thats actually a huge chunk of the book! like the whole first half! cant believe I forgot those aspects of the film, obviously I was not paying enough attention to the plots of these films...
Tbh, plot isn't one of these films' strengths. There are some bits of Hamilton in there, but you have to hunt for them. Hmmm, that should be familiar to Bond fans!
The second Matt Helm adventure was rush released because Colombia’s big rival James Bond epic, Casino Royale, was in dire circumstances and needed months of reshoots to make any sense of it. Herbert Baker penned Murderer’s Row and the director was Henry Levin, who’d had recent success with the Italian spy caper Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. The replacement of Oscar Saul, who had contributed an early draft of the script, and Phil Karlson seems to have worked wonders for Matt Helm.
Once more the movie takes a light-hearted view of the super-spy genre. Criminal syndicate BIG-O have stolen the plans for a Helio-Beam Laser and, to preserve their subterfuge, have set out to assassinate the world’s top secret agents; hence the Murderer’s Row of the title. Matt Helm fakes his own death to enable him to continue the ICE investigation. Aided by Ann-Margret’s trippy-dippy Suzie, Dean Martin’s laid-back womanising spy must find playboy scientist Prof Solaris who is being held captive by BIG-O operative Julian Wall. Without Solaris’ formula, the laser can’t function. Helm must either rescue the Professor or eliminate him. This causes friction. At first Helm refuses the commission, unprepared to kill an innocent man, then later he learns his latest squeeze turns out to be Solaris’ daughter. There’s an interesting moment late in the movie when Helm determines to leave Suzie outside the villain’s castle fortress because he knows he might have to kill her father. The Silencers had nothing so dark.
Murderer’s Row hasn’t entirely forgotten to reinforce Dean Martin’s trademark persona. There is an awful lot of drinking, gorgeous women throw themselves at him and there’s another dig at Frank Sinatra; this time Helm throws a grenade at a billboard poster of Old Blue Eyes – “Sorry, Frank,” he quips. However, this is a markedly more serious outing. The slapstick elements which pervaded The Silencers and made it such a childish disappointment have almost completely disappeared. The action is located along the fancy climes of the Cote D’Azur, although no location filming took place in France except for scenery and stand in work as the star refused to travel. The writer has created a series of well-constructed scenes which allow character and narrative development, however shallow. I was particularly impressed with an early sequence where Helm’s attempt to contact a local agent, Dominique, ends with her corpse tumbling out of a refrigerator. Not only did this surprise me, it also hints at the grittier side of espionage, the one Donald Hamilton’s novels allude to. Later, there’s a clever reveal of the mole inside ICE, which suggests a more complicated spy game than simple Cowboys and Indians. Helm’s infiltration of the villain’s camp is first rate: his cover as an Italian mafioso suggesting he could provide a much needed service to BIG-O. The scene where he’s interrogated in a mechanical grabber is quite astute, this time the humour doesn’t overpower the storytelling, instead it adds a layer of tantalising gloss.
The film is gaudily photographed, snappily costumed and has a jazzy, snazzy score from Lilo Schifrin which ably reflects the mid-sixties vibe. Unlike Elmer Bernstein’s thumping effort last time out, Schifrin’s music adds personality to the places and people, the tension, romance and action. There’s even a little nod to the pop scene with a couple of sequences set in a discotheque. The constant backdrop of Dino’s songbook which inhabited The Silencers has been virtually eradicated, allowing Ann-Margret to strut her boogie stuff – and who wouldn’t want to witness that?
Karl Malden is game for fun. He makes Julian Wall suitably bizarre. He’s aided in his enterprises by a slinky, sexy Camilla Sparv, who appears wearing a series of stunning constantly changing outfits and has her own motives for keeping Matt Helm alive. She more than resembles the infamous Fiona Volpe. Tom Reese’s henchman Ironhead is an Oddjob clone whose bowler hat has been replaced by a shiny metal skull piece. Wall’s private off-shore island includes a factory developing fuel for the Helio-Beam. There is something distinctly Bondian about the villain’s trappings and Helm’s sudden development into a more thoughtful character. There are a few daft gadgets, including a customised Ford Thunderbird, a coin with a poison needle and a gun which fires after a six second delay. While The Silencers attempted to impersonate OO7 in only the most spurious of terms, the attention to Bondian detail here is so acute you can almost feel Ian Fleming’s hero creeping out of the script. It is less a spoof and more of a generous, if clumsy homage. To demonstrate how close Murderer’s Row comes to Bond territory, it’s worth noting the scenes which were later re-enacted almost to the shot for Eon’s own series.
Matt Helm escapes capture by lighting a cigarette which fires bullets – exactly how Connery evades guards in You Only Live Twice. The Helio-Beam is designed to wipe out whole cities, the prime target being Washington D.C. – exactly Blofeld’s target for his own space laser in Diamonds Are Forever. Ironhead’s fistfight with Matt Helm is broken up when his metal skull is magnetised to a dockyard electro-clamp – exactly how Bond thwarts Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. Helm drives a hovercraft directly off the beach along the streets of Villefranche-sur-Mer disturbing the café society – exactly how Bond uses the gondola in Venice in Moonraker. There’s a car chase along the hills above Monte Carlo – exactly as there is in Goldeneye.
