SOME GIRLS DO (1969) Comes to Blu-Ray!

Eurospy fans, your collective prayers have been answered! The Sixties Bond knockoff (a term I use with great affection) title I've heard most often requested is finally coming to Blu-ray! In the UK, anyway. So American Eurospy aficionados who don't yet have all-region Blu-ray players (and you really ought to), add them to your Christmas lists! On February 17, 2020, Network will release the Bondified Jet Age Bulldog Drummond movie Some Girls Do (lesser sequel to the greatest Eurospy movie of all, Deadlier Than the Male) in Region B high-def. On the same date the title will also make its standalone DVD debut (Region 2). Both releases are quite notable, because they mark the first time ever that this title has been available in its native 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratio. It was previously available only on a Region 2 double feature DVD from Network paired with Deadlier Than the Male (which the company has offered on its own on Blu-ray for some time now). While that title came in widescreen, the Some Girls Do on offer was a panned and scanned 4x3 version--and transferred from a rather iffy source. Hopefully (and presumably, given the new aspect ratio), Network have uncovered a better source print for the new 1080p HD transfer. So even if you don't have an all-region Blu-ray player, but do have an all-region DVD player, you'll still have a way to finally see this movie the way it was meant to be seen!

Some Girls Do (1969) stars Richard Johnson (Deadlier Than the Male, Danger Route), Daliah Lavi (Casino Royale, The High Commissioner), Beba Loncar (Fuller Report, Lucky the Inscrutable), James Villiers (For Your Eyes Only, Otley), and the great Robert Morley (Hot Enough For June,  Topkapi) in a scene-stealing role as cooking teacher "Miss Mary." Here's Network's description of the movie:

Richard Johnson returns as Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond in this action-packed take on the exploits of H.C. McNeile's famous fictional hero - this time with an added dose of late '60s whimsy when Drummond comes up against a gang of armed, gorgeous fembots! Some Girls Do is presented here as a new High Definition transfer from original film elements in its original aspect ratio.
Drummond is hot on the trail of his nemesis, the devious Carl Petersen, who is hell-bent on sabotaging the new British fighter airplane. Peterson must be stopped - whatever the cost - but this time he's protected by a bodyguard of murderous female androids!

Special features are limited to the theatrical trailer and an "extensive image gallery," but just having this title in its proper aspect ratio is reason enough to buy the disc! And to have that great, great poster art on the cover! (My own Some Girls Do UK quad with that key art hangs in a place of pride in my apartment protected by UV-coated museum glass.)

Pre-order the Blu-ray from Network here.
Pre-order the DVD from Network here.
Read my review of Deadlier Than the Male here.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Chessgame: The Complete Series

This summer, Network will release a Region 2 DVD set of the 1983 UK spy series Chessgame, starring Terence Stamp. This will mark the series' first ever DVD release in its original episodic format. Chessgame was adapted from Anthony Price's excellent series of novels about the intellectual spymaster David Audley and his rotating roster of assistants. Though he doesn't quite match the author's physical description of his hero, Stamp (Modesty Blaise) plays Audley. Robin Sachs (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) co-stars as Hugh Roskill; Michael Culver (Philby, Burgess and Maclean) plays Nick Hannah (an amalgamation of several Price characters including Col. Butler), and Carmen du Sautoy (The Man With the Golden Gun) plays Audley's love interest Faith, whose role is beefed up from the books. The six hour-long episodes cover the first three novels, The Labyrinth Makers, The Alamut Ambush (a truly terrific spy novel) and Colonel Butler's Wolf. They were subsequently re-edited into a trilogy of feature films for television syndication in the U.S., and are available that way on budget Region 1 and Region 0 DVDs of limited quality re-titled (respectively) Cold War Killers, The Alamut Ambush and The Deadly Recruits. Not only does this forthcoming Network release guarantee a level of quality not found on those discs, but it certainly offers a much more attractive package as well! And I'm looking forward to seeing the show in its proper episodic format, with its original opening title sequence. Price wasn't satisfied with these adaptations (and fans of the books will understand why), but they're still quality Eighties spy television. The 2-disc set is due out July 20, and will retail for £12.24. It's available through Network's website or on Amazon.co.uk.

Now if only BBC would release their trio of  Michael Denison/Lucy Fleming miniseries, Blood Money, Skorpion and Cold Warriors, we'd finally be pretty well appointed for serious Eighties UK spy series on DVD... (We've already got Smiley's People from BBC, Mr. Palfrey of Westminster from Network and Acorn, Harry's Game from Network, and Glory Boys and The Contract from Acorn.)

