Another competent Eurospy featuring George Ardisson, let down by plot holes which become bigger and more frequent as we go along and by the customary budgetary restrictions, which leads to laughable special effects during what should be climactic moments
A rich man hires George to find his crusading journalist daughter, who has disappeared while investigating drug smuggling activity in Venezuela. Somewhere along the line the plot morphs into a ransom demand for the daughter and an extortion demand to prevent a number of oil rigs that have been rigged to blow up, thus ruining the Venezuelan economy (which Sanchez, Maduro and co have since managed to do, using slower but equally effective methods)
George makes a convincing hero as usual, but his proclivity for walking into traps and taking a beating pushes the envelope here, even by Eurospy standards. The straw that breaks the camel's back moment for me being the occasion where George is buried in a railway hopper car under a hopper load of sand, which then sets off on its journey, only for Pascal Audret to have a psychic moment as the carriage passes by and tell the Police Inspector that somehow she know George is in there. The carriage is drained via the hopper mechanism until George's body is revealed. Pascal tells us he survived using some sort of mini oxygen rebreather apparatus gadget, which has not been foreshadowed or highlighted as is traditional, other than that George may have used it previously when he swam out to the villains private villa (an island or just remote coastal is not made clear)
Women get a mixed bag of opportunities in this one. Christa Linder, as the daughter, gets to show off her body in the opening scene but is otherwise completely wasted, almost invisible and gets no dialogue to speak of. Pascal Audret, as the rival / allied female agent, gets the most screen time and dialogue, but she's mainly a damsel in distress and messes up when left to guard perennial henchman Sal Borghese. Maria Julio Diaz plays the lead drug mule and gets one decent dramatic scene before being poisoned. While Luciana Angiolillo gets to play the lead villain (villainess?) but lacks the charisma to carry it off in my opinion.
On the men's side Harold Leipnitz, as the affable male rival / agent and Horst Frank as evil Dr Soarez both make a memorable impression, along with the ever reliable Borghese.
Caracus makes for an unremarkable location, other than looking modern, bustling, clean and shiny, bursting with hope for a better future based on fossil fuels, in sharp contrast to the present day conditions. Similar to Beirut, which appears in so many 1960s Eurospy movies and was once considered the "Riviera" of the Middle East back then, long before Donald Trump revived the term for use in Gaza. Sad how things have turned out.
I suspect other locations, such as the villains villa, may well have been in Italy or France rather than Venezuela.
Well worth a watch if you enjoy the genre.