Murderer’s Row isn’t going to outshine James Bond. What it does do is restore some balance to the Matt Helm series. The initial offering veered too far from the established Euro-Spy format; the song score, the physical comedy, the oodles of women, the overacting, all contributed to a messy, uncontrolled, dysfunctional movie. Henry Levin’s product is much more confident in its aims. Instead of attempting to over-do James Bond, Murderer’s Row leans on OO7 for inspiration and style. It isn’t as sophisticated a product and lacks the skills of Eon’s tried and trusted backroom boys, but it certainly manages to suggest there is something more to Matt Helm than girls and songs and cocktails.
Yes, again I'd say you've covered this one very well. I agree with your points- already have, though in less detail, upthread. This is perhaps the best of the series, according to taste.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,848MI6 Agent
In 2019 I was lucky enough to find a real haul of 1960s spy paperbacks at a charity bookshop and among them were some of the early Donald Hamilton Matt Helm novels. They nearly all seemed to have been owned by the one person as many of them had the same signature inside them. I still haven't got around to reading them yet but I was happy to add them to my spy book collection as they seem to be very hard to find. It was certainly the first time I've ever seen them in a secondhand bookshop.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Thanks, Barbel. I've heard good things about them. It;s just a pity that they were filmed as spoofs. I was googling the Matt Helm novels and I see there were 27 of them, with a 28th so far left unpublished. That spy novel haul also had some paperback editions of the Bond novels I didn't already have and some fresher copies of John Gardner's spy novels. I was also surprised to learn that there was even a Matt Helm TV series at one point in the mid-70s starring Anthony Franciosa in the lead role:
The Ambushers has a tainted reputation among followers of the Super-Spy genre. Having watched it, I can certainly see why, but the movie isn’t as bad as contemporary and retrospective reviews might suggest.
The same team which made Murderer’s Row such a marked improvement on Matt Helm’s debut slice of action return to foster more ludicrous secret agent mayhem. Director Henry Levin again restricts his cast’s gawping and sniggering, ensuring they at least treat the antics with restraint. Writer Herbert Baker provides a serviceable script, workmanlike in its plot but packed with a monumental number of witticisms, many of them very amusing, although they might not go down too well in the PC friendly 21st Century. There are more chintzy costumes from sixties fashion icon Oleg Cassini. Most satisfying is the belting zippy music score from Hugo Montenegro which never fails to entertain even if the onscreen action is a bore.
Perhaps the main reason The Ambushers is neglected stems from its central premise. The United States has launched a new manned space probe, shaped like a flying saucer. While the technology didn’t and hasn’t yet existed to create flying saucers, they were certainly in the public imagination due to a host of UFO sightings. Curiously, the idea of an oddly shaped and functioning space vehicle was utilised in the same year’s Bond effort You Only Live Twice. The problem with the Matt Helm version is that this spaceship’s electro-magnetic power source unbelievably has the side-effect of being fatal to men. This is physiologically impossible, I think. That it has been hijacked by exiled South American dictator Jose Ortega using a silly-looking radar tractor beam doesn’t help suspend our disbelief, it only reinforces it. The pilot, Sheila Sommers, a dumb-founded looking Janice Rule, escapes the villains – somehow in an unseen scene – and ends up at an ICE rehab centre undergoing testing and treatment. Her miraculous recovery is solely the responsibility of Matt Helm, whose chance remark snaps her out of self-induced trauma. All these facets must be taken with a hefty disbelieving pinch of salt. Indeed throughout the movie a whole host of daft incidents and silly gadgets are utilised to provide humour or help Helm escape the bad guys. Very few of them make sense. They drag the movie lower than the level of a good natured spoof and into the disaster zone of the inept.
That it just about held my interest was something of a victory. In fact, I remember starting to view this about [God knows] twenty years ago and turning off after the first ten minutes; with so much initial stupidity I decided I couldn’t possibly stomach 100 minutes of it. This time out, I didn’t think life could get worse than the 100 minutes I spent watching The Silencers, so I watched it through.
The opening sequence takes place at an ICE retraining facility, where Matt Helm appears to be the only male employee. There are women everywhere. The credits refer to them as ‘Slay Girls.’ I don’t understand why. Helm is supposed to be getting in shape, but instead he’s seducing the ladies and making smarmy comments. It was a poor imitation of Bond’s shenanigans at Shrublands. Anyway, having cured Sheila Sommers, Helm is dispatched with her to Mexico essentially investigating why the Montezuma brewery is using the same jingle as Jose Ortega’s extremist political party. I was never clear how the connection was made between the jingle, Ortega and the flying saucer. Maybe I missed it. Among all the mirth I’d hardly be surprised.
They started early in this one and the pace of the jokes and japes never let up: a heat-ray pistol melts trouser belts, extremely effective in times of danger; “That’s when the danger usually starts,” quips a gorgeous female trainee. Another sexy agent has a retractable gun barrel loaded in her brassiere. Later, held at gunpoint Helm comments drily: “Only the girls are loaded here.” A third cutie loses her clothes during an amusing search and destroy training exercise in a train compartment. All this in less than ten minutes. Lovey Kravesit arrives to deliver a recorded message; this is also inside her bra. She has an amusing scene with Helm and a masseuse (Masseuse: “This feels all tensed up.” – Lovey: “Am I interrupting anything?” – Helm to the exasperated masseuse: “Relax, you’re all tensed up.”) Beverley Adams looks ravishing; she’s been sorely underused all series.
