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The purposefully drab update of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is reflected in a telling joke, Mozart played by a military band. (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold runs parallel with its own brand of deconstructive dourness.) Harry Palmer, "insubordinate, insolent and a trickster, perhaps with criminal tendencies," a British Intelligence drudge but with Michael Caine's canny charisma. From observation to investigation, "a promotion, sir?" Kidnapped scientists with minds turned to mush, the MacGuffin of "proto-proton scattering experiments," dueling superiors (Guy Doleman, Nigel Green). A scuffle is shot from a distance through a phone-booth pane, the raid on the hideout reveals a disused factory. In between muffled thrills, the true thrill of cooking a meal for a coworker (Sue Lloyd). "I thought you British were supposed to be subtle." Mundane naturalism caught in Sidney J. Furie's canted screens, a nervous theorem as corrective to Bondian smoothness. Espionage has its paperwork, government agencies devour their own, blurriness surrounds the hero even before his specs are removed. Figures and lines in a multiplicity of setups, geometric arrangements in supermarkets, libraries, underground garages. "One has to move with the times, I suppose, hmm?" Corpses break up bureaucratic monotony, one slumps against a bullet-cracked windshield and another is framed by the iris of an overhead lampshade. The preoccupation with blocked vision builds to the cinema allegory of "the treatment," out of the darkened cell and into the psychedelic chamber for an assault of abstract forms. Spotlight on the traitor—which boss to shoot? "I might have been killed or driven stark, raving mad!" "That's what you're paid for." The Parallax View and The Killer Elite follow, though not before Russell's grand cartoon blowout in Billion Dollar Brain. With Gordon Jackson, Aubrey Richards, Frank Gatliff, Thomas Baptiste, and Oliver MacGreevy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |