If you’ve read last week’s post, you know what’s going on. Basically, these were the cinematic cousins of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., back in the 1960s:
OSS 117: Mission for a Killer (1965)
We’ll start with yet another bonkers adventure about a ridiculously smarmy CIA agent, this one (played by Frederick Stafford) gallivanting around Brazil in between some very cool – and truly vicious – action beats, enjoying the sun, ignoring the recent onset of authoritarian rule, and eventually battling a sinister organization and blowing shit up in their secret lair… Because this is part of the peak era of the OSS 117 series, the production values are way higher and the cinematography much more luscious than in the pictures that make up most of this list. Less ludicrous than the previous film in the series (Panic in Bangkok) and way more dynamic that the next one (Terror in Tokyo), Mission for a Killer is probably the closest the French ever came to delivering something that truly *looked* and *felt* like a vintage James Bond picture (albeit more Moore than Connery).
Secret Agent Fireball (1965)
aka The Spy Killers
One of the very first ersatz-Bond – who in some versions is actually called Fleming! – tries to beat the Soviets in the search for a nuclear scientist who has defected from both sides, which leads our protagonist (Richard Harrison) from Paris to Hamburg to Beirut and beyond. Secret Agent Fireball is pretty much the quintessential Eurospy, nailing all the staples of the subgenre at its most enjoyable/cringy (depending on your sensibility), like the fact that the ‘hero’ is an unbelievably smug jerk who spends much of the film engaged in either martial arts or sexual harassment. That said, fans of this type of movie should appreciate not only the committed take on the regular tropes, but also a handful of neat surprises and just enough oddball touches to raise it above the crowd (for example, instead of the typical singing act in a nightclub, we get a female wrestling show!)
Spy in Your Eye (1965)
aka Bang You’re Dead
Obsessed with lasers and miniature cameras, swinging sixties thrillers often veered towards spy-fi, but this one pushes it to a whole other level. Among all the gizmos and hidden passages, the Russians manage to hack the artificial eye of the chief of the American secret services in Europe (a stone-faced Dana Andrews), which conveniently allows them to see and listen in on his plans. And this isn’t even the central plot of Spy in Your Eye, whose visually imaginative Cold War games stretch from East Germany to Syria (or, at least, this heightened reality’s version of those places).
SuperSeven Calling Cairo (1965)
Here the McGuffin is a sample of baltonium (a new element 100 times more radioactive than uranium!) which has been stolen, hidden in a camera, and then sold to the wrong person by mistake… so it’s up to the pipe-smoking Martin Stevens, aka agent SuperSeven (who, as the codename suggests, is more badass than 007), to globetrot and fistfight in order to track down the camera before the Soviets get their hands on it. Like many other Eurospies, SuperSeven Calling Cairo provides two kinds of entertainment. One, I suspect, is largely on the level the filmmakers intended, appreciating the touristic footage, femmes fatales, twisty intrigue, and the whole super-spy world where a pen is a gun, a razor is a transmitter, and the Waterloo National Museum secretly houses the MI6 headquarters, complete with a room for machine-gun training (talk about soundproof walls!). The other layer has to do with all the odd choices, whether it’s the characters’ sudden plan to disguise a corpse as the mannequin of a Napoleonic soldier or the fact that, once again, the protagonist can be quite an outrageous dick… While his behavior may be morally repulsive and sometimes quite bewildering, there is something infectious about the movie’s anything-goes attitude, approaching SuperSeven and his mission just as it approaches the uneven acting and preposterous plot: writer-director Uberto Lenzi doesn’t try to justify any of it, he just expects viewers to take it all in stride, swept by the propulsive momentum of unashamedly unpretentious two-fisted thrills.
Upperseven, the Man to Kill (1966)
aka The Spy With Ten Faces
aka The Man of a Thousand Masks
This time around, MI6’s top spy (Paul Hubschmid) has a gimmick: he’s a master of disguise who uses Mission: Impossible-style rubber masks in the fight against his archnemesis, Kobras, with whom he clearly has a backstory (boy, I wish this had turned into a series…). Fortunately, this isn’t the only thing Upperseven, the Man to Kill has going for it, as the film ticks all of the genre’s boxes with panache, including plenty of location-hopping/sightseeing, here put in the service of a mission to protect a money transfer from the USA to South Africa in order to fund an anti-Chinese pan-African alliance… Now, as you can guess from the previous sentence, the silliest thing about Upperseven is its politics, as the heroes are in cahoots with the apartheid regime while the villains operate out of Ghana, the pioneer of African anticolonial emancipation! As usual, it’s best to watch these movies as comically grotesque live-action cartoons, practically caricaturing their era’s international relations while merrily filling the screen with explosions and karate.
You Only Live Twice (1967)
Let’s finish things off with the real deal, i.e. with a classic installment of the series that loomed over everything else, starring Sean Connery. Arguably the most swinging sixties super-spy film of all the swinging sixties super-spy films, this Japan-set adventure shows the James Bond franchise at its best and worse: there are a bunch of truly fun sequences and *absolutely jaw-dropping* set design, but You Only Live Twice is also somehow even more sexist and racist than usual… Still, we do get to meet 007’s Japanese counterpart, who – hilariously – is way more of a super-spy than Bond is!