I’m describing all this to give you a flavour of the absurdities on show. I’d like to suggest things got more serious, but they really don’t. A handheld magnetic tractor beam gun is probably the nadir, but the inflatable tent which also contains fold out chairs, pillows and blankets takes some beating. The special effects are appalling by any standard. Generally though the dialogue saves us, jammed as it is with good-natured puns and, even if I’m disdainful of the third-rate action, the delivery of comic lines is first rate.
Interestingly a proto-Bond moment occurs when Helm faces a firing squad and uses his special cigarettes to incapacitate the soldiers; this reminded me of Anya Amasova’s sneaky seduction of OO7. Some of the best moments involve Helm and Santa Berger’s BIG-O operative, Francesca. They first meet at an extravagant party. “Hi,” says Helm; “Not yet,” she replies and makes slinky dance moves in an attempt to prevent Helm’s assassination. Berger is worth watching; she looks good in or out of any outfit and adds an alluring air of sensual menace whenever she’s on screen. Her character is less passive than Camilla Sparv’s identikit alternative in Murderer’s Row, but then Berger had practice, playing an assassin in Deadlier Than The Male. There’s an excellent scene where she seduces Matt Helm and drugs him with her lip gloss. “What about your lips?” remarks Helm as he passes out. My thoughts exactly! “I’ve taken the antidote,” she smoulders, raising her whiskey glass. This has relevance later on. Aside from that, I found this particular method of administering a drug interesting as it pre-empts modern day real events and genuine poisons, where the merest touch of deadly viruses or radioactive materials can result in a person’s life ebbing away.
It’s very hard for me to understand or explain exactly why I enjoyed watching The Ambushers because I can tell it clearly isn’t a great movie. It isn’t even trying to be one. The production team and the cast know it’s going to be fairly terrible, they cope admirably with whatever indignities the script or the director throw at them. The benefit of playing it relatively straight must be lauded. The screenplay is a lot of fun but forgets to join the dots of the plot, so it essentially becomes a series of scenes, some good, some bad, some dreadful, loosely joined together by luck not expertise. It’s easy to say you should never argue with the box office and perhaps you really shouldn’t. Apparently The Ambushers pulled in over $10m of receipts, a healthy return on the small budget. You can’t argue much with figures like that or those of the Slay Girls; so I guess everything looks most desirable from most angles.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,848MI6 Agent
It is rather disappointing to learn that neither the Matt Helm films or TV series were faithful to the original Donald Hamilton novels. We often complain as literary Bond fans about the lack of fidelity to the Fleming novels that many of the Bond films exhibit. However, it just goes to show that we could have fared a lot worse if we were literary Matt Helm fans.
I remember someone writing on one of the Bond forums once that the Matt Helm films were the equivalent of the spoof Casino Royale (1967) film being the sole representative adaptation of Fleming's Bond novels. That's a sobering thought. Things could always be worse.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Unless you're Matt Hem, he's already reached there.
Yes, he's already witnessed the dark side of screwing up an author's original intentions. At least Donald Hamilton kept on ploughing his own furrow with his Matt Helm novels into the 1990s and beyond to be fair to him.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
In the early Helm books, in the 1950s, much was made of Matt's past during WW2. Quite reasonable at the time, and no-one (least of all Hamilton himself) could have predicted the longevity of the series.
As the series progresses through the 1960s, the references to WW2 become fewer. By the 1970s they're quietly faded away and by the 80s and 90s gone altogether to avoid an unrealistically elderly Helm still doing all the things he had been doing all along.
Donald Hamilton’s novels never meant much to the script writers of the Matt Helm film series. The on-screen antics do not share any resemblance to the author’s originals. A few borrowed characters and incidents would be about the gist of it. The Wrecking Crew follows the same route. Hamilton’s ‘Crew’ were the shadowy wartime intelligence and assassination network who claw him back into the espionage fold. There is no explanation of the title at all in this thoughtless extravaganza which has visions of opulence, but ends up being merely tacky.
Dean Martin heads a serviceable cast. Nigel Green – always a decent shout as a middle-grade villain – and Elke Sommer pop up playing similar roles to the ones they occupied in the Bulldog Drummond relaunch Deadlier Than The Male. Both are watchable. Chic Nancy Kwan plays a Chinese assassin. Tina Louise is the villain’s ex-girlfriend with dollars on her mind. Sharon Tate, looking gorgeous, plays an accident prone ICE attaché. The problem isn’t the cast, it’s what they have to work with.