Network Brings Deadlier Than the Male to Blu-ray!!!

Are you sitting down? Are you ready for the best news ever? Because you're about to read the best news ever. Unless you don't live in Great Britain and don't have an all-region Blu-ray player, in which case it might be the most frustrating news ever. Or just a good excuse to finally buy an all-region Blu-ray player! Okay, here it is: on April 27, Network will release the 1967 Eurospy classic Deadlier Than the Male on Blu-ray! If that seems anticlimactic to you after my perhaps slightly hyperbolic build-up, then that must just mean that you've never seen Deadlier Than the Male, in which case you need this Blu-ray. And if that doesn't seem anticlimactic to you, then you already know you need this Blu-ray! As regular readers will no doubt be aware, Deadlier Than the Male (which stars Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina and Richard Johnson) is one of my absolute favorite non-Bond spy movies. It's the best Eurospy movie, and the best James Bond knock-off ever. It's also the Sixties spy title I've most wanted to see in high definition, so I absolutely cannot wait for this release! (For more about Deadlier Than the Male, read my lavishly illustrated, gushing review here.) Network's Region B Blu-ray will be in the original widescreen aspect ratio of 1.66:1 and carry over all of the special features (most in standard def, except where noted) from their Deadlier Than the Male DVD, including the original theatrical trailer (in HD), archive interviews, archive location reports, extensive image galleries (HD), and promotional materials PDFs. Their listing does a disservice to the "archive interviews" and "archive location reports" by calling them that, because they're far cooler than you might expect from that name. These are on-set featurettes filmed during production, and they're fantastic! Retail is listed at £9.18 (a bargain!), and the disc will be available for purchase through Network's website and Amazon.co.uk.

The bad news for spy fans outside of Region B (Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the Middle-East) is that you will require an all-region Blu-ray player to play this disc. An all-region Blu-ray player is a pretty essential piece of hardware for cult movie and TV fans already (largely thanks to Network's output, like their amazing Persuaders! Blu-rays), but this is a title worth making the plunge for if you haven't already. They are no longer exorbitantly expensive like they used to be. I have an Orei player that I bought cheaply on Amazon and that I love, but it doesn't seem to be available anymore. (At least not through Amazon; you may be able to find one elsewhere.) I see Amazon currently offers a Samsung player fairly inexpensively, and I'm sure more can be found by poking around. Just make sure that any listing specifically states that it plays Blu-rays from all zones, because there are a lot of players out there that function as all-region DVD players, but only play Region (or Zone) A Blu-rays. The cheapest way to view foreign HD may be to get an external Blu-ray drive and find an easy hack to play discs on your computer. I'm sure hacks are available somewhere for standalone players, too. But seeing Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina come out of the water in their bikinis with their spearguns in high definition will be totally worth any expense!

Now let's hope Network follows this up with a Blu-ray of the (admittedly inferior, but still worthwhile) sequel Some Girls Do, which hasn't even ever been available in its proper aspect ratio before...

Upcoming Spy DVDs: The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs

Network have been slowly working their way through many ITV spy series over the years, and in March they'll finally get to one that I've never seen, but long been curious about. Cold War comedy The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs ran for a single 13-episode season in 1974 and starred David Jason (Rough Diamond, Danger Mouse) as clueless SIS agent Edgar Briggs. In the tradition of Inspector Clouseau and Maxwell Smart, Briggs usually managed to bungle his way to success, rising - mystifyingly, to his flummoxed colleagues - to the number two position in the Service. The 2-disc set is out on March 3, and will retail for £12.24.

Look At... The Berlin Wall

Network recently relaunched their website as Networkonair, and one of the primary features of the new site is their streaming "On Demand" section. I really enjoyed the episode of Scotland Yard they posted there (now gone), but  it's another video I'm directing you to today. Anyone who reads as many books as I do about divided, Cold War-era Berlin should definitely check out the 10-minute episode of  the 1960s theatrical documentary short subject series Look At Life entitled "The Wall." It contains lots and lots of contemporary glimpses of the Berlin Wall, in color no less. It makes a great supplement to famous Berlin-set spy novels like Funeral in Berlin, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Quiller Memorandum. I don't know how long it will be available for, though; these free streaming episodes don't remain for too long on the site. This segment comes from the forthcoming Region 2 PAL DVD set Look At Life Volume 6: World Affairs, which also includes a short entitled "James Bond's Island" examining Early Sixties Jamaica. I'd sure like to see that one! As a matter of fact, I'd like to see all of these.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: The Man in Room 17 (1965)

