From the Orient with Fury/Agente 077 dall’oriente con furore (1965)

‘Fortunately, we’re only a few hundred yards from the carpet store.’

A top scientist is kidnapped and forced to build a prototype of his new disintegration ray. The CIA sends in their top agent to locate and retrieve his blueprints and rescue him if possible…

Tongue in cheek Eurospy sequel that sees Ken Clark returning as ‘Bond On A Budget’ CIA Agent Dick Malloy. Also back in harness is director Sergio Grieco, ensuring a swift hour and a half of harmless espionage hi-jinks.

Having a beautiful daughter and getting kidnapped came with the territory when you were a top nuclear scientist in Europe in the 1960s. Professor Franz Kurtz (Ennio Balbo) is no exception, but it’s fair to say that he could have done more to avoid the abduction part, as his security arrangements weren’t the best. Being mobbed by reporters asking about his latest secret invention isn’t really flying under the radar, and a bodyguard who stays in the lobby to listen to an obviously fake phone call was probably not the right guy for the job. Five minutes later, Balbo’s being carried out of his hotel room in a case made for double bass, and a subsequent booby trap explosive leaves everyone thinking he’s dead.

However, when the lab guys are through with the corpse, CIA Chief Heston (Philippe Hersent) isn’t buying it. Balbo’s previously mentioned beautiful daughter Romy (Evi Marandi) is shocked to hear it, assuming that her father’s component molecules had left to rejoin the universe. She’s happy to help to try and retrieve the blueprints of her father’s Beta Ray, but no one knows where they are. Hersent assigns top agent Malloy (Clark), who takes the call while in the middle of a bar fight. However, his rendezvous with Balbo’s colleague Professor Preminger (Jean Yonnel) doesn’t go according to plan when the egghead takes a poison dart to the chest in a casino.

By now, Clark has already locked horns with the enemy in the delightfully seductive form of femme fatale Simone Coblence (Fabienne Dali), the somewhat less appealing Sarkis (Loris Bazzocchi) and their boss Goldwyn (Franco Ressel). Balbo won’t cooperate with them, but they snatch Marandi and force him to assemble a prototype of his disintegrating ray. Clark’s luck takes a turn for the better when he finds the mysterious Evelyn Stone (Margaret Lee) using the shower in his hotel room, but it turns out she’s a fellow agent and all business. Together, they must track down Ressel’s organisation and stop the villain from selling Balbo’s invention to the highest bidder.

This sequel to ‘Mission Bloody Mary/Agente 077 missione Bloody Mary’ (1965) reunites star Ken Clark with director Grieco in the second of the star’s three outings as secret agent Dick Malloy. The good news is that the film retains the lighthearted approach of their first adventure, with Grieco gleefully embracing as many of Bond’s emerging tropes as his budget will allow. That means lots of fistfights rather than high-level stunts and few gadgets beyond Clark’s braces, which he uses to send Hersent an emergency message in morse code! The disintegrating ray is a working model, though, not just a McGuffin, and the dastardly Ressel wields it at the climax as he suddenly transforms into a cackling madman.

None of the proceedings is even vaguely original, of course, but that’s kind of the point when you’re mocking already established clichés. However, without the necessary wit or invention, the film does struggle to establish a clear identity of its own. The cast is good, though, with Clark striking the right balance between the knowing humour and the more serious moments. The action is fast-paced, the fight choreography solid, and the actor handles both in an assured and confident manner. There are plenty of beautiful but deadly women for him to tackle, too, and it’s good to see Lee making her secret agent debut. Unfortunately, she only appears in the last third of the film and is given little to do; her participation limited to playing Cleopatra in a rolled-up carpet and struggling with her big hair.

Hersent returns as Clark’s boss from the first film, and there are another couple of notable names further down the cast list. Spaghetti Western bandit Fernando Sancho provides a funny cameo as an overbearing restaurant customer, and the ubiquitous Luciano Pigozzi puts in a shift as a dodgy character with a fetching eye patch who hangs around a carpet store. There’s also a wonderfully eccentric ‘Bond Theme’ that plays over the cheap and cheerful opening credits and turns up a few times later. Singer and lyricist Lydia McDonald delivers her best Shirley Bassey while a lounge group lean heavily on the Hammond Organ. It’s quite the mash-up, to be sure.

