Movie Review: DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE (1965)

AIP’s Vincent Price vehicle Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine was one of the first Sixties Bond parodies I ever heard of, long before I actually saw it. In a way, that was a good thing, because it afforded the movie years to percolate in my imagination, growing far beyond a potential it could possibly live up to when I finally saw it. Ultimately I was bound for disappointment, because, let’s face it, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine is a far better title than it is a movie. But because of all those years that it lived in my mind as pure potential, I went into it for the first time after college (during college I had tried in vain to track down a 35mm print to program on campus) with a pre-built nostalgia, and nostalgia is a wonderful—and possibly essential—cushion for a movie like this. If you remember it from your childhood, you’ll probably enjoy it more than it deserves to be enjoyed. And the same can be said if you’ve somehow approximated such a nostalgia like I did. But even after that lengthy apologia for liking the movie, I have to admit that I only really like certain parts of it. Most of it is pretty bad.

Made at the height of the Sixties (and here I’m grudgingly conceding that that phrase, which I usually use very positively, can also have negative connotations), Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine is a as much a blend of what was popular then as those Seltzer and Friedberg “parody” movies (usually with “movie” in the title) were in the early 2000s. (Though to be fair it’s a lot better than those!) And since it was made by American International Pictures, it’s a blend of its time that particularly reflects that studio’s output. Therefore it’s as much a parody of their two bread-and-butter genres—Frankie and Annette beach movies and Poe-inspired Vincent Price horror movies—as it is of James Bond. While I’m indifferent to beach movies, I do love those Poe movies… so I’m not being an espionage chauvinist when I say that the only bits that really work are those inspired by the spy craze. And even then the hit-to-miss ratio is probably 50/50... at best.

Appropriately, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine opens with one of the strangest title sequences of any Sixties spy movie. Under a rather great and undeniably infectious theme song performed by the Supremes (available on the stellar Ace Records Sixties spy theme compilation Come Spy With Us), instead of the Bond-style credits most spy spoofs opted for, Bikini Machine treats us to Claymation, courtesy of Gumby creator Art Clokey. And the entire Claymation sequence is built around the stupidest thing in the whole movie: a pair of stupid gold elf shoes with little bells on their pointed toes that Price’s character wears to justify his name, Dr. Goldfoot. I’m aware that I just used the word “stupid” twice in that sentence, but that’s because these shoes are seriously stupid. I don’t know whose idea they were, but I sure am glad that Ken Adam wasn’t struck by a similar necessity to equip Gert Frobe with jingling golden thimbles.

After the titles, we meet an attractive robot woman (Susan Hart) in a trenchcoat and fedora walking through the streets of San Francisco. We learn that she’s a robot woman through a series of stupid gags (there’s that word again… are you detecting a pattern?), like a car crashing into her and getting wrecked (because she’s metal, get it??), or two bank robbers escaping and crashing into her and getting knocked down (because she’s metal!), then shooting her full of holes with no discernable result (because… you’ve figured it out by now, haven’t you?). Then we meet Frankie Avalon being annoying in a restaurant and sporting a really annoying helmet of hair. (Uh-oh. There’s another word that bore repeating twice in one sentence!) The robot woman comes in and drinks a sip of his milk and then spouts out gallons of the white stuff (all from that one sip, apparently) through the “bullet holes” in her body. (John Cleese would recycle the same questionable gag years later in that Schweppes commercial on the original Licence to Kill VHS.) Despite her leakage, the holes (which aren’t visible) don’t seem to have damaged her mechanics one bit, and in minutes she’s successfully picked up Avalon and is heading back to his apartment with him.

Avalon is Craig Gamble, a bumbling agent of Secret Intelligence Command (or SIC, which I think is supposed to pass for a joke) who decorates his walls with a picture of Sherlock Holmes, apparently for inspiration. The robot woman is named Diane, and she talks with an annoying put-on Southern accent and, we and Gamble soon come to learn, wears only a gold lamé bikini underneath her fashionable spy trenchcoat! (The latter makes up for the former.) But what made her pick him?

The answer comes back at Dr. Goldfoot’s lair, where we meet the diabolical mastermind and his sidekick, Igor (occasional Elvis cohort Jack Mullaney). While Vincent Price deserves an iconic entrance in any movie he makes, it’s kind of undercut here by those stupid gold shoes, which really are quite stupid. (Have I mentioned that?) I am not a production designer, nor a fashion maven, but I am confident I could have designed much better gold shoes for the same purpose. And regular readers will know that I am not given to making such claims. Anyway, it transpires at Goldfoot HQ that the idiotic Igor programmed poor Diane to go after the wrong man. While Gamble hasn’t got two pennies to rub together, she was supposed to be seducing Avalon’s beach buddy Dwayne Hickman, as millionaire playboy Todd Armstrong. (As either an inside joke or laziness, Hickman’s character is named after Avalon’s character in Ski Party, and Avalon’s Craig Gamble is named after Hickman’s character from that movie.) To Igor’s credit, the two actors do look a lot alike (in a very generic Sixties heartthrob way), and that fact actually makes the movie a little bit confusing. The fact that Gamble turned out to be a secret agent was just bad luck—or bad scriptwriting. Luckily Dr. Goldfoot can operate Diane by remote control, and he’s able to reprogram her to suddenly walk out on Craig and set off to lay a trap for Todd.

Diane’s trap for Todd involves bending over and pulling her trenchcoat far enough aside to expose a glimpse of that golden behind as she pretends to inspect a flat tire. It also involves Dr. Goldfoot somehow taking remote control of Todd’s car, and driving him backwards until he sees Diane. (Dr. Goldfoot possesses a magical universal remote long before its time, and uses it primarily for making cars drive the wrong direction and various things blow up. He also threatens people with it a lot, though I’m not sure if he’s threatening to blow them up or to reverse them.) One glimpse of Diane, however, is enough to make Todd forget that it might be a little suspicious and just a tad weird to find yourself suddenly pulled backwards by an unseen force while driving. Their meeting also offers the movie’s choicest bit of dialogue—and, yes, it’s every bit as sexist as you would expect/hope for from a movie called Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

“Thank heavens you came along, darling, I’m completely flat!” declares Diane as she opens the front of her trenchcoat.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” replies Todd, ogling her gold bikini-clad breasts jutting out of the London Fog.

So what’s all this about? Well, sadly all of Dr. Goldfoot’s ingenuity is expended on a simple gold digging scheme. Diane is supposed to get millionaire Todd to marry her and then make him sign over power of attorney to her (which is of course the same as signing it to Dr. Goldfoot). Honestly, I find it a little disappointing that Dr. Goldfoot has the ingenuity and the wherewithal to build perfectly human-looking robots and universal remotes that control anything, and yet the best scheme he can come up with is gold digging. Why not aim higher, Dr. G? Why not strive for world domination? (Well... that's what sequels are for!)

Anyway, Igor’s error with the target has accidentally tipped off an agent of SIC to the mad doctor’s big gold digging plot. Fortunately for Dr. Goldfoot, though, he’s not a very good agent.

Gamble’s code number is only Double O and a half. “Why they won’t even let you carry a gun until you get a digit instead of a fraction!” yells his boss and uncle, Uncle Donald (genuine comic genius Fred Clark, of Zotz! and Hammer's Curse of the Mummy's Tomb). Donald’s not really in any position to berate his nephew, though, because he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer himself. When Igor shows up in his office dressed in what looks like a Sherlock Holmes Halloween costume (deerstalker and Inverness cape) claiming to be SIC director Inspector Abernathy, Donald believes him despite Gamble’s protestations.

The gags in this movie are mostly lame (as opposed to lamé), and recycled for the hundredth time. When an upper file cabinet drawer is closed, a lower one pops out knocking someone on the head. A beautiful girl robot is mis-programmed (Igor!) and starts talking like a Brooklyn gorilla. When Igor tries to spy on his boss using a periscope, Dr. Goldfoot splashes some ink on the top end giving Igor a black ring around his eye from the viewer. (Actually, that one's still kind of funny.) Even the spy-specific jokes tend to fall flat a lot of the time. Igor shows Dr. G a new attaché case (pronounced the American way, not the British “attachee”) with its own From Russia With Love-style gadgetry. What surprises does it have in store?  Would you believe a fist with a boxing glove that pops out and punches someone when they open it? (Neatly and obviously accomplished by situating a stuntman underneath the table the case is set on, easily able to reach through a hole in the table and the case.)

While the jokes often fall flat, highlights come in the form of random outbursts of go-go dancing, whether from Dr. Goldfoot’s bikini girls (whose default mode seems to be set as “go-go,” befitting their gold bikini costumes) or in nightclubs. (There’s a odd number from a band all dressed up as Fred Flintstone credited as Sam and the Apemen and accompanied by—you guessed it—go-go girls. But for some reason the go-go girls aren’t dressed in fur bikinis, just regular bikinis.)

Price himself camps it up to the extreme (surprise, surprise), parodying his own other AIP performances and even donning costumes from a few of them at times. To that end, the movie becomes more and more of an AIP in-joke as it proceeds (complete with an Annette Funicello cameo), and eventually Gamble and Todd end up in Dr. Goldfoot’s torture chamber, getting a tour that includes portraits of all his illustrious forebears (again bearing certain resemblances to famous Price roles past) and lots of familiar torture implements. It’s poor Todd who ends up strapped down beneath the swinging pendulum from The Pit and the Pendulum.

But then, in its final act, something unexpected happens. The movie becomes… really fun! The undisputable high point of the film is the fifteen-minute-long final chase through the streets of San Francisco in which the heroes and villains keep changing vehicles. It’s accomplished mostly through obvious rear projection, but the San Francisco scenery is quite real. The heroes (Gamble and Todd) start out in a gadget-laden Cadillac spy car whose gags include inflatable seats that inflate when you don’t want them to and a steering wheel that switches sides between the driver and the passenger at inopportune moments. The villains start out in a motorcycle and sidecar that become detached in the course of the chase and eventually manage to re-attach themselves. When Dr. Goldfoot uses his magic remote control device to blow up their spy car, the heroes swipe a red convertible (a Sunbeam Alpine, like Bond drove in Dr. No), and when the motorcycle and sidecar end up smashed on the front of a train, the villains (their faces coated in black soot, just like a cartoon character’s after surviving such a collision) appropriate an E-Type Jag. Eventually the heroes are on a bicycle while the baddies commandeer a San Francisco cable car—and manage to drive it right off its tracks and all over town! By the end the good guys are in a boat on a boat trailer careening wildly down San Francisco’s steep hills. It’s all pretty fun, really, in a typically zany way.

The end titles feature those stupid gold shoes again (though not Claymation this time), performing a disembodied dance (accomplished simply—and effectively—enough with a dancer dressed all in black dancing in front of a pitch black background) alongside gold bikini-clad go-go dancers—and similarly disembodied writhing gold bikini tops and bottoms. (That’s actually a really cool effect!) All of which handily beats (and makes up for) the Claymation opening in my book.

Even though Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine leaves things open for a sequel with Dr. Goldfoot and Igor surviving their cable car crash (and subsequent bombardment by gunboats) and turning up on the plane winging our victorious heroes off to Europe, the end credits instead tout the next beach movie, The Girl in the Glass Bikini. Which kind of brings us back to this movie’s title. Say it out loud to yourself. Think about it. Based on that title more than my (or any) review, I suspect you already know if this movie is for you or not.

Full Cast Revealed for BOND 25 at Goldeneye Press Conference

At a non-traditional press conference today in Jamaica, appropriately held at the resort that used to be Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, James Bond producers revealed details about the next 007 movie--the twenty-fifth official entry in the 57-year-old series. One detail they did not provide was a title. This same situation occurred on Daniel Craig's second Bond film; no title was revealed at the commencement of filming press conference for the movie that ultimately became Quantum of Solace.

Goldeneye resort

What was revealed was the cast, confirming some long running rumors and offering some pleasant surprises. Foremost among those pleasant surprises was the news that, after more than a decade, Jeffrey Wright will reprise his Felix Leiter role! The beloved series character was last seen in 2008's Quantum of Solace. With a third turn as 007's CIA friend, Wright will surpass David Hedison, becoming the actor to play the role the most times. And should this untitled film prove to indeed be Craig's swan song as Bond, as he has said, then it will also make him the only Bond actor to date to have one consistent Felix throughout his entire run in the role. History in the making, folks!

Other new male faces include Billy Magnussen (a comedic standout in Game Night who previously worked with Bond 25 director Cary Fukanaga in Maniac), rumored to be playing another CIA agent, Rami Malek (Best Actor Oscar winner for last year's Bohemian Rhapsody), seemingly confirming that he'll be an antagonist by saying, via video, that he'll "be making sure Mr. Bond does not have an easy ride of it," Dali Benssalah (A Faithful Man), and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's Toby Esterhase, David Dencik. The stunning Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049), who previously worked with Craig in Rian Johnson's upcoming whodunnit Knives Out, and Captain Marvel scene stealer Lashana Lynch (who is of Jamaican descent) join the hallowed ranks of Bond Girls.

Ana de Armas

As previously reported, for the first time since Eunice Gayson's Sylvia Trench in From Russia With Love, there will also be a returning Bond Girl this time out. (There have, of course, been other returning actresses, but in different roles.) Lea Seydoux will reprise her SPECTRE role of Madeleine Swann, last seen driving happily off into the sunset with Craig's James Bond. Other returning cast members include Bond's entire MI6 support staff: Ralph Fiennes as M, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny, Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner (also setting a new series record, surpassing Michael Kitchen's two turns in the role during the Pierce Brosnan era), and Ben Whishaw as Q.

Lea Seydoux

Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson also confirmed some heavily rumored contributors to the screenplay for Bond 25. Series mainstays Neil Purvis and Robert Wade will be joined by Scott Z Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) and, in especially exciting news Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge (rumored to have been brought on a Craig's suggestion to inject more humor). Killing Eve is a terrific spy series with a very unique creative voice, and should she end up with a screen credit (something ultimately determined by the Writers Guild), Waller-Bridge will be the first woman to receive one since Joanna Harwood on the first two movies with Sean Connery! As previously announced, American director Cary Joji Fukunaga (who helmed the entire riveting first season of True Detective) directs, having come aboard after Danny Boyle famously left the production. Though not mentioned at today's Jamaica presser, cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land, First Man) was previously confirmed to shoot the movie. As far as I know no composer has yet been announced. Personally, I'm crossing my fingers hard for a David Arnold return to mark Craig's final outing.

Cary Joji Fukunaga

Broccoli revealed a tantalizing outline of the new film's plot. As recapped by The Hollywood Reporter, "Bond is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica after leaving active service. But his peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology." Besides a triumphant return to Jamaica, the iconic shooting location of Dr. No and Live and Let Die, filming will take place in Norway (where at least one second unit sequence has already been shot, in order to take advantage of the winter weather) London's Pinewood Studios, and scenic Matera in Italy. The press conference (whose only questions were actually chosen from Twitter rather than journalists) concluded by offering us our first glimpse at one of these locations. Presumably this is Bond's house in Jamaica where he's enjoying the soft life (a plot point perhaps borrowed from John Pearson's experimental 1973 continuation novel James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007, which had the agent retiring to the island).

Want a Very Expensive Max Zorin Action Figure?

©Sucklord

It's art! Bootleg toy artist Sucklord is offering an unofficial Max Zorin action figure for $175. It's part of a line of Christopher Walken character figures. If you buy it, I don't think you're supposed to open it up and play with it.

Tradecraft: Dave Bautista to Star in Spy Comedy from GET SMART Director

The Hollywood Reporter reports that SPECTRE's Mr. Hinx himself, Dave Bautista (Blade Runner 2049, Guardians of the Galaxy) will star in his own spy movie for STXfilms. Get Smart director Peter Segal will helm the action-comedy, entitled My Spy. Prolific spy writers Jon and Erich Hoeber (RED) penned the script. According to the trade, "My Spy will tell the story of a hardened CIA operative (Bautista) who finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl, having been sent undercover to surveil her family."

Remembering the Great Christopher Lee

According to numerous outlets including The New York Times, Sir Christopher Lee has died at the age of 93. I find that hard to accept. Obviously 93 years on this earth is an incredibly good run for anyone, and especially for someone who has managed to pack those years with careers as an airman, a spy, a musician, a writer, a scholar, and, certainly not least, an actor with over 250 credits in film and television, including among them work with some of the biggest directors of all time and in several of the biggest franchises ever. But even in his nineties, and even after an on-set injury left him less mobile and reliant on a cane, Christopher Frank Carandini Lee had shown no signs of slowing down. He continued acting right up until the end, reprising his iconic role as the wizard Saruman in last year's The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, and celebrated this past Christmas by releasing an EP of heavy metal carols. I had fully expected him to keep going strong for another decade still. So it was with shock more than sadness that I awoke this morning to this terrible news. Because such a full life of so many accomplishments is one to be celebrated rather than mourned.

My first exposure to Christopher Lee was in the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun, opposite Roger Moore. For me, Christopher Lee was the greatest Bond villain ever. The Man With the Golden Gun was certainly not the best movie (though it was my favorite as a kid), but Lee was fantastic as the titular assassin Francisco Scaramanga, transforming a character who was basically a common thug in his step-cousin Ian Fleming's novel into a much more interesting thug who has cloaked himself in a veneer of charm and sophistication. Scaramanga was the first, and most successful, of several attempts over the course of the series to create a villain who was a dark reflection of 007 himself, an equal in his deadly skills, and thus a truly worthy adversary. Lee brilliantly delivered what's probably my favorite villain monologue in the whole series when Scaramanga shares his personal history with Bond while seated next to him in a kickboxing arena. While keeping the tone conversational and even jovial, Lee subtly conveys tragedy, pathos, and eventually sadism and psychosis by the time he concludes his story of seeking revenge for the mistreatment and death of a beloved elephant with the line, "You see, Mr. Bond, I always thought I loved animals. Then I discovered that I enjoyed killing people even more."

While Lee is of course most associated with the horror genre (a genre he did a lot to elevate), and it's no accident that EON and George Lucas looked to a quintessential Dracula actor for their respective spy and sci-fi villains, he worked across all genres over the course of his career, and actually racked up quite a few spy roles. One of his earliest parts was an uncredited role as a KGB agent in the 1952 Oskar Homolka spy comedy Top Secret. He was probably able to rely to some degree on his harrowing real-life role in wartime military intelligence for his role as a Nazi commandant in the resistance thriller Missiles From Hell (1958). One of his surprisingly few forays into Eurospydom came very early in the cycle, in 1962's Cold War thriller The Devil's Agent. His only other Eurospy movie came six years later, with a villainous cameo in Five Golden Dragons. His ridiculously fun Sixties Fu Manchu movies all have an espionage flavor, as do the horror movies Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973, in which the Count takes on MI5), and Raw Meat (also '73, in which Lee himself has a small role as an MI5 agent). He also brought horror to spydom with a cameo as Dracula in the Sammy Davis, Jr./Peter Lawford spy spoof sequel One More Time (1970). One of his best roles was as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a film that very much plays up Mycroft's espionage activities. (Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself on two separate occasions, once in 1962 in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, and again in two miniseries in the early 1990s collectively known as Sherlock Holmes: The Golden Years.) He was a popular villain in TV spy movies including Once Upon a Spy (1980), Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979) and Detonator (1993), the latter opposite Pierce Brosnan. Lee's guest appearances on spy television series included an episode of O.S.S. (1958), two episodes of The Avengers opposite his grammar school classmate Patrick Macnee ("Never, Never Say Die," with Diana Rigg, and "The Interrogators," with Linda Thorson) and a spy-themed episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ("Austria, 1917"). It's also notable that over the course of his career, he acted opposite three James Bond actors: Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (in The Golden Compass).

His real life spy adventures are not so well documented, as he always adhered strictly to the secrecy expected of him. While in Air Force Intelligence, he was attached to the SAS and SOE, but when pressed for details in a 2011 interview with The Telegraph, he enigmatically (and typically) responded, "Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like." The wartime stories he recounted in his autobiography Lord of Misrule (an updated version of Tall, Dark and Gruesome) were mostly humorous anecdotes about things like awful commanding officers ("some people are just bastards") making him empty latrines in the desert. But when I was working on behind-the-scenes documentaries for The Lord of the Rings, I remember a moment caught on camera (though I don't recall if it made it into one of the documentaries) where Peter Jackson was attempting to demonstrate to Lee how Saruman should cut the throat of his hapless lackey Wormtongue (Brad Dourif). Lee took the knife from Jackson in exasperation and told him, in that inimitable baritone, something to the effect of, "no, this is how it's done." An awed and bemused Jackson then whispered to the camera, confessing his embarrassment at trying to direct a former commando how to cut a throat. So maybe it's best to follow Lee's advice and "leave it at that."

During his final months of service, according to his autobiography, Lee served with the multinational Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects, investigating and apprehending fugitive Nazi war criminals. These investigations took him to a number of concentrations camps, the all too real horrors of which left him completely inured to the greasepaint horrors of the movies he would later star in.

Lee's horror filmography is the stuff of legend. His performances as Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula in Hammer Studios' Curse of Frankenstin (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), respectively, helped launch the genre into the color era—and Lee to stardom. His Dracula, while terrifying, had a carnal sexuality absent from Bela Lugosi's earlier portrayal. Both of those Hammer gothics were directed by Terrence Fisher, with whom Lee would work many times over the course of his career, and both co-starred Peter Cushing. Cushing and Lee had both previously appeared in Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet (1948, in which an uncredited Lee played a spear carrier) and John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952), but it was their twenty horror and fantasy movies together, many for either Hammer or Amicus, for which the pair became famous. Lee and Cushing starred together in the Hammer classics The Mummy (1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Gorgon (1964, a must-see), and the camp-fantastic Dracula 1972 AD, among others. Without Hammer, they made more great horror movies with unforgettable titles like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), Island of the Burning Damned (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Nothing But the Night (1973), The House of Long Shadows (1983), and my personal favorite, Horror Express (1972, and another must-see), as well as fantasies like She (1965) and Arabian Adventure (1979).

Without Cushing, Lee made more excellent Hammer movies (The Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll, Scream of Fear, The Devil Rides Out) and excellent non-Hammer horrors, including two collaborations with Mario Bava, The Whip and the Body (1963) and the phantasmagorically awesome Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). He also made two off-brand Dracula movies, Jess Franco's Count Dracula (1970), a Dracula movie that aimed to, but didn't quite succeed at, sticking closer to Stoker than the Hammer interpretations, and the under-seen, under-appreciated and unfortunately poorly dubbed French comedy Dracula, Father and Son (1976). In 1973, he made what he (and many others) considered to be his best horror movie, Robin Hardy's cult classic The Wicker Man, opposite Edward Woodward. I think I would say it's his best film, and one fully deserving of all the praise that's been heaped on it over the years.