Last year, UK DVD company Network, who had put out so many great ITC spy series over the years, seemed to have eased up on espionage entertainment a little bit, and I was worried. There were still a lot of cult UK spy shows MIA on DVD. But in 2013, they've come roaring back! Hot on the heels of the recently announced Virgin of the Secret Service (a title I've been dying to see for years), Network have announced that they will release another ITV rarity on June 10: The Man in Room 17 - The Complete First Series. Kind of like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Man in Room 17 really focused on two men: Mr. Edwin G. Oldenshaw (Richard Vernon) and Ian Dimmock (Michael Aldridge); E.G.O. and I.D. Oldenshaw was the boss and the true titular Man; he had been one of Churchill's close advisers and an architect of D-Day. Now he's been employed by Her Majesty's Government to head up the Department of Special Research in Room 17 at Whitehall, answerable only to the Prime Minister. Said department consists solely of Oldenshaw and his younger partner, Dimmock, and they never leave that room. Like Nero Wolfe, they prefer to do their crime solving and spy smashing from the confines of a cozy office while engaging each other in the Japanese board game Go (the same one enjoyed by Nicolai Hel in Shibumi), leaving it to other agents to handle the legwork while they reach brilliant deductions in Room 17. Only the most perplexing cases make it to Room 17, after they've already baffled Scotland Yard and the Security Services. Some of the cases in The Man in Room 17 (which ran from 1965-67) focus more on crime than espionage, but even those ones tend to have international ramifications. Eventually, the series was spun off into The Fellows (Late of Room 17), which is already available on DVD from Network, but by then the espionage angle was greatly diminished. The Man in Room 17 features a number of familiar faces to spy fans among its guest stars, including Peter Wyngarde, Roy Marsden, Geoffrey Keen and the ubiquitous Vladek Sheybal. Denholm Elliott (A Murder of Quality) later replaced Aldridge when the latter became sick, playing another sidekick with the initials I.D. (albeit this time standing for a particularly unlikely name!), Imlac Defraits. Network's four-disc PAL Region 2 set will include all 13 episodes of the black-and-white show's first season and retail for £29.99; it can be pre-ordered on Amazon.co.uk.

Upcoming Spy DVDs: Virgin of the Secret Service (1968)

I'm thrilled to report that Network will release one of the most elusive ITC spy series of the Sixties on R2 DVD on April 1, 2013: Virgin of the Secret Service! Ever since I first read about this one in The Rogers and Gillis Guide to ITC, I've been dying to see this series, and always hoped that Network would unearth it. I'd begun to despair since the company didn't really release any spy rarities in the past year, but now it's on the schedule and I'm very happy! From what I can gather (largely thanks to Rogers and Gillis), Virgin of the Secret Service is a tongue-in-cheek spy adventure series very much a product of its late 1960s era even if it's set in Edwardian times. It follows the exploits of Captain Robert Virgin (Clinton Greyn) and his progressively emancipated partner Mrs. Virginia Cortez (Veronica Strong) as they traipse across the entire British Empire (in the days when the sun never set upon it) and beyond,  from India to Africa to Russia to Arabia to South America to Texas and back, spying for England and thwarting the dastardly plans of enemy agents Karl Von Brauner and Klaus Striebeck. Guest stars included the likes of Desmond Llewellyn and Roger Delgado. It sounds very much like an Edwardian Avengers, a British Wild Wild West, an Adam Adamant who never got frozen, or even a proto-Jack of All Trades, and if it lives up to any of that, I'll be very happy indeed. I'm already happy that at least I'll at last have the opportunity to see! The 4-disc, Region 2 PAL DVD set will contain all 13 episodes of this rare TBC series and retail for £28.00. I was under the impression that it was a color series, but Network's listing says black and white. That may be an error, or it may mean that only black and white recordings exist, as was the case (for the most part) with Spyder's Web. Or it may be that it was actually filmed in black and white after all. In any case, I'm still eager to see it. It can already be pre-ordered from Amazon.co.uk, and will also be available directly from Network come April.

