OSS117 - Mission For A Killer

Hell To Peyote

OSS117 - Mission For A Killer
aka Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117
France/Italy 1965
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

OSS117 - Mission For A Killer is the third of the films presented in Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set OSS117 Five Film Collection. This time around, the main lead has been recast... we no longer have Kerwin Matthews in the role of Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath aka OSS117, Instead we have Frederick Stafford who, it has to be said, is even more of a block of wood in the role than Matthews was. He does, to be fair, look much more capable of doing all the fights and is quite confident in the role but, well, when I say that Matthews displayed much more emotion and personality in the role, you can see what we’re up against here. I’m not sure I’m blaming the actor here though... I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Luckily, he has a really excellent female lead in Mylène Demongeot, playing a random lady who gets accidentally mixed up in the mechanics of a threat to the world, probably because she strikes up a friendship with Hubert as much as anything else. Said threat to the world starts off as a promising proposition, explained in a truly unmemorable and dull pre-credits sequence which, rather than starting off with an action piece as the Bond films would, is just lots of talking about important figures being assassinated by brainwashed, drugged up, suicide bombers. Hubert’s mission is to take over from another guy in Brazil (who obviously gets killed almost as soon as OSS117 gets there) and find out who is making and using these brainwashing drugs etc. I say etc because, it would seem implicit that they would also want to find out who’s actually programming these living bombs and stopping them in their tracks but, yeah, I don’t think that aspect of the mission is ever actually made clear.

From there on it’s the usual shenanigans where Hubert will get into a fight with a bunch of bad guys, romance a lady, step and repeat for a while before flying to a different part of Brazil to rescue some Indians who have been ‘making’ peyote, which apparently turns you into an easily suggestible robot (hmmm... I’m really not sure that’s what peyote and its mescalin ingredient does, to be honest). 

And it’s a fairly dull and plodding film it has to be said. Some of the fist fights do their best to break up the monotony, which is not in any way helped along by Michel Magne’s ponderous lounge score. I have to wonder how these were supposed to compete with the Bond films, which were already up to Thunderball when this was released without, apparently, the filmmakers managing to pick up on anything which made those films so good. This film is a big yawn compared to what EON were churning out at the same time. I also have to wonder how this was the 11th most popular film in France in the year it was released. 

I wish I could say that the film had some unseen twists or unusual things to recommend it. I suppose a fists against flame thrower fight in a hotel room is quite interesting in its own way and, later, when Hubert drives his car through a sheet of flame, the sight of the tyres on all four wheels of his car spinning orange flames is eye catching. But, over all, this film is as similarly snooze inducing as its predecessors.

I blame André Hunebelle... I thought his 1960s Fantômas movies made around the same time (and reviewed on this blog elsewhere, check out the movie section of the index) were somewhat okay but ultimately lacked a lot of the punch they might have had (although I think their screenplays were a little better) but these OSS117 movies are a somewhat duller affair than those. At least the Fantômas films had some novelty moments in them but, these OSS117 movies don’t even seem to have inherited Bond’s mania for sophisticated spy gadgetry... which is overplayed somewhat in the Bond series over time, to be fair but, yeah, they really could have done with something to lift these movies. 

So it would be true to say that OSS117 - Mission For A Killer is no better or worse than the previous two movies in the series. It’s not a film I would recommend, even to lovers of spy movies and, yeah, I won’t be watching this one again in a hurry. Still, there are two more films left in this set and the fourth, while produced by Hunebelle, is not actually directed by him so, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Frederick Stafford’s return engagement in the OSS117 role will be a better movie than this one. I should find out fairly swiftly. 

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard

Licence To Kilt

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard
(aka Fantômas Contre Scotland Yard
France/Italy 1967 Directed by André Hunebelle
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard is the third and final of the trilogy of 1960s Fantômas movies, based on the character who appeared in Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre popular novels. And, this will be a short review because it’s also my least favourite of the three, a real step backward from the previous movie... although I do know someone who absolutely loves this one, to be sure.

Once again we have Jean Marais playing both newspaperman Fandor and Fantômas (and, of course, various disguises of Fantômas who are always easy to spot). Mylène Demongeot returns again as Hélène, Fandor’s girlfriend and, again we have the bumbling Inspector Juve, played by Louis de Funès, along with his comical assistant, Inspector Bertrand, once more portrayed by Jacques Dynam.

