lead performance by Blake Lively, who simply plays through some of the films sillier moments as if they were perfectly natural, and adds a lot of little naturalistic touches to make a very typical character arc feel more human and personal. Morano for his part has an effective way to put ideas about guilt and how to lose it (and how not) into plot and action, keeping the focus tight on the elements he (correctly) deems most important to the material without getting distracted in flashbacks.


Admittedly, thematically, little of what is going on in the film and with its characters should be news to anyone watching genre movies at all, but an old story told well is a perfectly good thing too.

Past Misdeeds: Cartes sur table (1966)

aka Attack of the Robots

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Oh no! International bigwigs are murdered by guys and gals in blackface, wearing what we from a more enlightened age can only describe as hipster glasses! The perpetrators are acting kinda weird, too, as if they were some sort of mind-controlled…robots. They are also losing their black-faces when they get killed.

Interpol finds out that these killers – at least the ones they can get their hands on after their deeds – are all people who mysteriously disappeared before now turning up all minstrel show-y. The only connection between these disappeared is their shared blood group – rhesus zero (scientific fact: the film’s science might be ever so slightly dubious). Some very vague clues point to a charming tourist spot in Spain. Because they really want a rhesus zero blood type kinda guy to investigate things in Spain, and there’s a disturbing lack of them in active service, Interpol rope their former, rhesus as well as brains zero, agent Al Pereira (Eddie Constantine) back in. Al isn’t too happy about the whole thing, particularly because a “Chinese” gentleman with the extremely probable name of Lee Wee (Vicente Roca) wants him to do the same job too, but he’s actually even too stupid to properly say no to anyone, be it Lee or Interpol. Well, at least Al’s pretty good at punching people, and charming the ladies (pheromones, I guess?).

These awesome talents will be put to good use once Al attracts the attention of robot people builders Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion) and Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) and their entourage, as well as the ire of the Chinese, and the interest of one Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy).

I don’t actually know much about French genre films beyond Oughties horror, a bit of 50s swashbucklers, and Jean Rollin, but I do know the French had a – somewhat inexplicable, so I assume comparable to Jerry Lewis – thing for Eddie Constantine, hero of a quintillion of pulpy crime, spy and Godard movies, and not exactly the most inspiring actor ever to come from America, what with his difficulties expressing those “emotions” people talk about so much. One thing Constantine – as far as I know, and as Cartes as well as the Godard connection suggests – really had going for him was that he was clearly game for anything at all, with no unhelpful ideas about personal or thespian dignity. Just like Sir Ben Kingsley, now that I think about it.

Which obviously makes him the ideal lead in this relatively early directorial outing of my favourite Jesus, Jess Franco, because like all Eurospy films Franco made, Cartes sur table quickly turns out to be a Eurospy farce full of bat-shit insane ideas. The film, of course, does not make the slightest attempt to do stupid and boring stuff like tell a sensible, logical story (as if that had much risk of happening in any Franco film) in a sensible logical way, and instead throws bizarre dialogue, weird shit, and various incredibly fake looking but awesome and spirited punch-ups at its audience until it will either run off in a huff, or roll with it laughing and grinning, and having as much of a time as Constantine seems to have. Sure, the man wasn’t a great actor, and I don’t think one of the great low budget charismatics, but he sure seems to enjoy his time on screen so much it’s difficult for me not to share in the fun. So, unlike with Jerry Lewis, the our French neighbours were right.

Having fun with the possibly insane is made to look (and feel) particularly easy by Franco, of course. At this stage of his career, when he actually needed to make movies that didn’t exclusively cater to himself and his obsessions (which I actually love him and his films for, quite a lot), Franco’s films couldn’t quite get away with the full self-indulgence, so this Eurospy comedy can’t spend the time on the moments of leisure and boredom that soon became so important in the director’s films.