I discovered Lee's horror movies a little late in the game, in college, but it quickly became an obsession tracking down even the most obscure. Because his presence assured a good time, even on the occasions the movies themselves were not good. Christopher Lee was the sort of actor who elevated any material. I couldn't hazard a guess as to what percentage of my own DVD library is Christopher Lee movies, but it's not small.

In recent years, Lee enjoyed a real renaissance. He became a good luck charm for Tim Burton, appearing in the director's 1999 Hammer homage Sleepy Hollow as well as The Corpse Bride (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dark Shadows (2012). Martin Scorsese cast him in Hugo (2011), George Lucas cast him as the villainous Sith Lord Count Dooku in two Star Wars prequels, and of course Peter Jackson cast him as Saruman, a once great wizard turned villainous in his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies. That was a dream role for Lee, who was a lifelong devotee of J.R.R. Tolkien, and read the books on a yearly basis. I suspect he knew more about Tolkien than anyone else involved in those productions. (He also knew more about Bram Stoker than anyone else involved in his Dracula movies, and often insisted on line changes or cuts to reflect the author's intentions.)

Apparently, there were few subjects in which Christopher Lee wasn't an expert! He was also a polyglot. In his autobiography, My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore recalls working on an episode of Ivanhoe with Lee in which Lee played Otto the Hun. Moore was fighting a duel with him for the freedom of a serf, played by a child actor. Lee uttered a phrase of German, and the boy asked if he spoke it fluently. "Without pausing for breath," Moore writes, "Christopher said, 'Yes, and Portuguese, French, Italian, three dialects of Urdu, Swahili...' He went on and on - and yes, he does speak all these languages." Maud Adams recalled that on the set of The Man With the Golden Gun, she and Britt Ekland used to speak Swedish to gossip about all the other people in the cast and crew, thinking they were doing so in complete privacy. One day they made the mistake of doing it in the presence of Lee, who turned around and surprised them by joining the conversation, much to their shared embarrassment.

That mastery of languages, literature, and pretty much all things is part of Lee's legend. He was the total sum of the vast and varied parts of his extraordinary life. When he spoke, everyone listened. On those Lord of the Rings documentaries, we always knew that if we were ever stuck for a crucial line of narration, all we had to do was go back to the Christopher Lee interview, which occupied far more tapes than anyone else's. He provided erudite commentary on any aspect of Tolkien or Ring lore you could wish for, as well as the production. And he did so in such a commanding voice!

I seriously regret never meeting Christopher Lee in person, despite several close calls and feeling like I knew him through those tapes. But I did see him once in traffic, driving the most appropriate vehicle imaginable. After fifteen years of living in Los Angeles, where you see a star almost every week, that moment remains my favorite star sighting ever. I was stopped at a traffic light in the left turn lane at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica in Beverly Hills around the time Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was due to be released. I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a vintage, mustard colored Rolls Royce drawing near in the next lane over. It pulled even with me, and I glanced over and did a double take. At the wheel was Christopher Lee, in his Eighties but driving himself, and his wife Gitte was seated next to him. Both were, of course, impeccably dressed. I couldn't believe it. Now that he's gone, I'll cherish that memory even more. As I'll cherish the immense and astounding body of work he leaves behind.

What a life! What a star! Sir Christopher Lee was undeniably one of a kind.

James Bond Returns to Radio in Diamonds Are Forever Adaptation

Website Bond Miscellany has scored a scoop via Twitter that the next James Bond adaptation for BBC Radio will be "Diamonds Are Forever." Lucy Fleming confirmed that to the site. In her Tweet, she teased "an amazing cast" and a possible July airdate. Presumably, this radioplay will once again star Toby Stephens (Die Another Day) as 007 and hail from Jarvis & Ayers Productions, like the previous radioplays of "Dr. No," "Goldfinger," "From Russia With Love," and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." I have to admit, as happy as I am to learn that the series (which began as a one-off to celebrate Ian Fleming's Centenary in 2008) will continue, I'm a bit disappointed in the choice. For me, Diamonds Are Forever (along with Goldfinger, which they've already adapted, and The Man With the Golden Gun, which they haven't) ranks among Ian Fleming's weakest novels. With five radioplays to date, it's a bit of a shame that two of them will be of weak books. I was hoping they would follow up their excellent "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" chronologically with a new adaptation of You Only Live Twice, following James Bond's mission of revenge after his wife's death at the hands of Blofeld. You Only Live Twice has, however, already been adapted for radio, back in 1990 starring Michael Jayston (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) as James Bond. So maybe that's why they didn't opt to do it again? Whatever the case, Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Thunderball and Moonraker all would have ranked ahead of Diamonds Are Forever as my personal next choice. But I'm sure the amazing cast Fleming teases will knock it out of the park (as Ian McKellen & Co. did with "Goldfinger") and make "Diamonds Are Forever" a terrific listen! I look forward to hearing that cast announced in the coming months.

The SPECTRE Teaser Trailer is Here!

Well, here's the one we've all been waiting for! Here's the one that Paramount was clearly trying to beat to the punch when they released the Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation trailer last weekend. And you know what? It turns out the two trailers could not be more different.

Check it out:

Sure, both are introducing audiences to a shadowy criminal organization for their respective heroes to go up against, but they do it in such different ways. (And I love both.) Rogue Nation is all phenomenal, over-the-top action and stunts, and says the name "the Syndicate" again and again and again. (To my unending delight each time.) The SPECTRE teaser, on the other hand, is all subtlety, nuance and menace, and no character ever mentions "SPECTRE" by name. Instead we glimpse a ring with the familiar octopus logo first seen in From Russia With Love. We're treated to certain iconography associated with the Special Executive fr Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion in its classic Sixties incarnation: a "board meeting" of mysterious figures gathered around a wooden table in a luxurious, Old World setting, a shadow, silhouetted person presiding. Everything but a white cat. (Had I cut a trailer reintroducing SPECTRE, it would have just been a close-up of a white cat being stroked by the hands of an unseen villain. But then again, we're still not sure if Blofeld is even in this movie, and if he's not... then I guess there wouldn't be a cat, either.) I love the slow build. I love the beautiful cinematography, courtesy of Hoyte van Hoytema (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). I love that shot of Bond on the boat, tiny and alone in the vastness of that Austrian lake. And I love the use of the Bond Theme played on... is it a cimbalom? A xylophone? Whatever it is, it's stark and effective, like this teaser. And of course I love the final reveal of the logo, and all the franchise history packed into that logo: the octopus logo, Tracy... and a friend pointed out to me that that even looks like the pointed ears of a cat the way the glass is broken around the bullet hole. It's brilliant.