And, I guess you would suppose from the title that the film is set in London with Fantômas taking on the UKs finest police force at Scotland Yard but... you’d be wrong. In a blindingly clueless move by the film makers, this movie is almost exclusively set in a castle in Scotland, with hardly any mention being made of the English police until the end of the movie, where they all come in (presumably in their bizarrely left hand drive cars, like everybody else in the movie), kitted out with something similar to, but not quite, sten guns. Because, yeah, that’s obviously what a British bobby would carry around with them.

Actually, the plot is another one played for comedy hijinks but it eschews the Pink Panther-like animated title sequence of Fantômas Unleashed (reviewed here) and instead goes for a car driving around Scotland (ish) with bag pipes playing on Michel Magne’s score (yeah, I know, let’s not talk of this again). The comedy of the movie, with Inspector Juve constantly finding dead bodies in his room which disappear before he can show them to people, is set against a plot which involves Fantômas delivering ‘living tax’ contracts to various rich and powerful figures in an elaborately fanciful and blisteringly stupid version of a protection racket. Yeah... let’s not talk of the plot again either, such as it is.

And it’s pleasant and has a lot of Louis de Funès running around like a madman, if you like that sort of thing. And I guess people probably did because he seems to be the reason most people are watching this. A fourth film, Fantômas In Moscow was planned but, according to popular knowledge, the combination of Jean Marais getting fed up playing second fiddle to de Funès and the fact that the three leading actors were getting rather expensive to employ in their success, meant that the planned follow up to this one was scuppered. Actually, that might not be a bad thing because.. well, it’s just generally less interesting than the last one.

For me, the comedy comes from the bizarre mistakes found in the astonishing assumptions that the French writers obviously had about life in England. So, for instance, you have a fox hunt (with a nice moment where a dog is disguised as a fox... don’t ask) but instead of the traditional, English costumes, the cast all seem to be dressing up in something reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars for this sequence. And, get this, instead of the leader of the hunt playing his little horn... we have four horsemen carrying massive French horns and playing those. Seriously, this is way past just getting it wrong now... I couldn’t help but think there was some deliberate ‘winding up’ of potential English viewers on this one.

In a similar matter of pushing the bounds of credibility beyond what they could possibly be expected to get away with, when Juve and Bertrand find themselves being transported around the castle on a remote controlled bed, they go into an elevator in the walls and down into an elaborate, Ken Adams style criminal underground lair. But this is not the castle of Fantômas... he’s just quickly borrowing it. How in heck did he have any time at all to have a massive, labyrinth of a high tech lair built under the castle with electric access points installed into the walls? This thing makes no sense!

One good thing about this movie is that Jean Marais really does get a chance to shine. There’s not too much of Fandor in the film but his turn in various disguises as Fantômas really shows what a good actor he could be. He has a wonderfully sinister presence here and his bluer than blue contact lenses when he is in his normal guise help complete the look very well.

Ultimately, without the gadgets and dynamic chase sequences of the previous films, Fantômas Vs Scotland Yard tends to drag a lot and, though it’s nice seeing the cast reunited one last time, I’m kinda glad they didn’t make anymore. Ultimately, I think Louis Feuillade’s very early 20th Century silent serial is the best version of the character I’ve seen committed to screen but, that being said, I’m sure there have been some other, probably better, productions over the years. Alas, trying to get a hold of most of that stuff in the UK (or, indeed, in the US) can prove difficult.

Fantômas Unleashed

Juve Delinquent

Fantômas Unleashed
(aka Fantômas se déchaîne)
France/Italy 1965
Directed by André Hunebelle & Haroun Tazieff
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Once again ‘inspired’ by the popular Fantômas novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas Unleashed is the second of the trilogy of films which, not so much reinvented the central antagonist but transformed the milieu in which he operates to a 1960s sensibility. The plot on this one is much more straight forward and more a rip off of something you’d see in a typical espionage or super villain movie of the time... be it James Bond, Derek Flint or, very much so, a Fu Manchu film... in that this one is the usual master criminal kidnaps a bunch of scientists in order for them to construct him a super weapon with which to threaten the world. In this case, the plot device in question is a telepathic ray with which you can cause people to do your bidding through the power of your mind.