Network to Release ITC Spy Soundtracks on Vinyl in 2013

Following the success of their multi-disc CD soundtracks for such Sixties and Seventies spy staples as The Saint, Danger Man, Department S, Man in a Suitcase, The Prisoner, Jason King and other ITC adventure series, Network has announced that they will begin releasing soundtrack albums for these series on vinyl in 2013. These editions will be aimed at audiophiles and collectors. The first such release is a limited edition EP called Themes for Action! coming out on Record Store Day and available exclusively in participating record stores on that day, containing themes and cues from a handful of those ITC series. Then in September we'll see "newly restored original soundtrack albums" for Man in a Suitcase, The Saint, The Prisoner and The Protectors containing "the very best themes and cues from each show." Newly created, retro sleeve retro artwork evokes the style of each show's era. (I love what they've come up with!) Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) will follow in October, with more titles slated for 2014. Meanwhile, I remain ever hopeful that someone uncovers the supposedly lost masters for Ken Thorne's incidental music for The Persuaders! and that Network releases a full set of that Holy Grail...

Network Spy Sale

Network, the awesome UK DVD company responsible for the Region 2 releases of so many classic spy series and ITC adventure shows, is currently running an all-spy sale called their "Shadow State Sale." It's a great opportunity to pick up some fantastic serious spy shows, like Callan (review here), The Sandbaggers and Danger Man, at reasonable prices! Network's Callan releases include the reunion telefilm "Wet Job" and what survives of the original monochrome series (review here), neither of which have been released in Region 1 to date, so American spy fans with all-region players should take note. Another notable Edward Woodward title included in the sale is the 80s miniseries Codename: Kyril (review here), which had been out of print for a while and is well worth seeking out! Further great titles on sale include the excellent Mr. Palfrey of Westminster (which contains bonus material not found on the Region 1 release reviewed here), The Quiller Memorandum, The Ipcress File (also with bonus material not found in Region 1), and the Sixties anthology series Espionage, among others. I'm not sure how long The Shadow State Sale runs for.

Network DVD Sale: Last Day!

After skipping it last year (as I recall, anyway), Network is back to having a late-January (and early February) sale! Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to include their web exclusive titles (like Tightrope, Spyder's Web and The 4 Just Men); those have been taken off the site for the duration of the sale. But there are still plenty of great bargains to be had on Region 2 and Region B spy titles, including the feature-packed Blu-ray Persuaders! set and the Retro-Action BD titles, samplers which include one high-def episode each from such ITC classics as The Saint, Danger Man, Man in a Suitcase, Department S, The Baron, The Champions and more. All of the companies previous DVD collections of those shows (the non web-exclusive ones, anyway) are also on sale, many of them including slews of bonus material. This sale is also a good opportunity to pick up some of the company's excellent spy TV soundtrack sets, including The Saint (review here), The Music of ITC, and my personal favorite, Man in a Suitcase. They're all 40% off! But hurry, because the sale ends tomorrow, February 2.

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

New Spy DVDs Out This Week and Last

UPDATE:
New Spy DVDs Out This Week and Last

It Takes A Thief

Finally! It feels like we've been waiting years for It Takes a Thief! And I don't just mean the year-plus that it's been since the title was first announced as forthcoming by eOne Entertianment. I mean that this Sixties spy classic is long overdue on DVD in Region 1, and as one of the last major spy shows of that decade to be released, it's sort of hard to believe that it's finally here. (Now we just need Amos Burke, Secret Agent and T.H.E. Cat...) But it is, and in its three-season entirety all at once, no less!

eOne's 18-disc set  contains all 66 episodes of the 1968-70 ABC series starring Robert Wagner (The Pink Panther, Austin Powers) as master cat burglar Alexander Mundy, who's caught and pressed into service by SIA agent Noah Bain (Malachi Throne) to use his considerable skills for Uncle Sam as a thief-cum-spy. ("Let me get this straight.... You want me to steal?" clarifies a bemused Mundy when Throne makes his proposal.) The great Fred Astaire plays his dad (also a gentleman thief) on a handful of episodes during the third season, and guest stars include Senta Berger (Otley, The Quiller Memorandum), Adolfo Celi (Thunderball, Operation Kid Brother), Joseph Cotton (The Third Man), Bette Davis (Madame Sin) and even Peter Sellers (Casino Royale)  in dual roles. Extras on the discs include new (separate) half-hour interviews with Wagner and writer/producer Glen A. Larson, and the feature film version of the pilot episode, entitled Magnificent Thief, which runs almost 40 minutes longer than the TV version (which is also included). There's also a booklet with informative liner notes by Cinema Retro's Dean Brierly (who also curates the great Sixties Crime Films blog).