William McGivern wrote the screenplay. I know little about him other than he wrote crime stories. If this is the standard of his work, I don’t want to read a single one. The script is less than adequate. It lurches from location to location, fight to chase to fight, with no consideration for detail or explanation. Some of the scenes feature incurably banal dialogue. Others are so motionless they slow the pace of the film to a stop. I lost count of the number of times Matt Helm stood around looking hopelessly nonplussed while a sensuous female slopes around him, draping herself over furniture, in-and-out of clothes, obviously trying to seduce the famous international photographer playboy. Helm is phenomenally gallant and refuses all advances. I rather see his point. Martin looks jaded and out of his depth among these newly nubile youngsters. I was reminded of Roger Moore attempting to deflect an adolescent-looking Lynn Holly Johnson in For Your Eyes Only. Martin too seems to appreciate how icky-some his grizzly fifty-something countenance looks messing about with these beautiful creatures. Sadly, he carries this attitude over into the whole production. He’s hardly bothering to pay the slightest attention to anything or anyone around him. He looks stunned by the ridiculousness of the whole project and I can hardly blame him for the whole sorry adventure is peppered with impossibilities. If Sean Connery looked disinterested in Diamonds Are Forever, Martin looks as if he didn’t even bother to turn up; sometimes you feel a mannequin could have played his part.
The saving grace of the film might have been humour, but McGivern doesn’t have any. The script tries really hard, but every joke is a clunker. Worse, Phil Karlson, director of The Silencers, returns to pour his own brand of corpulent merriment onto proceedings. Nothing succeeds. Not the visual humour. Not the wordsmithery. Not the stunts. Nothing. Karlson reintroduces the wet pratfall – Sharon Tate this time drowning her elegant outfit in a muddy river – and has Helm tossing hanky grenades instead of buttons [I mean, really, a grenade in a silk kerchief; who thinks of this foolishness?] Karlson even gives us another song soundtrack including a dream sequence full of sexy, disrobing women played out to Dino’s lilting melodies. This is a jittery, lumbering, uncertain, crass few minutes of complete tedium for the audience; a moment which contributes nothing to the narrative or to the characters. I repeat that: nothing. Absolutely nothing. A complete waste of five minutes, which might have been better served explaining Helm’s assignment.
Basically the rogue evil criminal Count Contini has stolen a billion dollars in gold bullion and wants to resell it, destabilising the market and raising his own profit margins. A little like Auric Goldfinger’s plan. Helm, along with his bumbling accomplice Freya, intercept the Count and thwart his operation. Cue ninety-minutes of obnoxious hi-jinks. I’d rather forget most of it. Points of Bondian interest: Helm has a gadget laden camera; Helm carries an autogyro in the boot of his station wagon, hastily and impossibly assembled; he takes a nasty spin in a restaurant booth; Sharon Tate’s Freya is clearly the inspiration for Britt Ekland’s hapless Mary Goodnight; there is a fight on top of a fast moving train. It wouldn’t be half so bad if the director had exercised some control over the proceedings.
I wonder if Karlson or producer Irving Allen bothered to watch what had occurred in Matt Helm’s cinematic world since the series debuted in February 1966. The aimlessness of the direction, the gawping, the standing still, the slower-than-a-snail’s pace pitch, the desperate over-eagerness of the cast, their willingness to suffer indignities, the low production values, the shoddy effects, the California mountain scenery and backlot locations used to represent plain, level-grounded Denmark, the slapstick, the repetition of past ideas, the noisy, infuriatingly cheerful Andy Williams-esque incidental music – Hugo Montenegro should be ashamed of himself – the daft gadgets, the jumpy editing, I could go on and on and on. Except for the funky costumes and the bright photography, the best moments have nothing to do with Karlson at all: it’s the fight scenes, of which there are many. They were arranged by Bruce Lee and under his keen, skilful eye, the second unit comes up trumps with a series of fun kung fu kicking spectaculars. They’ll never be Fist of Fury, but they’re choreographed well and provide a diverting alternative to all the sexy, purring, stripping females. Lee recruited a host of real martial art experts to double the actors or play the heavies. It displays intent on his part to at least put on a decent show.
There was to be a fifth adventure, The Ravagers, but after Sharon Tate’s murder, Dean Martin couldn’t face returning to the role. Thankfully, I think he did us a favour. Matt Helm was running a downhill course already. The character did return for a brief television series in the seventies and Hamilton continued to write his bleak novels, but these four fairly elementary spy spoofs remain Matt Helm’s big screen legacy. If I’m being kind, I’d say they were a product of their time. Dean Martin was probably a little too old and world-weary to take on the central role as it was presented. Ultimately, his characterisation limits the scope of the pictures. To be fair, the movies are probably no worse than any of the other fledgling OO7 rip-offs of the time. There was an awful lot of rubbish made on the cheap between 1963 and 1969, but there were also some very good spy capers, or at least one’s which didn’t try so shamelessly and badly to imitate the James Bond formula. It’s disappointing Irving Allen and his production teams couldn’t have striven harder to strike that happy medium. Sadly the whole series, in my solemn opinion, is a bit of a dud.
Yes, I agree completely with that insightful review. "The Wrecking Crew" is a terrible film by any reasonable standard. I love it, and must watch it again soon.
A quick mention for Chuck Norris, making his film debut here (as discussed earlier in this thread, with stills.).
For those interested, an episode or two of the 1970s TV series can be found on YouTube- just search for "Matt Helm". As stated previously, these have nothing to do with the novels or films.
