Tag: spy

Dir: Jean Delannoy
Star: Stéphane Audran, Lilli Palmer, Klaus Kinski, Frédéric de Pasquale
a.k.a. La peau de torpedo, Children of Mata Hari, Pill of Death, The Deathmakers

The jealous Dominique Krestowitz (Audran) is trying to have an affair, yet is unable to go through with it. Turns out this is retaliatory: she suspects her antiquarian husband, Nicolas (de Pasquale) is cheating on her, and becomes certain of this after a friend sees him going into a Paris building, when he’s supposed to be out of town on a business trip. She’s half-right: he is keeping secrets from her, but it’s not an extra-marital sojourn. Nicolas is a member of a Russian spy ring, run by the ruthless Helen (Palmer). As he returns from his latest mission, this has come under threat, and everyone has to go off-grid for a bit: the building is a temporary safe house, and the woman another member of the ring.

Knowing absolutely nothing of this, Dominique rushes to the apartment to confront her “unfaithful” spouse. The resulting fracas leaves both Nicolas and his partner shot dead, and Dominique has to go on the run. This sets off a mess for everyone, as the authorities investigate the corpses, uncovering the espionage cell in the process, after they discover Nicolas’s double-life and the microfilm he took on his mission. As Helen struggles to keep a lid on things, her bosses send over Pavel Richko (Kinski), an assassin tasked with locating and killing Dominique before she can give up what she knows – even though the audience is aware, that isn’t anything of significance.

Director Delannoy was a veteran of the industry, starting in the twenties as an actor, before moving behind the camera the following decade. But he was reviled by many in the French New Wave, François Truffaut famously saying of Delannoy’s Chiens Perdus sans Collier in 1957, that he had seen it three times so as to learn exactly what not to do (“‘il avait vu trois fois afin de savoir exactement quoi ne pas faire.”). Following that and other critical savagings, Delannoy’s career dropped off, but he kept working on journeyman efforts like this, directing his last film at the age of 87, and reaching the century mark before passing away in 2008.

This is based on a book by Francis Ryck call La Peau de torpedo – an odd title, used for the original French release, which translates as “The torpedo’s skin”. I’m not certain of its relevance with regard to the movie. Helen refers to Richko and another spy by the term, saying “The service sent me two torpedoes,” but that’s the only mention of the word the subtitles contain. I presume the book would be more forthcoming, but doesn’t seem to have received any publication in an English translation. It may help explain the plethora of different titles by which this was released worldwide. The movie certainly is ahead of its cinematic time, offering a gritty and down-to-earth portrayal of espionage.

As a contrast, it came out between On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds are Forever, much more the kind of spy films produced during this era. This is closer to Le Carre than Fleming (even if I acknowledge the gap between the 007 novels and their adaptations!), being as interested in the mechanics of the spy business as its characters. The focus for the latter shifts repeatedly, from Nicolas to Dominique to Coster (Michel Constantin), the French counter-espionage agent leading the investigation, to Helen). Two scenes in particular stand out. There’s a long, almost silent depiction of Nicolas’s break-in to his target and, later, another lengthy sequence where another of Helen’s minions, knowing he’s being followed, tries to shake the tail. This switches between him and the French authorities, who know he knows and use all their resources to keep on their target.

Kinski takes his time showing up, only appearing about 75 minutes into proceedings, although there’s enough of other interest going on here, that I didn’t mind too much. Richko immediately takes charge on meeting Helen, telling her “You’re a friend. You’re welcoming me at Le Bourget airport. I kiss you. Smile, please. Now! That’s an order.” I was amused when he later arrives at her apartment (pausing only to do a little shopping, picking up a particularly lurid robe!) and knocks on the door, when she asks who it is, he deadpans, “James Bond.” As spies go, this could hardly be further from the truth: about the only gadgets on view here are the strychnine pills carried by each of the spy ring, for use in case of capture (explaining yet another of the alternate titles).

Through her contacts, Helen has tracked Dominique to the Normandy port of Fécamp, where the fugitive is hiding out on a ship moored at the docks. However, the cops have also located her, and are mounting a surveillance operation of their own. Richko does an end-run to avoid them, approaching the boat from the ocean-side and sneaking on board to dispose of his target, only for a literal mis-step to prove his undoing, and he falls into the hold, breaking his back. With Helen also in custody after a futile attempt to evade the authorities., he’s not needed: in an act of kindness that’s rare for the film, Coster gives Richko his suicide pill back so he doesn’t have to live out his days, paralyzed and in jail. Before the end credits, there’s still time for a final, downbeat twist – one which perhaps was inspired by a previous 007 film.

