Dolche in der Kasbah

Something dreadful is about to happen in Lebanon, but John Meseurier doesn't have any agents he can send there, so he recruits doctor David Niven, who flies to Beirut, has an affair with Françoise Dorléac, and winds up being kidnapped and tortured.

MGM thought they had an answer to James Bond in the Jason Love novels of James Leasor, but the result is a peculiarly weightless movie. There's not much fun, except for Mlle Dorléac and a sequence in which Niven charms Lebanese auto mechanic Eric Pohlmann with tales of his Cord roadster. We are expected to believe that a random English doctor can scale buildings with the ease of a mountain climber, and even the torture scenes seem to be wasted; Niven has no information on the local espionage scene. The movie is competently handled by Val Guest, but the show didn't set any box office records and the series never happened.