I have watched The Silencers for the first time and everything is A-OK! The movie is fun, the women are beautiful and they have never heard of women's lib, the gadgets are silly and the actors are charmismatic, especially Dean Martin. Speaking of silencers: silenced revolvers is something that exists in movies and not in real life. But who cares when the Reversible Gun is used so brilliantly! The action and stunts are unimpressive, but that's not the point. This is a silly comedy and it's a good one. In fact this mus tbe the "reversible" of movies like QoS. I look forward to watching more Matt Helm movies.
Napoleon Plural's Tweet about The Offence left the Last Film Seen thread sometime last night but we've lost trace of it and our radars are picking up nothing. 'Don't worry, we'll put our best man on the job...' @Barbel
Comments
Murderer’s Row
The second Matt Helm adventure was rush released because Colombia’s big rival James Bond epic, Casino Royale, was in dire circumstances and needed months of reshoots to make any sense of it. Herbert Baker penned Murderer’s Row and the director was Henry Levin, who’d had recent success with the Italian spy caper Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. The replacement of Oscar Saul, who had contributed an early draft of the script, and Phil Karlson seems to have worked wonders for Matt Helm.
Once more the movie takes a light-hearted view of the super-spy genre. Criminal syndicate BIG-O have stolen the plans for a Helio-Beam Laser and, to preserve their subterfuge, have set out to assassinate the world’s top secret agents; hence the Murderer’s Row of the title. Matt Helm fakes his own death to enable him to continue the ICE investigation. Aided by Ann-Margret’s trippy-dippy Suzie, Dean Martin’s laid-back womanising spy must find playboy scientist Prof Solaris who is being held captive by BIG-O operative Julian Wall. Without Solaris’ formula, the laser can’t function. Helm must either rescue the Professor or eliminate him. This causes friction. At first Helm refuses the commission, unprepared to kill an innocent man, then later he learns his latest squeeze turns out to be Solaris’ daughter. There’s an interesting moment late in the movie when Helm determines to leave Suzie outside the villain’s castle fortress because he knows he might have to kill her father. The Silencers had nothing so dark.
Murderer’s Row hasn’t entirely forgotten to reinforce Dean Martin’s trademark persona. There is an awful lot of drinking, gorgeous women throw themselves at him and there’s another dig at Frank Sinatra; this time Helm throws a grenade at a billboard poster of Old Blue Eyes – “Sorry, Frank,” he quips. However, this is a markedly more serious outing. The slapstick elements which pervaded The Silencers and made it such a childish disappointment have almost completely disappeared. The action is located along the fancy climes of the Cote D’Azur, although no location filming took place in France except for scenery and stand in work as the star refused to travel. The writer has created a series of well-constructed scenes which allow character and narrative development, however shallow. I was particularly impressed with an early sequence where Helm’s attempt to contact a local agent, Dominique, ends with her corpse tumbling out of a refrigerator. Not only did this surprise me, it also hints at the grittier side of espionage, the one Donald Hamilton’s novels allude to. Later, there’s a clever reveal of the mole inside ICE, which suggests a more complicated spy game than simple Cowboys and Indians. Helm’s infiltration of the villain’s camp is first rate: his cover as an Italian mafioso suggesting he could provide a much needed service to BIG-O. The scene where he’s interrogated in a mechanical grabber is quite astute, this time the humour doesn’t overpower the storytelling, instead it adds a layer of tantalising gloss.
The film is gaudily photographed, snappily costumed and has a jazzy, snazzy score from Lilo Schifrin which ably reflects the mid-sixties vibe. Unlike Elmer Bernstein’s thumping effort last time out, Schifrin’s music adds personality to the places and people, the tension, romance and action. There’s even a little nod to the pop scene with a couple of sequences set in a discotheque. The constant backdrop of Dino’s songbook which inhabited The Silencers has been virtually eradicated, allowing Ann-Margret to strut her boogie stuff – and who wouldn’t want to witness that?
Karl Malden is game for fun. He makes Julian Wall suitably bizarre. He’s aided in his enterprises by a slinky, sexy Camilla Sparv, who appears wearing a series of stunning constantly changing outfits and has her own motives for keeping Matt Helm alive. She more than resembles the infamous Fiona Volpe. Tom Reese’s henchman Ironhead is an Oddjob clone whose bowler hat has been replaced by a shiny metal skull piece. Wall’s private off-shore island includes a factory developing fuel for the Helio-Beam. There is something distinctly Bondian about the villain’s trappings and Helm’s sudden development into a more thoughtful character. There are a few daft gadgets, including a customised Ford Thunderbird, a coin with a poison needle and a gun which fires after a six second delay. While The Silencers attempted to impersonate OO7 in only the most spurious of terms, the attention to Bondian detail here is so acute you can almost feel Ian Fleming’s hero creeping out of the script. It is less a spoof and more of a generous, if clumsy homage. To demonstrate how close Murderer’s Row comes to Bond territory, it’s worth noting the scenes which were later re-enacted almost to the shot for Eon’s own series.
Matt Helm escapes capture by lighting a cigarette which fires bullets – exactly how Connery evades guards in You Only Live Twice. The Helio-Beam is designed to wipe out whole cities, the prime target being Washington D.C. – exactly Blofeld’s target for his own space laser in Diamonds Are Forever. Ironhead’s fistfight with Matt Helm is broken up when his metal skull is magnetised to a dockyard electro-clamp – exactly how Bond thwarts Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. Helm drives a hovercraft directly off the beach along the streets of Villefranche-sur-Mer disturbing the café society – exactly how Bond uses the gondola in Venice in Moonraker. There’s a car chase along the hills above Monte Carlo – exactly as there is in Goldeneye.
