After the world wide international success with Ian Fleming's James
Bond and the 1962 Dr. No a new genre exploded unto the film scene
- The EuroSpy genre, and with so many other genres
from the happy swinging 1960's (the gialli, spaghetti and paella westerns,
superhero
movies, spaghetti WW2 films and psychedelic trips) also this The EuroSpy
genre have been added to the Retro Cult.
I admit that i haven't seen that many EuroSpy movies, but a whole series
of Agent OSS 117 were made in the 60's (5 or 6 i think)
and this
EuroSpy genre and series has been re-animated in the 2000's with i.a.
OSS 117 - Lost in Rio (OSS 17 - Rio ne répond plus)
produced in France
in 2009, directed by Michel Hazanavicius and with Jean Dujardin as agent
OSS117 in a light-hearted Spy Comedy version of OSS117.
Jess Franco made some EuroSpy trash also and surely many, many other
director's with Eurotrash inclinations.
Thai DVD edition
Deadlier Than the Male are supposedly
one of the better films in the genre and it's based on a novel by the
once immensely popular Pulp
fiction writer Sapper who wrote a series of novels about the agent and/or
detective Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond. I've read
one of the books
in the series, the 1928 "The Female of the Species" and i
thought of scanning the cover and putting it here, but i couldn't find
it as i had
thrown it away, so that's how good that book was. The story was something
about Bulldog's fight against the revengeful widow of his old
nemesis Carl Peterson. It was trash but somewhat enjoyable and a child
of it's age (1920's) with reprehensible racist undertones.
This film is about deadly games in the international
oil business and it starts with some "spectacular" murders
committed by two GORGEOUS
women, Elke Sommer as Irma Eckman and Sylva
Koscina as her buddy Penelope. These 2 are the best thing about
the movie (and they could
possibly have inspired the two killers in Diamonds are Forever) and
especially Elke Sommer is good as a ruthless killer.
Hugh Drummond (a fine Richard Johnson) is hired by the oil company Fenician
Oil to investigate what has happened, and Bulldog takes it
personally when the killer duo tries to murder him with an explosive
cigar. The traces leads him to the French riviera and an Arabian prince.
The film is trashy nonsense but quite entertaining and
Bulldog's proficiency in Judo comes in handy when fighting. Elke Sommer
was good.
I guess that there has been other films made about the adventures of
Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, but i haven't seen them yet.
The film was presented in widescreen 2.35:1 and it looked good (probably
not a public domain trash company then). No extras.