That's the good news. Now the bad. For starters, the retail price on this puppy is a heart attack-inducing $199.98. Luckily, that one's easily enough overcome since the set is available for half price at a number of online retailers including Deep Discount, WalMart and Amazon. (You can now support this blog again by buying things from my Amazon links; Amazon made peace with California, fortunately.) Not so easily overcome is the astoundingly atrocious packaging! Seriously, I think this is the worst packaging I've ever seen for a DVD set, even worse than that annoying box for The Wild Wild West: The Complete Series. I'm not a fan of unnecessarily bulky packaging to begin with, because I have a lot of DVDs and shelf space is always at a premium. But, unfortunately for people like me, the studios always put complete series sets in unnecessarily bulky long-boxes or cubes because they want them to take up a lot of shelf space at big box stores in the weeks leading up to Christmas. They also feel that their size should reflect the steep prices they like to charge for them, because they think consumers feel that way. Maybe some consumers do. I don't. But understanding all that, this one is still worse than most. At this excessive price point, the nearest comparison spy fans have are Time-Life's gift set releases of the complete series of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart. Both were clunky, but they were also clever (the former was shaped like an attache case and the latter mimicked the many doors leading into Control) and (the attache case's handle notwithstanding), for the most part, sturdy. The cube encasing these It Takes A Thief discs is neither clever nor sturdy. It's made out of the flimsiest cardboard I've ever seen used on a DVD box set. If you pick it up the wrong way, you'll crush it. On top of that, it's massively inefficient. When you open the box, you find a lot of empty space taken up by a cardboard placeholder and stupid trinkets like a set of four It Takes A Thief coasters (coasters!) and a "limited edition senitype." Senitypes are those individually numbered cardboard dealies with a little piece of 35mm film stuck into them. It's not even from an original print; it's a reproduction. They're the stupidest kind of artificial collectible I can think of... except maybe coasters. Is there really any demand for Robert Wagner coasters? It's almost insulting to think that eOne thought these cheapo items would justify such an excessive price point. But it's not the trinkets that really bother me. It's the fact that they take up so much space in the box... and yet not all of the space!

There's a tremendous amount of wasted, empty space inside this stupid box. And to make matters worse, the stuff that goes in it (including the actual discs, housed in square wallets, as well as the trinkets) don't all fit comfortably inside. It should be a simple matter of spacial logic, but it's not. One season's folder is awkwardly packed in sideways, because the others, which are stacked, don't fit snugly enough without that one wedged in there. But because the discs are in wallets and not Amrays, you can't really display them on their own without the packaging... so you're stuck with this chunky, inefficient cube. (Definitely hang onto that cardboard space-filler. You can use it to creatively rekajigger the arrangement as seen below for something that almost fits...) If these things matter to you, you really might be better off waiting and hoping that eOne releases more conveniently packaged individual seasons down the line. (That happened with Get Smart.)

However, the show itself is a lot of fun and a must in any Sixties spy fan's library. And from the brief bit I've sampled so far, the picture looks awfully good. [Scratch that! See below.] So while this box and its dumb trinkets are definitely not worth $200, the three seasons of the series itself are easily worth Amazon's $98.99. So put it on your Christmas list after all. Even if the packaging sucks, the actual content won't disappoint. Because it's a great thing to finally have It Takes A Thief on DVD.

UPDATE: I've watched a few more episodes now and I take back what I said about the picture looking good. The first episodes I sampled were all from Season One, and that does, indeed, look pretty good. Today I checked out some Season Three episodes, and the quality is horrible! Horrible enough to warrant this edit. I'm really not a stickler for top quality, either. A lot of the Eurospy titles I'm into are so obscure that you have to take what you can get, and I'm used to that. I'm okay with it, even. If those are all the elements available, we have to make do. But I cannot believe for a second that these discs from eOne represent the best elements available from a major American network series like It Takes A Thief! Were the original masters lost in that Universal fire a few years ago? I find it impossible to believe that the studio can't provide better elements otherwise. As is, these discs offer no improvement from the bootlegs die-hard fans likely already have. eOne claims on the packaging that they're "remastered," but they must have been remastered from an ancient video source by the look of it. They are definitely not restored in any way. Some people have complained about Warner Archives' non-remastered Girl From U.N.C.L.E. discs, but that's only because they were spoiled by Time-Life's beautifully restored Man From U.N.C.L.E. set. Girl looks fantastic compared to It Takes A Thief. I still believe that any It Takes A Thief is better than no It Takes A Thief, but at this steep price point, I can't really recommend upgrading if you've got episodes taped off TV. It's a real shame.