Murderer’s Row isn’t going to outshine James Bond. What it does do is restore some balance to the Matt Helm series. The initial offering veered too far from the established Euro-Spy format; the song score, the physical comedy, the oodles of women, the overacting, all contributed to a messy, uncontrolled, dysfunctional movie. Henry Levin’s product is much more confident in its aims. Instead of attempting to over-do James Bond, Murderer’s Row leans on OO7 for inspiration and style. It isn’t as sophisticated a product and lacks the skills of Eon’s tried and trusted backroom boys, but it certainly manages to suggest there is something more to Matt Helm than girls and songs and cocktails.
Thanks, Barbel. I've heard good things about them. It;s just a pity that they were filmed as spoofs. I was googling the Matt Helm novels and I see there were 27 of them, with a 28th so far left unpublished. That spy novel haul also had some paperback editions of the Bond novels I didn't already have and some fresher copies of John Gardner's spy novels. I was also surprised to learn that there was even a Matt Helm TV series at one point in the mid-70s starring Anthony Franciosa in the lead role:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Helm_(TV_series)
I wonder if this was any more faithful to the source material than the film series was?
Ah, thank you Barbel!
The Ambushers
The Ambushers has a tainted reputation among followers of the Super-Spy genre. Having watched it, I can certainly see why, but the movie isn’t as bad as contemporary and retrospective reviews might suggest.
The same team which made Murderer’s Row such a marked improvement on Matt Helm’s debut slice of action return to foster more ludicrous secret agent mayhem. Director Henry Levin again restricts his cast’s gawping and sniggering, ensuring they at least treat the antics with restraint. Writer Herbert Baker provides a serviceable script, workmanlike in its plot but packed with a monumental number of witticisms, many of them very amusing, although they might not go down too well in the PC friendly 21st Century. There are more chintzy costumes from sixties fashion icon Oleg Cassini. Most satisfying is the belting zippy music score from Hugo Montenegro which never fails to entertain even if the onscreen action is a bore.
Perhaps the main reason The Ambushers is neglected stems from its central premise. The United States has launched a new manned space probe, shaped like a flying saucer. While the technology didn’t and hasn’t yet existed to create flying saucers, they were certainly in the public imagination due to a host of UFO sightings. Curiously, the idea of an oddly shaped and functioning space vehicle was utilised in the same year’s Bond effort You Only Live Twice. The problem with the Matt Helm version is that this spaceship’s electro-magnetic power source unbelievably has the side-effect of being fatal to men. This is physiologically impossible, I think. That it has been hijacked by exiled South American dictator Jose Ortega using a silly-looking radar tractor beam doesn’t help suspend our disbelief, it only reinforces it. The pilot, Sheila Sommers, a dumb-founded looking Janice Rule, escapes the villains – somehow in an unseen scene – and ends up at an ICE rehab centre undergoing testing and treatment. Her miraculous recovery is solely the responsibility of Matt Helm, whose chance remark snaps her out of self-induced trauma. All these facets must be taken with a hefty disbelieving pinch of salt. Indeed throughout the movie a whole host of daft incidents and silly gadgets are utilised to provide humour or help Helm escape the bad guys. Very few of them make sense. They drag the movie lower than the level of a good natured spoof and into the disaster zone of the inept.
That it just about held my interest was something of a victory. In fact, I remember starting to view this about [God knows] twenty years ago and turning off after the first ten minutes; with so much initial stupidity I decided I couldn’t possibly stomach 100 minutes of it. This time out, I didn’t think life could get worse than the 100 minutes I spent watching The Silencers, so I watched it through.
The opening sequence takes place at an ICE retraining facility, where Matt Helm appears to be the only male employee. There are women everywhere. The credits refer to them as ‘Slay Girls.’ I don’t understand why. Helm is supposed to be getting in shape, but instead he’s seducing the ladies and making smarmy comments. It was a poor imitation of Bond’s shenanigans at Shrublands. Anyway, having cured Sheila Sommers, Helm is dispatched with her to Mexico essentially investigating why the Montezuma brewery is using the same jingle as Jose Ortega’s extremist political party. I was never clear how the connection was made between the jingle, Ortega and the flying saucer. Maybe I missed it. Among all the mirth I’d hardly be surprised.
They started early in this one and the pace of the jokes and japes never let up: a heat-ray pistol melts trouser belts, extremely effective in times of danger; “That’s when the danger usually starts,” quips a gorgeous female trainee. Another sexy agent has a retractable gun barrel loaded in her brassiere. Later, held at gunpoint Helm comments drily: “Only the girls are loaded here.” A third cutie loses her clothes during an amusing search and destroy training exercise in a train compartment. All this in less than ten minutes. Lovey Kravesit arrives to deliver a recorded message; this is also inside her bra. She has an amusing scene with Helm and a masseuse (Masseuse: “This feels all tensed up.” – Lovey: “Am I interrupting anything?” – Helm to the exasperated masseuse: “Relax, you’re all tensed up.”) Beverley Adams looks ravishing; she’s been sorely underused all series.