This Italian-French and Spanish co-production utilises some exotic shooting locations, including Istanbul. However, Grieco has so much action to cram in that the audience is mainly spared the usual footage of ‘local colour’ mandated by the tourist boards in question. There are also a couple of funny in-jokes, probably from the English dubbing crew rather than the original production. Marandi’s character has been studying physics in Moscow and has returned with a Russian boyfriend. His name? Boris Molotov. In one sequence, Clark participates in an auction for a piece of furniture where he’s hidden Balbo’s blueprints. He’s outbid by sexy, thrill-seeking millionairess Dolores Lopez (Mikaela), but before they begin, the auctioneer announces the winner of the previous lot. It’s Miguel Cervantes, author of ‘Don Quixote’!

Clark was an American who began acting on Network Television in the 1950s and took the occasional small film role, his only lead being in David Bradley’s low-budget science-fiction snoozeathon ’12 to the Moon’ (1960). Relocating to Italy, his impressive physique won him supporting roles in Peplum features such as ‘Hercules The Invincible/Ercole l’invincibile/The Sons of Hercules in the Land of Darkness’ (1964) and ‘Maciste nell’inferno di Gengis Khan/Hercules Against the Barbarians’ (1964). He was also cast as the lead in two Mario Bava Westerns, ‘The Road to Fort Alamo/La strada per Forte Alamo’ (1964) and the more impressive ‘Savage Gringo/Ringo del Nebraska/Nebraska Jim’ (1966). Other espionage adventures included ‘FX-18/Agent Secret FX 18’ (1964) and two more directed by Grieco: ‘Tiffany Memorandum’ (1966) and ‘Fuller Report/Rapporto Fuller, base Stoccolma’ (1968).

Arguably, Lee went on to become Eurospy’s 1960s poster girl with a string of such features, including ‘An Orchid for the Tiger/Le Tigre se parfume à la dynamite’ (1965), ‘New York Calling Super dragon/New York chiama Superdrago’ (1966), ‘Spy Pit/Da Berlino l’apocalisse’ (1967), ‘Dick Smart 2.007’ (1967), and several others. Previously, she had been a frequent comedic foil for Italy’s national comedy institution, Franco and Ciccio, and she continued to display her acting chops outside the spy world, co-starring with iconic actor Jean Gabin in the entertaining crime caper ‘Action Man/Le soleil des voyous’ (1967). She also appeared many times alongside Klaus Kinski and also featured in notable fringe horrors ‘The Bloody Judge’ (1970) with Christopher Lee and Massimo Dallamano’s pop art update of ‘Dorian Gray/Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray’ (1970).

Good fun and one of the more entertaining Eurospy features.

James Tont: Operazione U.N.O./Goldsinger (1965)

‘Barbara, if you hadn’t sent that mouse when you did, I wouldn’t be a man anymore; l’d be a hamburger.’

A secret agent who has problems keeping his mind on the job chases down a vital roll of microfilm, only to find it contains no information, just musical notes. As he struggles to decode the message by listening to various lounge singers, a sinister villain targets the United Nations on behalf of an aggressive foreign power.

Italian EuroSpy parody that finds Lando Buzzanca as this week’s ‘Tont On A Budget’, running around the glamorous capital cities of the world at a pace to make even the most enthusiastic film editor’s head spin. Along the way he tangles with the obligatory elements of guns, gadgets and girls, but mostly girls. He also encounters a talking mouse.

Opening with a song that should get every copyright lawyer in the world reaching for a lawsuit, it’s clear from the get-go that we’re in very broad comedy territory. Buzzanca is the cleverly named Agent 007 and a half, who is in trouble with his controller because he’s more interested in getting his hands on the fairer sex than on that missing microfilm. Turning into a surgeon to perform the necessary operation to retrieve his prize from the body of an enemy agent(!), Buzzanca finds the message coded in musical notes, and has to spend a lot of time hanging around nightclubs and listening to horrible songs to decode it. As this tends to involve one gorgeous euro-babe after another, it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

It involves a bewildering travelling schedule too; taking in Las Vegas, Miami, Hong Kong, and several major cities, although l am unconvinced the production visited many of them (or even more than one!) ln other developments, Buzzanca flirts shamelessly with Miss Lollypop back at HQ, eye drops and sunglasses give him x-ray vision, and at one point his body ends up covered in gold paint, a bit like actress Shirley Eaton in some other, slightly better known film whose title escapes me at the moment. Our villains are Goldsinger (Loris Gizzi) and his bowler-hatted henchman Kayo (George Wang) and, as well as the title song, more of the musical soundtrack flirts cheerfully with dire legal consequences.