I'm also surprised at how much this teaser seems to reveal in its relatively brief minute and forty-two seconds. Although they've played coy with his actual character since the initial press conference, here they certainly seem to be hinting that Christoph Waltz is playing Blofeld. Or maybe it's all a clever misdirect. But that seems to be his silhouette we see in shadow, and his collar even seems carefully arranged to recall the silhouette of a Nehru jacket! Then there's all that about Bond's childhood. It feels like a very direct continuation of Skyfall (right down to Moneypenny's name-check in the opening moments of the teaser), and it looks like SPECTRE will continue to explore 007's formative years. Freeze on that document, and you'll find that it's a transfer of guardianship from James' Aunt Charmian (a character first mentioned in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, and fleshed out by Charlie Higson in his Young Bond novels) to Hannes Oberhauser, James' childhood ski instructor and a surrogate father figure introduced in Fleming's "Octopussy" and fleshed out in Higson's By Royal Command. Finally, there's the return of Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), the villain from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace whose escape has bothered many Bond fans. Judging from his ragged, unkempt appearance, Mr. White has come down in the world since we last saw him, but he remains as enigmatic as ever. (His advice to Craig's Bond in the teaser hardly seems helpful.) Christensen's involvement in SPECTRE had been rumored, but wasn't officially announced at the press conference last December that revealed other key cast members. Presumably his appearance indicates a connection between the villainous organizations Quantum and SPECTRE, as many fans have hoped for.

What surprises me most, though, is the complete lack of action! Has there ever been a James Bond teaser before that showed actual footage from the film, but no stunts? I can't recall one off the top of my head. But it works! In fact, it works so damn well! I don't think they could have done a trailer like this in the Brosnan era. I think it's specific to Daniel Craig's tenure as 007 that they can get away with a James Bond trailer based entirely on character and drama and suspense rather than bombastic action. Of course we know the action will be in the movie, but I like the confidence that it's not needed to sell the film. Because it's really not in this day and age. As I said up front, the SPECTRE trailer and the Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation trailer could not be more different in how they introduce audiences to their respective revived villainous organizations. But both work in their own right, and both seem very true to the current conception of their respective series. I can't wait for both of these movies! Between them and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., it looks like spy fans are in for one fantastic year.

SPECTRE opens November 6 worldwide.

NOTE: Please speculate all you like in the comments; after all, this teaser trailer leaves us with plenty to speculate about! But, since the script for this movie was leaked in last year's Sony hack, it's necessary for me to implore readers to refrain from making comments with actual spoilers in them, as many fans (myself included) are still trying to go into this movie knowing only what EON and the studios want us to know. Thank you!

International Trailer for The Gunman

Here's the international trailer for Pierre Morel's latest neo-Eurospy moive, The Gunman, starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba and the great Javier Bardem. It shows a little more than the previous domestic trailer, but mainly shows why Morel is the reigning grandmaster of the neo-Eurospy genre. With furious action spanning the Congo, London, Barcelona and Gibraltar, this doesn't look like a very faithful adaptation of the cult French noir novel Prone Gunman, but it does look like a pretty worthy follow-up to Taken and From Paris With Love! (If only Morel had continued to direct the Taken movies!) The Gunman opens March 20.

James Bond Will Return in... SPECTRE!!!

EON Productions, MGM and Sony announced this morning that the next James Bond movie, once again starring Daniel Craig as Agent 007, will be called SPECTRE! Obviously that title holds enormous ramifications for the film's plot and the series. Thanks mainly to legal issues, now resolved, the eponymous villainous organization hasn't officially been heard from since Diamonds Are Forever back in 1971.

Joining Craig will be returning cast members Ralph Fiennes as M, Ben Whishaw as Q, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny, and Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner. This time around they'll be joined by Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), Monica Belucci (Agents secrets) as Lucia Sciarra, David Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) as the unfortunately named henchman Mr. Hinx, Léa Seydoux (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) as Madeleine Swann, and Andrew Scott (Sherlock) as Denbigh, who director Sam Mendes described as "a new addition to the Whitehall family." The producers remained enigmatically cagey about exactly what the rest of those roles entail, and Waltz's character name, perhaps tellingly, was not revealed. The stunning Belucci was first rumored as a Bond Girl way back in 1997 for Tomorrow Never Dies, when Pierce Brosnan strongly advocated her for the role of Paris Carver.

Perhaps more anticipated than any human actor in the film, the new Bond car was also revealed. And it's nearly as stunning as Belucci. It's the all-new Aston Martin DB10, which Mendes claimed the Bond team had designed together with the car company.

As previously reported, Skyfall's Mendes will once again direct, this time joined behind the camera by editor Lee Smith (X-Men: First Class, Inception) and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, HER, Interstellar) stepping in for Roger Deakins. Van Hoytema previously indicated that while Deakins shot Skyfall on digital, he will shoot on film. Thomas Newman will return to score once again, as will production designer Dennis Gassner, 2nd unit director Alexander Witt, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, visual effects supervisor Steve Begg, costume designer Jany Temime (no word yet about Tom Ford, but I would assume he'll be providing Craig's suits again) and stunt coordinator Gary Powell. The twenty-fourth official James Bond movie begins its seven month shoot on Monday, and opens worldwide on November 6, 2015. (It was previously slated to open in the UK two weeks prior.) Less than a year to wait! You can see more pictures from the event at 007.com and watch the video of the press conference below:

Watch the Official Bond 24 Title and Cast Announcements Early Tomorrow Morning

While rumors about the likes of Kristoff Waltz, Monica Belucci, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux and Andrew Scott (as well as Fiat 500s) have been swirling, EON, MGM and Sony will officially announce the cast of Bond 24 along with the film's title early tomorrow morning or late tonight, depending on where you live. The press conference will be live streamed at 11am Thursday, GMT, which works out to 6am for Americans on the East Coast and 3am for West Coasters like myself. Will the title be one of the remaining unused Fleming titles, like Risico or The Property of a Lady? Will the rumors be confirmed? Debunked? Are there any surprises left? Watch here when the moment comes!

On Her Majesty's Secret Service Radioplay Now Streaming On BBC Site

BBC Radio 4's fourth James Bond radio drama starring Toby Stephens (Die Another Day, Cambridge Spies) as 007, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," is now available streaming on the BBC website. It will be available for six days, so be sure to listen to the 90-minute radioplay sometime this week! Alfred Molina (The Company, Raiders of the Lost Ark) plays Bond's arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and Joanna Lumley (The New Avengers), a veteran of the feature film version of this story, plays his consort Irma Bunt.  Alex Jennings (Ashenden, Smiley's People) co-stars as Marc-Ange Draco, Lisa Dillon (Cambridge Spies) as Tracy, and Joanna Cassidy (The Fourth Protocol) as Ruby. John Standing, Julian Sands and Janie Dee reprise their roles as M, Q and Moneypenny, respectively. Martin Jarvis again plays Ian Fleming in a narrator role. The previous BBC radio adaptations starring Stephens have been "Dr. No," "Goldfinger" and "From Russia With Love."

Alfred Molina to Play Blofeld in New BBC Radio Drama of On Her Majesty's Secret Service

It's been rumored for a long time, but now an announcement in RadioTimes (along with a photo) makes it official: the next James Bond radio drama on BBC Radio 4 will be "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," and will air on Saturday, May 3. Toby Stephens (Die Another Day, Cambridge Spies) reprises the role of 007 for the fourth time, and Alfred Molina (The Company, Raiders of the Lost Ark) continues the BBC tradition of casting big name actors (Ian McKellen, David Suchet) as villains in these radio productions, playing Bond's arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This will mark only the second appearance of Blofeld in any medium since Never Say Never Again in 1983 when Max Von Sydow played the SPECTRE mastermind. (The other occasion was also on radio, when Ronald Herdman voiced the part opposite Michael Jayston's 007 in a 1990 adaptation of Ian Fleming's novel You Only Live Twice.) It's possible that might change soon, however, since after years of court battles over the ownership of the character, Bond filmmakers EON Productions have officially reclaimed the right to use the villain in films from Thunderball and Never Say Never Again producer Kevin McClory's estate. Molina would actually be an excellent choice, though I would personally hope for a more radical reinvention of the character should he ever face off on screen against Daniel Craig's Bond.