I’m describing all this to give you a flavour of the absurdities on show. I’d like to suggest things got more serious, but they really don’t. A handheld magnetic tractor beam gun is probably the nadir, but the inflatable tent which also contains fold out chairs, pillows and blankets takes some beating. The special effects are appalling by any standard. Generally though the dialogue saves us, jammed as it is with good-natured puns and, even if I’m disdainful of the third-rate action, the delivery of comic lines is first rate.
Interestingly a proto-Bond moment occurs when Helm faces a firing squad and uses his special cigarettes to incapacitate the soldiers; this reminded me of Anya Amasova’s sneaky seduction of OO7. Some of the best moments involve Helm and Santa Berger’s BIG-O operative, Francesca. They first meet at an extravagant party. “Hi,” says Helm; “Not yet,” she replies and makes slinky dance moves in an attempt to prevent Helm’s assassination. Berger is worth watching; she looks good in or out of any outfit and adds an alluring air of sensual menace whenever she’s on screen. Her character is less passive than Camilla Sparv’s identikit alternative in Murderer’s Row, but then Berger had practice, playing an assassin in Deadlier Than The Male. There’s an excellent scene where she seduces Matt Helm and drugs him with her lip gloss. “What about your lips?” remarks Helm as he passes out. My thoughts exactly! “I’ve taken the antidote,” she smoulders, raising her whiskey glass. This has relevance later on. Aside from that, I found this particular method of administering a drug interesting as it pre-empts modern day real events and genuine poisons, where the merest touch of deadly viruses or radioactive materials can result in a person’s life ebbing away.
It’s very hard for me to understand or explain exactly why I enjoyed watching The Ambushers because I can tell it clearly isn’t a great movie. It isn’t even trying to be one. The production team and the cast know it’s going to be fairly terrible, they cope admirably with whatever indignities the script or the director throw at them. The benefit of playing it relatively straight must be lauded. The screenplay is a lot of fun but forgets to join the dots of the plot, so it essentially becomes a series of scenes, some good, some bad, some dreadful, loosely joined together by luck not expertise. It’s easy to say you should never argue with the box office and perhaps you really shouldn’t. Apparently The Ambushers pulled in over $10m of receipts, a healthy return on the small budget. You can’t argue much with figures like that or those of the Slay Girls; so I guess everything looks most desirable from most angles.
I remember someone writing on one of the Bond forums once that the Matt Helm films were the equivalent of the spoof Casino Royale (1967) film being the sole representative adaptation of Fleming's Bond novels. That's a sobering thought. Things could always be worse.
Yes, he's already witnessed the dark side of screwing up an author's original intentions. At least Donald Hamilton kept on ploughing his own furrow with his Matt Helm novels into the 1990s and beyond to be fair to him.
As the series progresses through the 1960s, the references to WW2 become fewer. By the 1970s they're quietly faded away and by the 80s and 90s gone altogether to avoid an unrealistically elderly Helm still doing all the things he had been doing all along.
The Wrecking Crew
Donald Hamilton’s novels never meant much to the script writers of the Matt Helm film series. The on-screen antics do not share any resemblance to the author’s originals. A few borrowed characters and incidents would be about the gist of it. The Wrecking Crew follows the same route. Hamilton’s ‘Crew’ were the shadowy wartime intelligence and assassination network who claw him back into the espionage fold. There is no explanation of the title at all in this thoughtless extravaganza which has visions of opulence, but ends up being merely tacky.
Dean Martin heads a serviceable cast. Nigel Green – always a decent shout as a middle-grade villain – and Elke Sommer pop up playing similar roles to the ones they occupied in the Bulldog Drummond relaunch Deadlier Than The Male. Both are watchable. Chic Nancy Kwan plays a Chinese assassin. Tina Louise is the villain’s ex-girlfriend with dollars on her mind. Sharon Tate, looking gorgeous, plays an accident prone ICE attaché. The problem isn’t the cast, it’s what they have to work with.
William McGivern wrote the screenplay. I know little about him other than he wrote crime stories. If this is the standard of his work, I don’t want to read a single one. The script is less than adequate. It lurches from location to location, fight to chase to fight, with no consideration for detail or explanation. Some of the scenes feature incurably banal dialogue. Others are so motionless they slow the pace of the film to a stop. I lost count of the number of times Matt Helm stood around looking hopelessly nonplussed while a sensuous female slopes around him, draping herself over furniture, in-and-out of clothes, obviously trying to seduce the famous international photographer playboy. Helm is phenomenally gallant and refuses all advances. I rather see his point. Martin looks jaded and out of his depth among these newly nubile youngsters. I was reminded of Roger Moore attempting to deflect an adolescent-looking Lynn Holly Johnson in For Your Eyes Only. Martin too seems to appreciate how icky-some his grizzly fifty-something countenance looks messing about with these beautiful creatures. Sadly, he carries this attitude over into the whole production. He’s hardly bothering to pay the slightest attention to anything or anyone around him. He looks stunned by the ridiculousness of the whole project and I can hardly blame him for the whole sorry adventure is peppered with impossibilities. If Sean Connery looked disinterested in Diamonds Are Forever, Martin looks as if he didn’t even bother to turn up; sometimes you feel a mannequin could have played his part.