Page Eight

Last week saw the release from PBS of David Hare's elegant, adult BBC spy thriller Page Eight, which recently aired on PBS' Masterpiece Contemporary. This serious spy drama boasts an all-star cast to equal that of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, including Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Ewan Bremner and Judy Davis. And it's really, really good. Hopefully I'll have a full review up soon. Nighy plays veteran MI5 officer Johnny Worricker. When his boss and best friend Benedict Baron (Gambon) dies suddenly, he leaves behind an inexplicable file, threatening the stability of the organization and the government itself. Johnny's colleagues and the Prime Minister (Fiennes, playing a PM so evil he could only be described as Voldemort in a tuxedo) all scramble to use the file to their own ends, but how will Johnny use it? Meanwhile, a seemingly chance encounter with his striking next-door neighbour and political activist Nancy Pierpan (Weisz) seems too good to be true, so he has her vetted by a former colleague (Bremner). Johnny is forced to take some extreme measures to find out the truth. Set in London and Cambridge, Page Eight is,  PBS puts it in their disc copy, "a contemporary spy film for the BBC, which addresses intelligence issues and moral dilemmas peculiar to the new century." It's also the closest thing on television right now to the serious spy series of the late Seventies and early Eighties like the original Tinker, Tailor and Smiley's People, as well as Game, Set and Match and Mr. Palfrey of Westminster. In other words, if you're looking for 24, look elsewhere. But if you're looking for intelligent, adult, thought-provoking spy drama, definitely give this disc a look. SRP is $24.99 for the DVD and $29.99 for the Blu-ray, though both are available for less from the usual online retailers. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any features on this Region 1 release; at least the Region 2 DVD featured cast and crew interviews.

Bognor: The Complete Series

"THE SAINT, STEED, CALLAN, DICK BARTON... now the most unlikely super hero of them all comes to your screen!" blared ITV's announcement of their latest spy(ish) series, Bognor, in a February 1981 TV Times. Now Network reworks that hyperbole in their copy for its DVD release: "John Steed, Simon Templar, Dick Barton… and Simon Bognor. Following in the footsteps of some illustrious predecessors, the principal agent of the Special Investigations Department of the Board of Trade ventures forth to take on wrongdoers wherever they may lurk!" Since the odds are most people have never heard of him, obviously Bognor (played by David Horovitch) didn't really make it in such lofty company. But I'm intrigued by anyone who tries, so I'm curious to give this humorous take on the secret agent format a chance--especially since it does actually have a connection to one of those aforementioned TV heroes. Bognor is based on a series of novels by Tim Heald, author of John Steed: An Authorized Biography: Volume One - Jealous in Honour. That was a fictional biography of the famous Avenger, (in the vein of John Pearson's James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007) which also featured an unauthorized cameo from Bond. (Read more about it here.) Only one edition was ever printed and it's become quite hard to find, but it's worth tracking down for Avengers fans. It's good enough to inspire interest in Bognor. Here's the rest of Network's copy: "In [the serial] 'Unbecoming Habits,' [Bognor] poses as a CID officer to investigate a friary suspected of passing agricultural secrets to the Soviets; 'Deadline' sees him lowering journalistic standards as he goes undercover to probe the murder of a gossip columnist; in 'Let Sleeping Dogs Die' he trails ruthless pedigree dog smugglers; 'Just Desserts' finds him uncovering deadly intrigue in the world of haute cuisine. But will the assignments throw up more clues than Bognor can handle?" Network's 4-disc Region 2 PAL DVD set includes all 21 episodes of the series, which originally ran from 1981-82. The set is a web exclusive, available only from Network's website for £35.00. While you're there, you can also check out a video of the show's entertaining opening credits, which gleefully send up the title sequences of Sixties spy series.

Bulman: The Complete Second Series

Finally, another Network web exclusive came out last week that isn't principally a spy show, but still has enough Cold War-themed episodes to interest fans of British spy TV. Don Henderson stars in his third TV show playing the same part, classics-quoting detective George Bulman (previously seen in The XYY Man and Strangers, as well as the first series of Bulman), now retired from the police force, but still taking cases on a private basis--and taking unofficial assignments from Secret Service mandarin William Dugdale (Thorley Walters). It's a detective show, but like most UK detective shows of that era, detection and espionage often intersect. Ingrid Pitt, Robert Hardy and Iain Cuthbertson also appear. The 2-disc set (PAL, Region 2) containing all 6 episodes of Series 2 is available exclusively from Network's website for £15.00.