Stephens, who himself once squared off against Pierce Brosnan's 007, won't be the only Bond film alumnus involved in this production. Joanna Lumley (The New Avengers), who played one of the Piz Gloria girls in the 1969 film version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, will return to the story in a different part. RadioTimes reports that Lumley will play the villainous Irma Bunt, but other sources have pegged her as Bond's wife to be, Tracy (the role Lumley's fellow Avengers heroine Diana Rigg played in the film). I suppose it's possible that she could play both roles; Lumley is certainly talented enough! The trade adds that Joanna Cassidy (The Fourth Protocol) will co-star. Additionally, Janie Dee is rumored to be returning as Miss Moneypenny. Martin Jarvis once again directs and stars as Ian Fleming, the narrator.

The previous BBC radio adaptations starring Toby Stephens have been "Dr. No," "Goldfinger" and "From Russia With Love."

Movie Review: Peau d’espion aka To Commit a Murder (1967)

Peau d’espion turns into a pretty decent spy movie in its second half, though to get to that you have to sit through a slow and confusing first half. Characters appear without any real introductions to speak of, and we’re offered no context for their actions. I suspect this is supposed to be artistic, but it comes off as kind of sloppy instead. Still, when these characters we don’t know are played by Senta Berger (The Quiller Memorandum) and Louis Jourdan (Octopussy) in their prime, they’re fun to watch even if we have no idea what they’re up to! Spy movie regular Berger is as lovely as ever—lovelier, actually, as a redhead—and Jourdan oozes a sophisticated Euro-cool in the Marcello Mastrioni/Jean-Louis Trintignant mode armed with hip sunglasses and an ice-cold stare. It’s kind of a treat for Bond fans to see Prince Kamal Khan as a good guy spy. Of course, we don’t know up front that he’s a even a spy, and “good” is a relative term in the Eurospy realm, because the heroes are often fairly loathsome. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Jourdan is Charles Beaulieu, an author and a gambler and a bit of a cad. Berger is Gertraud Sphax (talk about an anti-Bond Girl spy name!), a married woman who picks him up twice but goes cold just when things start to get interesting. (All the inconveniences of having an affair without the fun, he complains.) Her husband has a fashion-conscious thug with a Jag following her around, which leads to a somewhat lackluster car chase that still manages to be the highlight of the film’s first half. The sped-up chase through Paris isn’t terribly impressive as car chases go, but it’s still an E-type Jaguar chasing Senta Berger through the streets of Sixties Paris, so that’s something! (Also, the chase leads Jourdan to deliver the immortal line, "The only thing I admire about you is your Jaguar.")

Nearly a half hour in, a plot finally starts to manifest itself when Charles is summoned to see his former commanding officer from his army days, Major Rhome (the excellent Bernard Blier, from The Great Spy Chase). Rhome now works for the SDECE (French Intelligence), and he likes how close Charles has become with Gertraud, because her husband, Harris (Edmond O'Brien), is the editor of a popular leftist magazine and, Rhome suspects, sympathetic to the Red Chinese. He’ll also be accompanying Henri Banck, a French missile scientist with "a degree in crystallography” on a trip to Heidelberg, where Rhome fears Harris will help Banck defect to China.

So it’s finally clear that Charles is a spy (sometimes, at least), and since he’s working against the Communists I guess that makes him a good spy. This being Eurospy territory, however, he’s not necessarily that good a spy-guy. True to the subgenre, in fact, he’s kind of a jerk. In one scene, he goes into a Parisian bar and acts like an asshole for no reason whatsoever, first hitting his boss and friend, Major Rhome (and clearly enjoying it), and then picking a fight with long-haired hippy kids just because they have long hair. (He fights them by slapping them repeatedly, apparently because he doesn’t think them worthy of man-punches.) At one point, he dodges one of their punches intentionally so that it lands on the woman he’s just been dancing with, square in the face. Afterwards, he cringes at her black eye, but still hands her his card and instructs her to, “Call me… when you’re able to read my number.” He also stands by and watches with what appears to be smug satisfaction as his pal gets beaten up by the hippies because of the fight he started. None of that is motivated in any way by his mission or by the story being told; it just happens because he’s a jerk. But at least the pointless bar fight is edited in a dynamic fashion, cutting on each punch or slap to a close-up of abstract Sixties wall art, all to the diagetic strains of a catchy pop instrumental on the bar’s juke box. It’s pointless, but stylish.

Style is something this movie has in excess, starting right off the bat with a fantastic and beautiful title sequence which prefigures Daniel Kleinman’s use of playing card suits in the Casino Royale credits. The cinematography is gorgeous as well, to match all the gorgeous Sixties fashions on display throughout the film. The editing is also stylish. It’s never quite as trendy as it is during that bar fight, but it’s always interesting and highly visible. There are times when visible editing is a bad thing for a film, but in this case it’s a boon rather than a distraction.

There are a lot of agents and double agents playing very complicated games on one another, but none of that is remotely clear to the audience until the final half hour. We don’t even know that it’s happening until then! We’re not given enough information early on to even suspect. By the end of the movie, though, hardly any character turns out to be who you thought they were at first. Everyone’s spying for someone, but to reveal who’s on what side would spoil the fun. It all builds up to quite a compelling moral quandary for Charles, however—one which justifies the film’s somewhat unspyish English language title To Commit a Murder. Ultimately, despite its confusing beginning (and despite a touch more propaganda than this type of film usually boasts), Peau d’Espion is well worth watching for fans of the more serious side of the genre. But it requires patience to get to the interesting stuff. Its artistic ambitions are considerably higher than a lot of Eurospy fluff, though, so even when you’re confused, there are at least plenty of visual treats to behold.

Tradecraft: Javier Bardem Signs Up for More Spy Villainy

Javier Bardem is following in the footsteps of Adolfo Celi, going from Bond Villain to (neo-) Eurospy villain. Deadline reports that the Skyfall heavy has signed on to butt heads with Sean Penn in Taken director Piere Morel's international assassin thriller The Gunman (formerly known as Prone Gunman, and based on the existential French novel of that name). Penn vs. Bardem? Cool! Yet another reason to be excited for this movie, which comes from the producing team behind Unknown.

Tradecraft: Bond Alums Defect to Le Carre

The Wrap reports (via Dark Horizons) that two James Bond actors are contemplating defection to the other side of the spy genre, and joining a John le Carré adaptation. According to the trade blog, Casino Royale baddie Mads Mikkelsen and Skyfall's Ralph Fiennes are circling Justin Kurzel's Our Kind of Traitor, adapted by Drive and Jack Ryan screenwriter Hossein Amini from le Carré's most recent novel. Presumably, Mikkelsen is up for the potentially show-stealing role of larger-than-life Russian gangster Dima, and Fiennes for British spymaster Hector. The latter would be a tad surprising, since the role would be quite similar to his Bond part as some sort of intelligence bureaucrat. Then again, Pierce Brosnan managed to (quite wonderfully) play a le Carré role not without its similarities to his most famous part in The Tailor of Panama during his 007 tenure! Fiennes, who's no stranger to le Carré having starred in The Constant Gardener, would of course be great as Hector, though I always pictured Page Eight's Bill Nighy in the role.  (Perhaps because Michael Jayston puts on a fantastic Nighy voice for the character in his audiobook adaptation.) Jessica Chastain's name has also apparently been mentioned in connection with the film, too, presumably for the plum role of Gail, one half of a young British couple Dima chooses to be his conduit to British Intelligence. (That's a great part, among the best women le Carré's ever written.)