However, while the story line is pure spy stuff, the overall tone of the movie betrays, even more, it’s partial basis on the success of The Pink Panther movies of the time. Once again we have Louis de Funès playing the put upon Inspector Juve who has the task of capturing Fantômas, although Fantômas and the newspaperman Fandor (once again played as a dual role by Jean Marais) are very much the sturdy, serious characters they always were in previous incarnations of the property, the tone of this one is even more comic with the emphasis now more on Juve than Fandor. Funès plays the part of the bumbling police inspector quite well but there’s not much room for anything else in the movie when you have his larger than life antics filling up most of the scenes as he utilises a number of special gadgets and not so clever disguises in his unending failure of a quest to bring Fantômas to justice. Even the opening title sequence is a Pink Panther style cartoon sequence starring Juve, which gives us a humorous recap of the previous story as scenes from the 1964 movie are recapped in animated form.

Once more, Mylène Demongeot plays Fandor’s photojournalist girlfriend Hélène but, this time, a young juvenile delinquent of a brother is thrown into the mix and you just know he’s going to come under the grasp of Fantômas by the end of the movie, as the villain tries to use his life as leverage. Incidentally, the young brother is played by the son of Louis de Funès and this was the first time they’d worked together on screen.

It’s another film that could have been fantastic but kinda plays the comedy a little too broadly in parts for my liking. That being said, it’s a much more even film (it doesn’t feature a chase scene that lasts for nearly half an hour, thank goodness) and I’d say it’s an improvement over the previous one (reviewed here), in pacing at least. There’s also a lot of points of interest in this one, most notably in terms of the secret agent 'Q branch' style gadgets that Juve employs in his pursuit of the villain. These are all played for laughs, naturally but, unusually for instruments that seem to be there only to get a laugh for the audience, Juve actually manages to use each gadget to get him out of a tight spot and put one over the enemy when needed so... yeah... they’re not just throwaways.

The first ‘gadget’ is a mechanical fake arm which allows Juve to have his real arm hidden under his jacket and holding a gun when he’s in trouble. Despite the comic shenanigans which ensue from the use of the moving fake arm, he does gun down two of Fantômas’ men when they are not expecting it. Similarly, he uses some cigar guns to have two guards shoot each other so he can free himself from Fantômas’ clutches. Lastly... and I’m so pleased I’ve seen this now... he makes use of a fake wooden leg which doubles as a machine gun. Yep, Cherry Darling’s machine gun leg from Planet Terror (which I’d thought was an original invention), actually makes its debut here in prototype. So now I know.

There are some other quite interesting things too, which put it a little ahead of Bond at the time (Thunderball, reviewed here, was released the same year as this movie). For example, when Fantômas is making his getaway at the end of the movie, he uses a Citroen which converts into a flying car at the flick of a couple of switches (I don’t believe the Bond series had a flying car until The Man With The Golden Gun... reviewed here). Another thing which is special about this movie is that it contains the first large format cinema filming of a skydive stunt where a man catches up to another before operating his parachute. This is for a sequence where Fandor has to catch Juve in mid-air because the bumbling police inspector has accidentally put on a ruck sack instead of a parachute and, well, like I said, it’s pretty much the first time this was done for a feature film, predating the stunt’s use in the Bond series, in Moonraker (reviewed here), by over a decade.  

So, Fantômas Unleashed is an ingenious film but perhaps just a little too much slapstick in some areas... indeed, there are even a couple of ‘silent movie’ style comedy sections, one of which, frankly, I couldn’t make head or tail of. All in all, though, the film is quite entertaining and, frankly, Jean Marais still looks great as the blue headed title character... although, the best gadget in the entire movie is Fandor’s frilly fronted shirt. I wish more people wore those these days, so I can bring my own one out of retirement. These should definitely make a come back because, as far as I’m concerned, they should always be considered the height of fashion. Hopefully there will be another fantastic, frilly shirt in the third and final film of this series, the review of which you can catch in a couple of days on this blog.

Fantômas

Fandor Snatch

Fantômas
France/Italy 1964
Directed by André Hunebelle
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Fantômas is a very popular master criminal character who appeared in a series of over 40 best selling books by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, written between 1911 and 1963. I’ve only ever read two of them myself because translations from the French are especially hard to come by over here in the UK but in the original stories he’s a pretty ruthless and vicious criminal who is more of a terrorist and will stop at nothing to achieve his goals.