It's worth noting that Network's web exclusives are now available for a limited time only. Both Bognor and Bullman: The Complete Second Series will be discontinued on November 4, 2012.

The Men Who Would Be King - Together For the First Time At Last!

The Men Who Would Be King - Together For the First Time At Last!

I've written many times about how much I love the UK DVD distributor Network. I love them for releasing obscure ITC shows that no one else realizes there's an audience for, I love them for releasing so many spy things, but most of all I love them for seemingly creating brand new old gems from whole cloth. Of course they're not really new, but they're new to me, and I love discovering them through these fantastic Region 2 releases. For example, despite being a huge fan of the two frequent spy stars, I never realized that Sean Connery and Michael Caine had been in a movie or TV show together prior to their epic team-up in The Man Who Would Be King. But now, thanks to Network's newly relaunched website, I know that they both starred in the 1969 TV movie Male of the Species, which the company will release on DVD (for the first time ever on any home format) on October 10. Connery and Caine don't actually appear together, but they're both in it and they're both on the cover and either one of them alone would be enough to get me to buy this! Apparently Male of the Species was originally conceived for British television as a series of three half-hour plays by Alun Owen airing in consecutive weeks on ITV’s celebrated anthology series Saturday Night Theatre. Each episode explored the relationship between Mary MacNeil (Anna Calder-Marshall) and a different man in her life. Connery plays her father in the first part, and Caine plays her smooth lover in the second. Paul Scofield appears in the third, and Laurence Olivier narrates. The three plays were apparently aired together as one TV movie on Masterpiece Theater in the United States. Network's Region 2 PAL DVD will retail for £15.31, but it's currently discounted on their website to £9.18.

The Persuaders! Comes to Blu-ray in the UK

Network has announced a fall release for a 40th anniversary edition of The Persuaders!: The Complete Series in high definition. Of course, like all of Network's Blu-ray releases, we can expect this one to be for Region B, limiting it primarily to European and Australian viewers or North Americans with an all-region Blu-ray player. The picture looks stunning (a vast improvement over any DVD version I've seen), as evidenced even in the promotional video below. In addition to that, Network has lived up to our high expectations of the company and provided a wealth of bonus material. Some of it was included on their previous DVD collection (which already boasted some pretty impressive extras), and some (most tantalizingly a new 156-page book by Andrew Pixley!) is new to this set. Here's the rundown:

• Digitally restored, High Definition transfers
• 156 page fully-bound book of viewing notes by Andrew Pixley
• Recently found, extensive textless material (including some behind the scenes) (HD)
• Previously unseen alternate title sequence (HD)
• Extensive HD image galleries of rare and previously unseen stills
• 1972 Sun TV Awards footage with Tony Curtis
• Contemporary French interview on location from 1971
• Moore and Curtis reunion on the Alan Titchmarsh Show from 2008
• Merchandise image gallery (HD)
• The Morning After - Remembering The Persuaders! exclusive documentary
• Commentaries with Roger Moore, Tony Curtis and production staff
• AVROSkoop contemporary documentary from 1971
• Top of the Pops promotional video for John Barry's theme
• Promotional spots
• Trailers and archive newsreel footage
• Tony Curtis interviewed by Russell Harty
• French titles
• Commercial break bumpers
• Script PDFs
• International movie versions and trailers for London Conspiracy, Mission: Monte Carlo, Sporting Chance and The Switch
• and more

Those "international movie versions" were feature films created for the foreign market by editing together two episodes of the series. They were previously available on the company's DVD set, as were the documentary and commentaries. I'm glad that all of that stuff is presented again on this collection, making it truly a complete package. (Well... almost complete. I'm guessing Network probably haven't managed to license the different commentary tracks recorded for A&E's Region 1 DVD release.) All 24 episodes of the fantastic series (probably my favorite ITC show) have undergone an HD restoration this Blu-ray edition.

The 8-disc set will be out on September 19, with a suggested retail price of £79.99. However, it's already listed at a substantial discount on Network's website: just £53.10.