‘But I ordered the Aston Martin…’

As you may have gathered, none of this to be taken remotely seriously, but the film aims for a wacky sensibility that it never really delivers, instead settling for boring, predictable jokes and half-assed physical gags. So, rather than knowingly winking at the audience with a sly grin, instead it chooses to hit them constantly over the head with one heavy blunt object after another.

On the plus side, there is a high speed car chase with some excellent stunt driving. It’s rather a good sequence, but seems to have wandered in from another movie entirely. Interestingly enough, Buzzanca’s little Fiat does turn into a submarine at one point, predating a certain Lotus driven by Roger Moore in some other spy movie I vaguely remember that was made a dozen years later. His car also boasts a telephone and a TV, although this does seem to be stuck on a channel that shows endless rejected entries for the Eurovision Song Contest.

The directors here were Bruno Corbucci (brother of the more successful Sergio) and Giovanni Grimaldi. Both had long careers in Italian cinema, almost exclusively in comedy (which is a bit hard to believe!), although Grimaldi also penned thriller ‘Web of the Spider’ (1971). Lovely co-star Evi Marandi also appeared in the much better EuroSpy ‘From The Orient With Fury’ (1965), as well as Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) and bargain-basement doodle ‘Goldface, The Amazing Superman’ (1967). Here, she continually resists Buzzanca’s oily charms, but can she hold out until the final credits? I think you already know the answer to that one.

Comedy sometimes doesn’t cross national boundaries, and this would seem to be a prime example of that. It was successful enough domestically to get a swift sequel.

Luana/Luana, The Female Tarzan/Luana Le Figlia Foresta Vergine (1968)

‘George, don’t come any closer! I lost my clothes!’

Over twenty years after the disappearance of a scientist in an uncharted jungle region, his daughter mounts an expedition to investigate. The safari immediately runs into a series of strange misfortunes and its steps are dogged by a mysterious figure…

It’s a little surprising to find that the jungle movie was still thriving in Europe in the late 1960s. Even though the genre had its heyday in the 1930s, and its roots go back to the silent days, there was apparently still a market for this Italian-West Germany co-production. Perhaps the small screen success of Ron Ely’s ‘Tarzan’ show had something to do with it. Anyway, this example provided proof, if it were needed, that nothing had really changed since the days when Johnny Weismuller was swinging through the trees on an MGM sound stage and mucking about in the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Gardens, 301 N. Baldwin Avenue, Arcadia, California, USA.

So are all the time-worn clichés present and correct? Pretty much. Kicking off the story is beautiful Evi Marandi, who has come to the dark continent to investigate the mysterious plane crash that apparently killed her father twenty years before. By all accounts, he’d been on the verge of some great scientific discovery or other. Accompanying her is the egghead’s old partner, who isn’t in favour of her harebrained scheme at all (nothing suspicious about him then!) Marandi entrusts her expedition to local guide Glenn Saxson who is still ruggedly handsome but has seen better days due to a close association with the bottle (no idea what’s going to happen when he and Marandi spend time together…not a clue…)

‘So, Cheetah, are you going to give me Ron Ely’s phone number or not…?’

So…lost expedition…sinister plane crash…the actors staring offscreen at various pieces of mismatched wild animal library footage…the local bearers desert as they always do (why even bother to hire them in the first place?)…a raging storm only blows some trees about and not others…and Saxson fights to the death with one of the villains by having an arm-wrestling contest with attendant scorpions.

Perhaps the oddest thing here is the role of our title character. To call Mei Chen Chalais a female Tarzan is pushing it more than a little bit. She’s so slight and petite that it looks like a stiff breeze could blow her away, and the idea that her mere appearance causes the local natives to run for the hills is pretty ridiculous. How has she survived on her own in the jungle for over 20 years? Search me.
To the film’s credit, at least it doesn’t look like she spends all her time at the local beauty parlour with all the other jungle girls of cinema, but she’s still pretty well turned out with a touch of eye makeup and lipstick, and her hair always hangs down in just the right way to cover her naked breasts. But the strangest thing is how little she does. Most of the time she just hides in the trees and watches the expedition, although she does intervene to pluck a big hairy spider off a sleeping Marandi just before it walks onto her naked back (for which the actress was undoubtedly grateful, if not the oblivious character).

