There is one good joke in "The Ambushers," the third of Dean Martin's Matt Helm adventures. It comes at the end when Helm attempts to seduce a striking blonde. Music, he tells her, is the most important ingredient in creating a romantic mood, but Dino's rendition of "Everybody Loves Somebody" leaves her unmoved. With a flick of a switch on the record player, Dino's buddy, Frank Sinatra, croons "Strangers in the Night," and the blonde is suddenly receptive to Helm's advances. "Hmm," Helm says, "I didn't think you'd like Perry Como." Aside from this one chuckle and that striking blonde, all "The Ambushers" has in its favor is some other striking blondes, some striking brunettes, and some cast members for whom this 1967 Christmas release must have represented an opportunity to indulge their masochistic tendencies. What is the lovely Janice Rule, a distinguished stage and screen actress, doing in a movie starring Dean Martin that isn't "Rio Bravo," "Some Came Running," "The Young Lions," or "Toys in the Attic"? In the short red dress that comprises her outfit for most of the film's length, Rule looks terrific, more so than Senta Berger whose reputation rests solely on her attributes as a sexpot and not on her thespian skills. The problem with "The Ambushers," like the other three Matt Helm movies, isn't that it's lowbrow, escapist junk. The problem is that it's BAD lowbrow, escapist junk. Even at its most elaborate, it looks as though it was shot on the set of Martin's TV variety show, which was then in its third season. Everything about the film, excepting the presence of Martin and Rule, looks and sounds like a rejected episode from the last (and worst) season of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," which also parallels the film's release. The music by Hugo Montenegro is fifth rate Bond stuff with the addition of a "groovy" 60s feel reminiscent of the era's most contrived pop music; the framing of each scene is as simple and unimaginative as possible; and the script may have been neatly typed but otherwise represents a waste of even that much effort. Ol' Dino was capable of much better than this, and his box-office pull, surprisingly strong in 1967 despite an average of three movies a year, a weekly TV show, and assorted record releases, would surely have encouraged a producer with better taste than Irving Allen to put up the cash for a worthier vehicle. Instead, when the crooner gasped his last on Christmas Day 1995, the film legacy he left behind, with a handful of exceptions, was a ghastly one.