The saving grace of the film might have been humour, but McGivern doesn’t have any. The script tries really hard, but every joke is a clunker. Worse, Phil Karlson, director of The Silencers, returns to pour his own brand of corpulent merriment onto proceedings. Nothing succeeds. Not the visual humour. Not the wordsmithery. Not the stunts. Nothing. Karlson reintroduces the wet pratfall – Sharon Tate this time drowning her elegant outfit in a muddy river – and has Helm tossing hanky grenades instead of buttons [I mean, really, a grenade in a silk kerchief; who thinks of this foolishness?] Karlson even gives us another song soundtrack including a dream sequence full of sexy, disrobing women played out to Dino’s lilting melodies. This is a jittery, lumbering, uncertain, crass few minutes of complete tedium for the audience; a moment which contributes nothing to the narrative or to the characters. I repeat that: nothing. Absolutely nothing. A complete waste of five minutes, which might have been better served explaining Helm’s assignment.
Basically the rogue evil criminal Count Contini has stolen a billion dollars in gold bullion and wants to resell it, destabilising the market and raising his own profit margins. A little like Auric Goldfinger’s plan. Helm, along with his bumbling accomplice Freya, intercept the Count and thwart his operation. Cue ninety-minutes of obnoxious hi-jinks. I’d rather forget most of it. Points of Bondian interest: Helm has a gadget laden camera; Helm carries an autogyro in the boot of his station wagon, hastily and impossibly assembled; he takes a nasty spin in a restaurant booth; Sharon Tate’s Freya is clearly the inspiration for Britt Ekland’s hapless Mary Goodnight; there is a fight on top of a fast moving train. It wouldn’t be half so bad if the director had exercised some control over the proceedings.
I wonder if Karlson or producer Irving Allen bothered to watch what had occurred in Matt Helm’s cinematic world since the series debuted in February 1966. The aimlessness of the direction, the gawping, the standing still, the slower-than-a-snail’s pace pitch, the desperate over-eagerness of the cast, their willingness to suffer indignities, the low production values, the shoddy effects, the California mountain scenery and backlot locations used to represent plain, level-grounded Denmark, the slapstick, the repetition of past ideas, the noisy, infuriatingly cheerful Andy Williams-esque incidental music – Hugo Montenegro should be ashamed of himself – the daft gadgets, the jumpy editing, I could go on and on and on. Except for the funky costumes and the bright photography, the best moments have nothing to do with Karlson at all: it’s the fight scenes, of which there are many. They were arranged by Bruce Lee and under his keen, skilful eye, the second unit comes up trumps with a series of fun kung fu kicking spectaculars. They’ll never be Fist of Fury, but they’re choreographed well and provide a diverting alternative to all the sexy, purring, stripping females. Lee recruited a host of real martial art experts to double the actors or play the heavies. It displays intent on his part to at least put on a decent show.
There was to be a fifth adventure, The Ravagers, but after Sharon Tate’s murder, Dean Martin couldn’t face returning to the role. Thankfully, I think he did us a favour. Matt Helm was running a downhill course already. The character did return for a brief television series in the seventies and Hamilton continued to write his bleak novels, but these four fairly elementary spy spoofs remain Matt Helm’s big screen legacy. If I’m being kind, I’d say they were a product of their time. Dean Martin was probably a little too old and world-weary to take on the central role as it was presented. Ultimately, his characterisation limits the scope of the pictures. To be fair, the movies are probably no worse than any of the other fledgling OO7 rip-offs of the time. There was an awful lot of rubbish made on the cheap between 1963 and 1969, but there were also some very good spy capers, or at least one’s which didn’t try so shamelessly and badly to imitate the James Bond formula. It’s disappointing Irving Allen and his production teams couldn’t have striven harder to strike that happy medium. Sadly the whole series, in my solemn opinion, is a bit of a dud.
A quick mention for Chuck Norris, making his film debut here (as discussed earlier in this thread, with stills.).
For those interested, an episode or two of the 1970s TV series can be found on YouTube- just search for "Matt Helm". As stated previously, these have nothing to do with the novels or films.
I was not a fan of the Matt Helm films at all when they first came out.....but I was just a kid at the time.
They just appeared to be a cheap, Bond rip off (which they kind of were).
As an adult I get a bit of a kick out of them as a bit of low brow satire and surely appreciated the absolute knock out "Helm Girls".
I have watched The Silencers for the first time and everything is A-OK! The movie is fun, the women are beautiful and they have never heard of women's lib, the gadgets are silly and the actors are charmismatic, especially Dean Martin. Speaking of silencers: silenced revolvers is something that exists in movies and not in real life. But who cares when the Reversible Gun is used so brilliantly! The action and stunts are unimpressive, but that's not the point. This is a silly comedy and it's a good one. In fact this mus tbe the "reversible" of movies like QoS. I look forward to watching more Matt Helm movies.
Napoleon Plural's Tweet about The Offence left the Last Film Seen thread sometime last night but we've lost trace of it and our radars are picking up nothing. 'Don't worry, we'll put our best man on the job...' @Barbel
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Job completed, @Napoleon Plural