Once Upon a Spy

Neat little TV movie, in the spirit of "The Men From U.N.C.L.E." A pre-Cheers Ted Danson is partnered with an athletic female lead, and Christopher Lee is always good value as the villain. Former Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster had a hand in the story.

ONCE UPON A SPY is a deservedly unknown 1980 TV movie that stars up-and-coming Ted Danson as a computer programmer who unwittingly gets drawn into a spy plot that's straight out of a James Bond movie. And indeed this turns out to be a Bond spoof through-and-through, with the unfortunate added side-effect that it's also quite horrible.

Rarely have I seen a film in which the acting is so stilted or the narrative so predictable and boring at the same time. Danson displays none of the charisma that would make him a household name in time, and his attempts at flirting and romance with token blonde Mary Louise Weller are, to be frank, excruciating. ONCE UPON A SPY is truly a movie of its era, with cod attempts at feminism (think CHARLIE'S ANGELS style tough fighting women) mixed in with the normal "saving the girl" routines and some quite appalling jump suits that make the female cast look both fat and frumpy (although they're neither).

Bizarrely, Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster had a hand in the screenplay, although quite what he was thinking I don't know. Keeping on the Hammer theme, we get Christopher Lee as the villain, riffing on his MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN persona. I felt sorry for him, soiled by his appearance in this; I remember his comments about breaking free of Hammer and making it in Hollywood, but even latter-day Hammer efforts like THE SATANIC RITES OF Dracula are a hundred times better than this trash. Definitely a film to be consigned to obscurity, and for good reason.

Not great but there are some elements available today in 2021 (the film is made in 1980), they mention terms like "new world structure", "reset", "new order".

Ted Danson has neither salt nor pepper, the script is predictable and boring, Mary Louise Weller is beautiful and sexy in body-hugging costumes, either black or yellow. And Christopher Lee doesn't have the dominating force as in other movies. But his character fits Bill Gates perfectly.

One of those failed TV-pilots that then became a standalone TV-movie, ONCE UPON A SPY takes the James Bond aesthetic to the small screen, from formidable (and colorful) technical set pieces to a flaunting trumpet score to a former Bond villain in Christopher Lee, a brilliant computer mogul who, brain-wise, is second to none...

Well except for Ted Danson, turning in one of those "befuddled geeks who's really a handsome diamond-in-the rough/anti-leading-man" types... and it's no surprise, given his near-future turn in CHEERS, he has great comedic timing...

Perfectly paired with (and counterbalanced by) sublime ANIMAL HOUSE beauty Mary-Louise Weller, an Alpha Male-like female operative and, after getting Danson's Jack Chenault out of a stuffy office shared with his only friend, a computer the size of a wall, the action is pretty much non-stop...

So the peripheral world-dominating plot doesn't matters since it's the nifty Odd Couple duo... whether ripping around in a hot-rod on the ground or jumping out of planes in the air... that really matters, and this SPY would have made a genuinely good series (as the creators of REMINGTON STEELE would soon-after prove).

This continues the string of bad-to-middling pictures Christopher Lee lent his services to after he went the Hollywood route; while not terrible as such – at the very least, it reunited him with former Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster – the end result is best described as terminally bland.

Rather than imitating the James Bond formula (though John Cacavas' score certainly throws several cues in that direction), the film seems like a belated addition to the myriad espionage TV series of the 1960s yet fully embracing the absurd obsession with technology that was redolent of the era in which it was made; interestingly, Lee's shrinking of a cumbersome computer to portable size can be seen as a prophetic indication of the extensive progress achieved in this particular field! He plays a reclusive tycoon, bound all the way through in a snazzy missile-carrying(!) wheelchair, whose everyman nemesis (Ted Danson) not only happens to be an old rival but ultimately contrives to hoist the older man with his own petard. Aiding the protagonist is a female secret agent (a relationship which, typically, starts off on the wrong foot and inevitably ends in romance) and, to further accentuate the feminist viewpoint, Eleanor Parker fills in for the Agency Head.

The film, then, is not unentertaining for what it is and, if anything, manages a nod to both Hitchcock (Danson is about to be eliminated when a crowd of tourists bursts upon the scene and he joins them on their way out towards safety) and the cult TV series THE PRISONER (hero and villain conduct a deadly board game utilizing human pieces).