New James Bond Radio Drama Available to Hear Online Now

Following previous BBC Radio 4 adaptations of "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger," Die Another Day villain Toby Stephens returns to the role of James Bond 007 in a brand new radioplay of "From Russia With Love." Today's Saturday Drama is available to listen to now around the world from the BBC Radio 4 website. Stephens is joined by Eileen Atkins (The Avengers) as Rosa Klebb, Tim Piggot-Smith (Quantum of Solace) as Kerim Bey, Julian Sands (24) as Q, and Mark Gatiss (Sherlock, author of the Lucifer Box novels) as Kronsteen. Martin Jarvis again plays the "Ian Fleming" role of narrator. The 90-minute radioplay will stream on the BBC's iPlayer for 7 days.

DVD Review: The Four Just Men

DVD Review: The Four Just Men

The Four Just Men was one of ITC’s earliest stabs at a contemporary adventure series. As such, its primary interest for fans of the genre will be a historical one. While not all the usual suspects had a hand in the scripts and direction (Brian Clemens’ name is noticeably absent from any credits), this series (which ran from 1959-60) clearly established the regular episodic formula that would form the foundation of all of ITC’s Sixties output. As I’ve written many times before, the company’s usual setup is following a man with a slightly unusual job (antiques dealer, import/export agent, photojournalist, playboy, etc.), and then ignoring whatever that job is and instead thrusting him into spy plots week after week in exotic locations via stock footage and studio backlots. This being before the advent of Bondmania sparked by Dr. No and, perhaps even more relevantly, before the British TV spy craze launched by Danger Man and The Avengers well before Sean Connery ever gulped down his first on-screen vodka martini, more of the plots are standard-issue mysteries (reflecting the private eye genre prevalent in the previous decade)–but a surprising percentage of them are still espionage-related.  It was the Cold War, after all. If you were telling adventure stories, you simply couldn’t escape such plots. 

Anyway, the slight twist on the regular formula with The Four Just Men is that instead of following a single hero, we follow four of them–individually. After a pilot that serves as an origin story and shows our four heroes all meeting in WWII–and later being reunited in tragic circumstances and signing a pact to uphold justice in their own ways–the leads rotate, and only one of them carries each story. Contrary to what I’d read about this series prior to its DVD release, however, that’s not to say that they never interact. At least one other Just Man (generally the one from the week prior or the one who will take center stage the following week) pops up in every episode–usually only via telephone, though.  Several episodes feature all four Just Men contributing from their respective home bases in London, Paris, New York and Rome.  This practice certainly adds to the series’ continuity and makes it feel more whole, and not just like an anthology show. 

The leads themselves belie a bygone era in television, when programs were targeted at adults, and not kids. In other words, they’re all old, each one whiter and more Establishment than the one before. There was no room in ITC’s 1959 stable for Jason King’s bouffant or Brett Sinclair’s shaggy do and hip, trendy (maybe?) duds. The four leads are all past-it movie stars–some more past it than others. There’s British war film stalwart Jack Hawkins as Ben Manfred, a member of Parliament based (quite naturally) in London. There’s Italian arthouse darling Vittorio de Sica(!!!) as partisan resistance fighter-turned-hotelier Ricco Poccari, who operates out of Rome.  Then there are the two Americans, ubiquitous film noir face Richard Conte as New York-based lawyer Jeff Ryder, and veteran Hollywood actor Dan Dailey (who has the sort of lumpy, hard-drinking face that could only become famous on black and white Forties film stock) as Tim Collier, a hotshot journalist who works out of Paris. Each one has a regular assistant, but the only interesting ones are Andrew Kier as Jock, Manfred’s Scottish manservant, and–particularly!–Honor Blackman as Nicole, Tim’s lovely French secretary. (Conte and de Sica are assigned more standard-issue central casting beauties who leave no impression.) Blackman, looking amazingly young, makes the most of her limited role. She is a secretary and a Girl Friday and a love interest for Tim (although I honestly can’t imagine what she sees in him), but she’s got a quick wit and she imbues the character with an independent spark that prefigures her defining role as Cathy Gale on The Avengers. Don’t get me wrong; Nicole is no Cathy Gale (and never gets to use judo), but she is more than just a pretty face–thanks as much to what the actress brings as what’s on the page.

The men’s careers–and moreso their locations–define the sorts of adventures they have to a certain degree, but of course in ITC Land anyone can happen upon kidnappers or spies or blackmailers at any time. I found Manfred’s episodes to generally have the most interesting plots–and the most espionage-heavy. Tim also gets some good ones as a reporter and as an American in Paris. Poccari’s are a mixed bag; they’re either very cool (like taking on Charles Grey as an Arab slaver or solving one of those classic “someone overpaid for a bad painting because it contained hidden secrets” cases) or very lame (usually involving orphans or urchins or some variation thereupon). In either case, he definitely brings something slightly different to the table, being noticeably older than the others. He rarely relies on fisticuffs (although he does rather brutally poke a henchman’s eye out with his cane!) or gunplay, instead using his charm and keen intellect to unravel his monthly thirty-minute mysteries. Richard Conte is not a bad performer (in fact, he makes a more appealing lead than Dan Dailey), but his character gets all the most boring cases. Perhaps it’s just because I live in America that I find the American setting (mainly New York, but he also frequently travels to Small Town USA) fairly boring compared to Rome or London or Paris, but I don’t think so. His legal profession also tends to lead to these boring cases, shoehorning his stories into a genre I could care less about. They play out like the worst of Fifties American television; of the Conte episodes I watched, I can’t recommend a single one. (Jeff gets involved in things like defending the pretty outsider accused of poisoning from the close-knit-community-turned-angry-mob-riled-up-by-respected-community-leader physically as well as in court, and prison riots, and New York race wars right out of West Side Story. Boooring.)

The most problematic aspect of the premise of The Four Just Men is determining which causes, exactly, are “just.” In the pilot (ostensibly based on an Edgar Wallace book which had already spawned two feature films), the men’s Justice-obsessed wartime commanding officer kicks the bucket and the executor of his estate summons the four men to his castle, where he reads a will bequeathing them a vast fund to spend towards forwarding the cause of Justice. He also leaves it up to them to determine what constitutes “Justice.” The Four Just Men are famous world-wide, and generally respected. Local police wherever they go have no problems with turning over their cases to famous vigilantes and look on in awe when the Just Men–who report to no one but each other–flout the word of the law in the name of the more intangible concept of Justice. And, honestly, their idea of Justice is not really anyone’s but old, white, rich dudes of the 1950s. For example, Manfred readily agrees to hush up a dying Peer’s involvement in art theft (is that really Justice?), but just as readily runs down a “rough-looking” (read: lower class) sod who seems out of place at a snooty art auction. (This not being boundary-pushing television, the rough-looking sod turns out to actually be involved, and not just a red herring.) Tim is always ready to help a beautiful, wealthy blackmail victim, even if she’s being blackmailed for something utterly reprehensible like her part in a deadly hit-and-run accident. And, in the most egregious example of questionable Justice, Tim decides to aid a philandering politician not only in extricating himself from a blackmail plot, but also in covering up his affair! 

That episode is “Les Beatniques,” and it typifies not only the show’s loose ideas of Justice at their worst, but also its complete lack of understanding its potential young audience. A senator, played by future Felix Leiter Cec Linder, wrote love letters to a fading actress that a trio of leather-clad, Abe Lincoln beard-wearing, French beatniks (or “beatniques”) have stolen for blackmail.

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” exclaims the actress.

“Not unless I can find the Martians before six o’clock,” says Tim, his face grave.

“Martians?” queries the senator.

“Well that’s what we’re up against,” lectures Tim. “A whole generation of weird kids that might as well come from Mars or any other planet for all you’ll understand about them.” He manages to look really weird himself–not to mention old and out of it–as he delivers those lines.  Comparing this encounter with the Mission:Impossible episode less than a decade later in which series star Leonard Nimoy pretends to be one of those weird kids is demonstrative of the change that the television industry would undergo in the Sixties. By the end of the decade, the networks in both Britain and America would realize that their most profitable audience was the younger generation—the “martians.”

Tim wouldn’t be able to pass himself off as a beatnik (not that Nimoy pulled it off, but at least he tried), though he does earn the compliment from a beatnick girl that he doesn’t dance too badly for a square! At the end of the episode (lesson time), he puts on his thick, professorial glasses and reads some of the beats’ poetry, quickly dismissing it as “suicide notes” and accusing them of writing off the world in their words.

One beat defends his position, arguing, “There are no answers.”

“Well how would you know?” asks Tim sanguinely. “You’ve never bothered to ask any questions.” Oh, snap! Apparently in his effort to quell the percolating youth rebellion, Tim just inadvertently started the whole question-asking beatnik movement! He’s much less appealing when Honor Blackman’s not at his side to mitigate his unrelenting curmudgeonliness.

Of course, Justice isn’t always so grey; sometimes it’s black and white and clear-cut. But even then it can be hard to suss out the truth. Manfred is forced to ask some tough questions in “The Survivor,” in which future Blofeld Donald Pleasence is either a concentration camp survivor with a list of Nazis in hiding, or else he’s a neo-Nazi agent with a list meant to discredit innocent people and former resistance fighters. It’s up to Manfred to determine which in a pretty compelling tale of terrorism and genocide that goes to pretty Callan-y dark places for a Fifties show.

Another future Blofeld, Charles Grey, shows up twice on this series, most memorably as an Arab sheik running the North African slave trade from Rome in “The Slaver.” That’s a pretty brutal episode, with unrepentantly nasty villains—and not in a Blofeld way, but in a gritty, ugly way. Right off the bat, a slaver shoots three black kidnap victims and dumps them in the water, pondering, “I wonder if the sharks like black meat?” As the chief slaver, Grey even smacks around his pretty girlfriend. The slavers in question are unscrupulous travel agents who book passage to the Holy City on pilgrimages, then instead kidnap their passengers and sell them as cargo.

“Doesn’t anybody care?” demands an incredulous (white) policeman

“They’re primitive people. Their families just write them off.” explains Poccari with a dismissive wave of his hand, regrettably recalling (to modern viewers) General Westmorland’s infamous Hearts and Minds claim that “the Oriental” doesn’t value life the same way Westerners do. It’s a good thing the old white Just Men care, since the black victims’ “primitive” families don’t! At least Just Man Poccari is well-meaning, even if he’s racist, too, in his own way. He deals these brutal villains a taste of their own medicine; this is the episode in which he pokes a henchman in the eye with his cane through an arras. It looks quite painful!

Poccari seems to specialize in the most clichéd plots, but I guess it bears remembering that they weren’t quite so clichéd back then. So maybe the glass-half-full way to view them is that he starred in more templates for future ITC episodes than anyone else! “The Crying Jester” is the one where Poccari buys a terrible painting he was never meant to buy and finds himself chased by various parties willing to kill for it. Since it can’t be its artistic merit, obviously it’s the secrets it conceals that attract the would-be buyers. It’s trite, sure, but it’s also one of the series’ more entertaining episodes! “Night of the Precious Stones” is the one where a rich dowager has her jewels stolen at a swanky function at one of Poccari’s hotels and the gang is all rounded up, except for their mastermind. It couldn’t possibly be a woman, could it? And certainly not a woman with whom Poccari is well acquainted? I'll never say…

Manfred has his share of pre-cliché classics as well, but his still tend to be my favorite episodes, for the most part. In “The Deserter,” Manfred finds himself defending a soldier accused of desertion despite the fact that the man has confessed. Only Manfred is convinced of his innocence. Who is he protecting? And why is he so confident in the face of a firing squad? The answer is a pretty good twist, but the real reason this one’s notable is for its guest cast. The young soldier accused of desertion is none other than Richard Johnson, who was not only a candidate for the role of James Bond, but later proved himself to be among the best of the Bond imitators playing a Sixties version of Bulldog Drummond in my favorite Eurospy movie, Deadlier Thanthe Male, and its sequel, Some Girls Do. TV's Sherlock Holmes, Ronald Howard, also appears. Manfred gets the art forgery case, too, in “National Treasure,” and it’s a pretty good one, even if he does display his skewed sense of elitist justice.

For a modern-day muckraker who stumbled upon it, the fact that the wife of the American Ambassador was involved in a horrible hit-and-run and then covered it up would be a major news story. Not for Tim Collier. She’s part of the Establishment, and therefore deserves his protection. He’ll reserve his Justice instead for the person who dares to blackmail her about her culpability in “The Man in the Road.” When he’s not protecting guilty politicos and their consorts, though, Tim gets the fun stuff like chasing a radioactive capsule around rural France in “The Deadly Capsule” and preventing political assassinations. In one of his better episodes, “The Prime Minister,” Honor Blackman gets to take on a meatier role, ably assisting Tim by doing spy duties (like staking out a posh hotel lobby and then taking initiative on her own and following a suspect) as he sets out to stop one such assassination.

“Village of Shame” is both “the one with the whole village full of people with a secret colluding against the one Just Man interloping in their midst (Manfred) and “the one about a wartime collaborator who betrayed his resistance comrades and eluded justice for decades following.” The former is a good enough ITC plot (and possibly even original at this particular vintage) that it makes up for the hackneyed latter, which is especially overused in this series.

The “wartime traitor” trope gets trotted out yet again in “The Rietti Group.” This time it’s Poccari, who attends a reunion dinner of his old partisan compatriots (including Geoffrey Keen) and of course ends up exposing one of them as the traitor who cost them the life of a beloved comrade decades prior. Then the group gets to sentence him to death without the involvement of any courts or anything, because that’s the kind of bonds old resistance fighters share. Yes, ITC, we get it. There were lots of heroes in the war and they still can’t get over the fact that there were also some traitors, even twenty-some years later. We get it! Unbelievably, this plotline would still rear its boring head every couple of weeks on ITC shows throughout the Sixties, proving that England just couldn’t let go of WWII, her greatest glory, as the Empire faded in the postwar world.

While it’s got some fun episodes (as well as some cringe-inducing ones), The Four Just Men is overall most interesting to modern ITC aficionados as a historical artifact.  Along with Interpol Calling, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the brief “missing link” era that bridged the gap from Fifties detective procedurals to swinging Sixties spy shows. The heroes are still the stuffy old men of the previous generation, but some of their adventures encompass the globetrotting plotlines that would fuel the Jet Age. ITC would still get a lot of mileage out of some of these plots in future iterations on The Saint, Man in a Suitcase and other shows. The Four Just Men may not be as exciting or even as politically correct (and that’s saying something) as the shows it inspired, but it sets the template, nonetheless. Casual spy fans can easily go on living their lives without ever seeing an episode of The Four Just Men and sleep perfectly soundly. But armchair scholars and television archaeologists who want to trace the origins of their favorite Sixties ITC adventure shows (as well as rabid Honor Blackman fans!) will enjoy seeing their nascent forms in this series. And for that reason, I’m highly grateful to Network for unearthing it.

If you are interested in this show, act fast! Network’s Region2 PAL online exclusive goes on moratorium at the end of the month (Friday, December 30, 2011). After that, you’ll be at the mercy of Ebay vendors.

Read my reviews of some other ITC shows:
Danger Man (aka Secret Agent)
Man in a Suitcase
The Baron
Sentimental Agent