To promote the release, the company has organized a big 40th anniversary celebration event, "The Time and the Place." The guest of honor will be Sir Roger Moore himself, who will discuss his career and his role in the show. The actual time and place of "The Time and the Place" will be 6pm on September 10, 2011, at Kent House, Knightsbridge, beginning a food and drinks reception followed by an HD screening of two episodes selected by Moore, “Overture” and “A Death in the Family.” (Great selections, Sir Roger!) A Q&A and signing session with the star follow. Speaking of restorations, the original restored Aston Martin from the series will also be on display. Perhaps best of all, Network promises that "a special prize will be awarded to the person who attends in the best 70s attire!" A roomful of people dressed up in velvet jackets and cravats of the sort favored by Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde would be well worth attending even without the presence of Roger Moore, in my opinion. As with the 50th Anniversary celebration of The Avengers that took place earlier this summer (another event like the London Kiss Kiss Kill Kill one that I meant to cover but never got around to until it was too late), I really, really wish I could be there. For those lucky fans who can, tickets can currently be ordered from Network's website. £40 gets you into the reception, screening and Q&A; £80 gets you “The Gold Napoleon” deal which includes all that plus an advance copy of the Blu-ray and an opportunity to have it signed by Sir Roger personally. Chances are if you're going to this event, you're already planning on buying it anyway, so why not spring for the Gold Napoleon? I don't mean to sound like a shill, but I know I would...

Now here's that promotional video showing off the HD restoration:

New, Vaguely Color-Coordinated Spy DVDs Out This Week

Spyder's Web

The most exciting new DVD release this week is a PAL Region 2 title from the UK's Network, out well ahead of its previously announced May 2 street date. I'm always eager to sample ITV spy shows I've never seen before, and that goes double when they're Avengers imitators from the late Sixties or early Seventies, as is the case with 1972's Spyder's Web! As with so many ITC shows of that vintage, TBC's Spyder's Web focuses on a top secret spy organization reporting directly to the highest levels of government who take on the assignments too hot or delicate or weird for the standard branches to handle. This secret organization, Web, uses a documentary unit called "Arachnid" as its cover. Some of the Avengers-like weirdness encountered by Web's top agents (Patricia Cutts, Anthony Ainley, Roger Lloyd-Pack and Veronica Carlson) includes a nursing home that can arrange almost anything, a romance tour company whose clients fall in love and then disappear, a mynah bird who relays orders to field agents (in an episode that also involves life-size puppets), a mad vicar waging a private war in the middle of Britain and a gadget that instantly ages humans to the point of skeletonizing them. Though the show was originally shot in color, only two episodes survive in that format; therefore the majority of the 13 episodes (that's the complete series) included on Network's 4-disc set exist only as black and white film recordings. Retail is £40.84 but the set is available now from Network's website for £35.74. I'm really looking forward to this one!

Sextette
Speaking of weirdness, that's really the only possible way to categorize the 1978 curiosity Sextette. Best known as Mae West's last film, Sextette is also one of Timothy Dalton's earliest spy roles, playing a British agent "even bigger than 007." ("I didn't get his measurements," replies West with an arched eyebrow.) That's actually intended as a surprise revelation, but it's also the critical bit for readers of this site... and this really isn't the sort of movie you can spoil. To call a spade a spade, it's an unwatchable mess... yet a compellingly watchable unwatchable mess for discerning viewers of a certain disposition.  (And if you can stomach it yourself, it's a great film to torture your friends with at a party—provided everyone's suitably inebriated.) Sextette comes to us from Ken Hughes, one of the many directors of another famous unwatchable mess that will be familiar to readers of this site, the 1967 spoof extravaganza Casino Royale. (In the interest of fairness, however, Hughes should also be credited with the wicked James Coburn spy movie The Internecine Project and episodes of the TV series Espionage, as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.)

Octogenarian West plays a serial matrimonist whose titular, all-star harem includes Tony Curtis, George Hamilton and Ringo Starr as well as Dalton. For good measure, Keith Moon, Alice Cooper and Regis Philbin also show up. And it's a musical. It really has to be seen to be believed, and now, thanks to Scorpion Releasing, you can. (Sextette was previously available on Rhino, but that version has long been out of print.  Now I kind of wish I'd taken advantage of that duration to unload my Rhino copy when they were commanding prices  $60-$100!) New extras on the remastered Scorpion version include a long interview with West's vocal coach and the original theatrical trailer. Retail is $19.95, but Amazon's got it for $13.49.