Saxson once filled Franco Nero’s shoes as the iconic gunslinger in ‘Django Shoots First’ (1966) and also appeared as the suave super crook ‘Kriminal’ (1966) and in sequel ‘The Mark of Kriminal’ (1967). Marandi took a trip to the ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) for director Mario Bava, starred in Eurpospy ‘From the Orient With Fury’ (1965) and went up against bargain basement superhero ‘Goldface, the Fantastic Superman’ (1967). Chalais only did half a dozen pictures, including fractured spy thriller ‘The Blonde from Peking’ (1967) with Hollywood legend Edward G. Robinson.

When the film received a belated U.S. release in 1972, writer Alan Dean Foster was hired to pen a novelisation for Ballantine Books. Unfortunately, the script was in Italian and Foster didn’t know the language. A screening of the film didn’t help either; there was no English dub at that point and no subtitles. So, Foster just made up a new story based on the U.S. poster. Whatever he came up with, it was probably more interesting than what was happening on the screen!

I don’t know if there are ‘Jungle Movie Completists’ out there, but, if so, then this one’s for you. No-one else need apply.

Goldface, The Fantastic Superman (Goldface il Fantastico Superman) (1967)

‘Goldface, what you suggest is madness! But I guess sometimes madness pays off…’

Mysterious supervillain Cobra starts bombing factories as part of a huge blackmail scheme. Industrial leaders agree to pay his ransom but, luckily for them, wrestling star Goldface has become involved. Cobra plans to rub out our masked hero but finds that he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

The Italians have a long association with comic book culture, so the notion of masked heroes and villains was not new to them. The international success of their ‘Sword and Sandal’ epics had put the national film industry on the world map, but their popularity was waning by the mid-1960s, and, when the Adam West ‘Batman’ TV show went global in 1966, producers were quick to jump on the bandwagon with characters like ‘SuperArgo’, ’Argoman’ and ‘Goldface.’

Goldface (Espartico Santoni) is a champion wrestler like SuperArgo (and masked Mexican legend El Santo before them), balancing a life fighting crime with his grappling exploits and being a top scientist (or something?) His weapons are…mostly fisticuffs. His hi-tech transport is…a normal motorbike. His go-to gadgets are…well, he uses a telephone quite well. Yes, I’m afraid this is all rather cheap and cheerful, with our masked hero making do with his natty costume, peanut-chewing sidekick Lothar, and…well that’s about it really.

The Cobra (Hugo Pimentel) is planning world domination (somehow or other), but needs plenty of cash to do it and so begins his reign of terror and blackmail, aided by statuesque blonde Evi Marandi, who’d had a prominent role in Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965). The Cobra’s various tiresome plots and schemes include holding pretty Micaela Pignatelli at his island base (of which we see two rooms and some minions in a tower), as well as eliminating our caped hero with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately for him, Goldface and the forces of law and order storm the island in a truly Bond-like finale (on a slightly smaller scale!), and his men are a bit rubbish in a fight. Actually, despite the obvious limitations of overacting stuntmen and actors who don’t know how to make a prop gun look real, this is the best sequence in the film.

‘If you’re going undercover, may I make a suggestion?’

Goldface infiltrates the secret base by simply waiting around in the bushes to overhear the password – ‘The Cobra is Everything’. He then mutters it to a couple of sentries and he’s in (told you The Cobra’s men were rubbish). Later on, when faced with the dilemma of how to deal with the guards in front of Pignatelli’s prison, he simply walks up to them in costume and starts hitting them. As you can probably tell, it’s all top quality stuff. Proceedings climax with some poorly matched helicopter stock footage.

Although the adventures of fellow Italian wrestling crime-fighter SuperArgo weren’t exactly compelling, they were still much more fun than this; a tatty, dull affair bereft of any invention or interest. The inescapable conclusion is that this was knocked out quickly as a cheap cash-in on a current trend. In a lot of ways it resembles one of the old Republic movie serials; masked hero, mysterious supervillain, and plenty of (unconvincing) fisticuffs.

Only without the entertainment factor.