And that’s the tone director Louis Feuillade took with him in his excellent, silent, Fantômas film serials, which in some ways are more a series of interlocking shortish films but, yes, pretty much in the serial format and, of course, he’d later go on to direct two more very famous serials (internationally famous, that is, he churned out a lot of interesting stuff)... Les Vampires (with the original Musidora incarnation of Irma Vep... played by Maggie Cheun many decades later) and Judex (who also resurfaced in 1960s movies). Since Feuillade’s serials, many versions of Fantômas hit the silver screen (and television) in various incarnations and this one I’m now seeing for the first time on an American Blu Ray release of the 1960s trilogy (these still haven’t been released in the UK, can you believe?), is a more lighthearted take on the master criminal.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s still quite ruthless but the other characters in this play it more for laughs and, surprisingly, they all just manage to get away with it without harming the movie... too much. So we have Jean Marais in a dual role here both as Fantômas himself and the main protagonist Fandor, the newspaper man originally created by Fantômas in the first book but, well, that part of the story doesn’t come into play here at all, Fandor starts off as his own man here. We also have Louis de Funès playing Inspector Juve completely for laughs (and it’s a fairly charming performance), Mylène Demongeot playing Hélène (Fandor’s girlfriend and news photographer) and Marie-Hélène Arnaud as Lady Beltham, whose husband, if I’m remembering correctly, was killed in the first book but, again, not much mention is made to her origins as the current girlfriend of Fantômas here.

And it’s a bit of a romp. It’s well paced (for the first half of the movie, at least) with a certain competence behind the shot design, without being all that spectacular. Looked at now it seems a little clumsy in places but you can see the director and producers were just finding their legs with it and I suspect they got a little wilder as the series progressed (I hope). It’s also very much, it seems to me, to be a reaction to the current cinema trends in which the James Bond films had started making waves. Dr. No and From Russia With Love (and possibly Goldfinger) would have preceeded this film and you can certainly see the influences here. The set for Fantômas’ underground lair is absolutely taking a page from the Ken Adams school of 'evil villain power base' design and this is coupled with a kind of slightly underplayed (but still quite over the top in terms of most films) homage to the The Pink Panther films, regarding the incompetence and bumbling of the policemen lead by Juve in the movie. Indeed, even the smooth, secret agent style scoring from Michel Magne seems a bit like a pastiche where John Barry meets Henry Mancini from their respective, famous franchise scores.

It’s a bit uneven in terms of on screen action, especially for the last half an hour of the film which is pretty much just one, long ridiculous chase. An over the top (especially in terms of length) sequence where Fandor and Hélène try to negotiate their car down a mountain without breaks really outstays its welcome and then leads into an equally lengthy pursuit by car, bike, train, helicopter and submarine scene which, frankly, gets a little dull in places but, overall, it’s not a bad movie and I think I’m maybe being a little too harsh and not allowing for the historical context of the release of the film to make an impact. This would have been quite well received at the time and you can certainly see why.

Marais looks older here than in anything else I’ve seen him in (which just amounts to some of his collaborations with Jean Cocteau, to be honest) but he shows a certain versatility in various guises here, not least of which is the harsh title antagonist who, bizarrely, they’ve chosen to give a blue face to. The ‘mask’ of his face is actually quite cleverly put together and I reckon it’s a half mask prosthetic blended with his ‘blue skin’ because it’s a lot more mobile around the mouth and completely dead and sinister in the upper part of his face. This is not, by the way, what Fantômas looks like but, it’s a nice idea and, well, it was the 1960s... I’m happy to accept it.

My biggest criticism is, perhaps, the softening of Fantômas. Don’t get me wrong, he seems utterly ruthless here and somehow ‘gets away with it’ amongst all the comedy hi-jinks but, well... for instance, there’s a caper where he steals a load of ‘unstealable’ jewellery from under the police commissioner’s nose during a presentation. To do this he gasses a load of models who were wearing the jewellery in their dressing room but, later, it’s revealed that this was a sleeping gas from which they all awake. All I’m saying is that, in the books, I’m pretty sure Fantômas would have just killed them all with the poison gas... he has no regard for human life, as I recall and it wouldn’t have been a big deal for him. Indeed, it would just feed his reputation as a terrorist before whom the world should tremble even more so, yeah, I can half see why they’ve done it here but, I still think he’s a little bit of a compromised version of the character, nonetheless.

And that’s me done with this one. Really glad I’ve started to catch up to the 1960s cycle of Fantômas movies and I’m looking forward to watching the next one in the series. That review will be coming in a couple of days.