Dir: Manfred R. Köhler
Star: Stewart Granger, Karin Dor, Curd Jurgens, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Target for Killing

I must say, it feels as if this entry may end up being less than my standard thousand words. This is partly a reflection of the low amount of Klaus to be found in it. But there have been films with even less that I’ve still managed to cover to my usual depth, e.g. The Soldier. The difference is, that was not as mind-numbingly tedious as this poor man’s Bond-esque thriller. When you combine a shortage of Kinski with a plain bad movie, my attention is always going to be struggling to cope. But there’s nothing wrong with giving a film the coverage it deserves: which in this case, would be “not a lot.”

It centres on the criminal syndicate run by Gérard van Looch (Jurgens), known to all as “Giant” – I guess in deference to Jurgens’s 6’4″ frame. His current target is Sandra Perkins (Dor), who is flying to Montenegro to take up a position as a publicist at a company there. It turns out she is about to inherit a large sum of money, and her uncle has tipped the Giant off to the possibilities resulting from her demise. The initial plan is to poison her on the inbound flight, but this is foiled when another passenger, James Vine (Granger), accidentally kicks the doctored drink from the hand of the stewardess, who is a minion of the Giant.

He strikes up an apologetic conversation, which leads to a relationship – though not before another assassination attempt is foiled, after Vine discovers the crew have unanimously parachuted out of the plane. He turns out to be a bit of a special agent, which helps land the plane, and foil further attempts by the Giant to come into Sandra’s inheritance. Bizarrely, the villain is operating out of a monastery, where the habit-wearing monks tote automatic weapons. Hence the original title, which translates as “The Secret of the Yellow Monks.” I must confess, based on the name, I was expecting a krimi from the Edgar Wallace school, but this is much more in the Eurospy genre. The idea of a fake religious establishment is certainly right out of the Bond villain playbook, and it’s far from the only similar element.

The Giant also has a pet mad scientist, Dr. Yang, on hand, working on brainwashing techniques. Then again, when your process involves using electric rays to open up your subjects to the desired re-programming, it’s understandable that more conventional avenues of funding may not be available. Also in typical Bond style, things come to a head after the hero lets himself be captured, in order to rescue his girl, who is Dr. Yang’s latest victim.Vine escapes certain death, not least because the Giant decides to have a chat, and the authorities rush to the rescue, having recorded the entire incriminating conversation. Really, the final reel should be “What not to do if you become an evil overlord 1.0.1.”

It is, almost painfully, a product of its time, most obviously in its portrayal of Sandra. For example, when she and James are fighting to land the crewless plane, he’s in the pilot’s seat and she’s trying to contact air-traffic control. Their shocked reaction after she does? “When does the pilot have the voice of a woman?” Oh, I dunno: maybe when you let women fly planes? Admittedly, Sandra is a bit… fainty, shall we say, keeling over on more than one occasion. On the other hand, I was impressed by the gung-ho attitude of the Giant’s chief henchma… er, make that henchwoman, La Tigra (Scilla Gabel). Clad in her fetching black leather pants, she takes obvious pleasure in strafing one of the failed plane assassins with her machine-gun, purely to terrorize her, before her victim is handed over to Dr. Yang for processing. Though in another scene, La Tigra is doing some… knitting? I’d like a whole movie about her, rather than Giant.

As well as the plot, the Bond connection is also apparent in the casting, which stretches both back to the past, and into the future. Adolfo Celi and Molly Peters had appeared in the previous year’s 007 movie, Thunderball; here, they play Sandra’s evil uncle, Henry, and Vera respectively. The following year, Dor would graduate from faux Bond to the real thing in You Only Live Twice, as a SPECTRE agent who ends up being eaten by piranhas. Most famously, Jurgens also gained promotion, though that took over a decade. He played main villain Karl Stromberg in the 1977 Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.

As for Klaus, he plays another less than competent minion, Caporetti. He was also part of the failed plane plot, being its pilot. After parachuting to Earth, he gets picked up by La Tigra in her convertible (top) and informed that Giant is “mad” at the failure, saying it’s all Caporetti’s fault. He is obviously aware of what happens to henchmen who fail their job appraisal, i.e. they get fast-tracked to a personal encounter with Dr. Yang and his electric rays. So after further efforts to kill Sandra also come up short, he heads straight for a travel agent to book a ticket on the first plane from Montenegro, to anywhere in South America. However, the escape plan becomes discovered, and after trying to warn Sandra, is punished for his treachery with a stiletto between the ribs.

Kinski collects his cheque at about the 45-minute mark, and that’s the point at which my interest evaporated as well. While the Bond movies this is aping were not necessarily great shakes – Thunderball is arguably among the worst of the franchise – they did at least have glamour and a star with potent charisma. This doesn’t have much of the former, and Granger is a full 25 years older than his romantic interest, which makes their relationship feel more creepy than anything. Köhler’s pedestrian direction robs the script of any tension it might have generated, and the whole thing is thoroughly forgettable.