Fortunately, this is so early in Franco’s career too, he doesn’t just get bored with the whole affair and shoots some random crap, takes his cheque, and makes three other films with that money. Instead, Franco chooses a classic and simple one damn thing after another approach we, the easily distractible, always will enjoy. Among these damn things are some Franco mainstays, like two (alas only very short) improbable night club numbers of the kind I generally find impossible to describe effectively (because that’s what the movies are for, and I’m not Jess Franco), a main villainess with a bit of a kinky handle on villainous life and a charming dominatrix personality, the inexplicable business with the black-face robot zombie people, bizarre asides like the scene where Constantine finds his hotel room smashed after a Chinese goons versus robot goons fight in his absence, fetches a porter to complain, only to find a perfectly fine room again because the surviving Chinese have – for no reason I could make out, of course – taken it upon themselves to clean up behind themselves once they are alone in the room. All the while, Cynthia watches the proceedings through an absurdly large hatch in the wall. The Chinese only miss two corpses, but what the heck, right? Plus, that gives the film the opportunity for some corpse joke business taking up the next five minutes.


And if that doesn’t convince you Cartes sur table may be slightly atypical Franco but also very fun Franco, I don’t know what could.

Scorpio (1973)

Aging CIA agent Cross (Burt Lancaster) has been handling assassination business for the CIA for quite some years now, running freelancers and patsies to assist in the murders of heads of states and politicians the US would rather see dead. In the last couple of years, Cross has often used Jean Laurier (Alain Delon) – going under the codename of “Scorpio” as his freelance partner. The two men have grown somewhat fond of one another, as far as the age difference and the business they are in allows for this sort of thing at all.

So, when the CIA decides to get rid of Cross for some reason and decides to hire Jean to do the job after their own people have screwed things up rather badly, the younger man isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the job. It takes a faked case of heroin possession and a rather great job offer to convince Jean; but even then, his heart clearly isn’t in it, and he often seems to be outright looking for reasons not to kill Cross.

Cross for his part only wants out of the game completely. He could go over to the Soviets – he even has an actual friend there in the old school KGB operative Zharkov (Paul Scofield) – but there’s really no future in that. Plus, at a certain age, a guy just wants to live somewhere nice with his wife without having to think about death and destruction.

There are a lot of secrets and lies for both men to uncover during the whole affair, and eventually, both will pay with the last of their illusions about the world they move in, but also their illusions about the possibility of a normal life.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers know, I am not terribly fond of director/old sleazebag Michael Winner, and find many of his films unpleasant in a way that’s neither enjoyable nor instructive.

Scorpio, though, is definitely a film where this old criticism of mine doesn’t work, for everything here that’s brutal and unpleasant needs to be as brutal and unpleasant as it is to make the film work, to portray the world of spies and assassins the protagonists work in as cruel, cold and driven by an utilitarianism that has become so automatic it is now completely divorced from ideology, or passion, or even the idea that terrible things have to be done to reach a goal that is right. In this world, it’s obvious that Cross, as one of the last men standing of an old guard that still believed in things, needs to be destroyed; but then, as the film will eventually reveal, he has been corrupted as much as the rest of the world, he just wears a nicer face and perhaps tells himself that he is still different.

In fact, it’s Jean who will turn out to be the true innocent of the characters, still genuinely clinging to human feelings like love, and an idea of friendship that’s not secretly based on how useful his friends can eventually be to him. And of course, it’s this core of actual humanity that will be crushed during his hunt for Cross, until he has nobody and believes in nothing anymore.

Very atypical for its very cynical director, the film seems genuinely sad and angry about this state of affairs, treating the terrible things that eventually happen to all good people here with surprising dignity, giving them true emotional resonance by showing – a first in a Winner movie as far as I am concerned – a degree of restraint. The dialogue (script by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson) is uncommonly thoughtful too, meditating on things like the mechanisms of the spy world, but also the worth of ideology, or the relationship between aging men who have seen quite a few terrible things.


Which doesn’t mean that Scorpio is lacking in ruthlessness and brutality, Winner just manages to find the proper amount of both so he’s not losing the whole of the film to them. So no worries, fans of more traditional Winner outings, the action is still as brutal as it got in ‘73, the rest of Scorpio just isn’t buried under it.

OSS 117 - Mission for a Killer (1965)

Original title: Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117

Everyone’s favourite secret Cajun agent, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Frederick Stafford) aka OSS 117 finds his R&R in the Alps rudely interrupted by another mission. Apparently, the number of terrorist attacks on Important People™ has risen considerably in the last couple of months. Responsible for all the – mostly suicidal – attacks are perfectly common people without any radical political backgrounds or histories of violence. 117’s higher ups have found out that the killers have been mind-controlled with the help of some sort of drug, and have traced that drug’s production to Brazil, and of send our hero there.

In Brazil, OSS is first to contact his local colleague, gather information and go villain hunting according to whatever this information may suggest. Unfortunately, said colleague turns out to have been nearly killed in the sort of “accident” that can happen when somebody blows your car up with a grenade, and the villains of the piece are rather keen on scratching the “nearly” from this sentence. While they are at it, they’re also trying to murder 117, which turns out to be rather more difficult than they seem to have expected.

Our hero for his part clearly follows the standard eurospy movie agent tactics of punching guys and flirting with women, knowing full well that this will eventually lead him where he wants to go, as the genre conventions prescribe.

In this third movie in the 60s version of the adventures of OSS 117, and also the third directed by André Hunebelle, Frederick Stafford replaces Kerwin Matthews in the title role, and I rather liked him in this one. Sure, I doubt, as with nearly all eurospy heroes, that his flirtatious moments would charm anyone (call me the eternal optimist), but he’s really rather convincing at portraying the more ruthless man of action side of the character, while looking good enough in a suit to still work in the kind of society spies move in this sort of film.

Mission for a Killer, like most of the OSS 117 series, belongs to the relatively classy arm of Eurospy movies that can’t keep up with the budget of a James Bond outing but clearly aren’t made out of cardboard and spit. There are actual production values, like partial location shoots in Brazil, and a script that has problems but is generally coherent and sane inside of the rules and regulations of the non-realist spy film. Hunebelle, despite not being one of the revered French masters, was a pretty great genre director, when it came to swashbucklers and action-based spy movies at least, staging all sorts of inventive action scenes between rough punch-outs and somewhat ambitious semi-mass fights. He is particularly great at using the locations as actual physical spaces, demonstrating an eye for verticality that is often curiously lacking in directors (or not so curiously when a film simply can’t afford to use it).

Plot-wise, this is pretty much bread and butter Eurospy business, with the usual reversals and betrayals, the obligatory capture of the hero, and so on and so forth, but it’s all well-paced and carefully enough constructed if you are willing to buy into the basics of how espionage works in Eurospy films (and if you don’t, you’re probably not exactly the audience for this write-up or the film), and makes for a fine time when combined with Hunebelle’s skills and a glass of wine or two.


Politically, there is of course something a bit dubious about a film that has its hero fighting off revolutionaries against the Brazilian government, including a bunch of paratroopers landing to rousing music, just the year after a coup d’état in the real country that replaced a democratically voted-in government with what would become a twenty year military dictatorship. However, the novel this is based on was written in 1955, and I don’t really think the filmmakers were trying to do propaganda work here, and more being a bit careless with the real world their film has very little to do with anyway. In this context, the portrayal of the revolutionaries is actually rather fitting, and pretty damn funny, for the film seems to go out of its way to not give them an actual political stance while still using the popular version of revolutionary iconography with them. So there’s not a single actual political statement made by any of these guys. Instead, we get vague speeches about The Revolution that completely leave out for what and against what they are fighting in what I can only see as a truly awkward attempt by the filmmakers to have their cake and eat it, too.