Overall, this was better than expected, especially after early scenes where I had no real idea what was going on. For truth be told, that’s the point here: the entire film is based on a huge series of mistakes and misunderstandings, e.g. Nicolas isn’t having an affair, and Dominique has no clue at all about espionage. Yet in the murky world which is spy versus spy, these still prove more than capable of leading to the deaths of just about everyone involved. Even if the fate of Kinski’s character was poorly-handled, you can only appreciate the consistently downbeat tone, and admit its impenetrable nature is entirely by design.

Dir: Albert Cardiff, Robert Lynn and Sheldon Reynolds
Stsr: Stewart Granger, Pierre Brice, Lex Barker, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Gern hab’ ich die Frauen gekillt, Spies Against the World

I think there’s a good reason the anthology film is more common in genres like horror than the spy field. While you can conjure up scares with a relatively scant amount of storyline, it takes a fair amount of plotting to put together a decent espionage yarn. That certainly seems to be the case here, where the three stories presented are all underdeveloped, little more than trifles where any potential interest is only sketched out in the briefest of terms. It’s like this film is an artist’s impression of three statues, rather than any of them being fully-fledged work in themselves. The wraparound story is also rather dumb. A wanted man (Peter Vogel) takes refuge in the house of a professor (Patton‘s Richard Münch); while waiting for the police who are combing the era to leave, the professor tells three stories of crime and espionage, with the vague moral that crime doesn’t pay. [The way this ends, after the final tale is told, likely will be among the more WTF? twists you’ll have seen]

The first story takes place in Vienna, and is clearly trying to channel The Third Man, right down to the zither-laden soundtrack. After a woman’s journalist brother is killed in a car “accident”, she goes to David Porter (Granger), a grumpy private-eye who initially refuses to help, but eventually agrees after seeing that the woman was apparently trailed to his office. The journalist had been investigating a drugs ring, travelling across Europe to find its leader, and it seems he may have got too close to the truth. Porter pays a visit to the last person shown in the dead writer’s journal before his untimely demise, and discovers that the conclusion that contact was a dead-end is not entirely true. So why would a journalist lie in his own notes to himself? It;s an intriguing idea, but no sooner has it been set up, than it’s resolved, in about two minutes of unconvincing deductive work, because the film needs to gallop on to the second installment.

This is more of a spy caper, and is clearly not intended to be taken seriously, right from the time that the hero, Agent Brice (Brice) gets his instructions in the form of a 7″ single made of spaghetti, which he is instructed to eat after listening to. Though disappointingly, he doesn’t bother to boil the pasta record and serve with a nice carbonara sauce. What a Philistine. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is delivering a package of documents to a specific location, but Brice soon finds the Chico gang are also after the papers, and will stop at nothing to get their hands on them. With no backup to hand, he has to figure out who he can trust, and who is really working for the enemy. If light-hearted in nature, that’s no excuse for being dull as ditch-water, with comic mugging and slapstick replacing anything likely to cause more than a slight twitch at the corner of your mouth.

The third is perhaps the most interesting, and has the most potential for development, though as with the other two, is severely hampered by having to gallop through the narrative at such a pace as to leave little or no room for character portrayal, atmosphere, etc. It starts in San Francisco with the discovery of two dead women in the ocean; private eye Glenn Cassidy (Barker) investigates, and discovers that they were killed to try and hush up a planned plot to assassinate the Brazilian president during the Rio carnival. He takes the place of the assassin hired for the job, and heads for Brazil to expose the ringleader, who is incredibly cautious with regard to protecting his identity, to the extent of wearing a black hood when he meets with Cassidy. This has some nice action sequences, in particular a roof-top chase involving a Ferris wheel, that has some good stunt-work. It’s the one of the trilogy that I could most easily see being expanded into a full feature, and on this showing, wouldn’t be a bad one.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Klaus. That’s because his appearance is very much of the “blink and you’ll miss it” variety, playing the part of Gomez, one of the leading henchmen to the assassins in the final segment. He has about two scenes, one depicted in the picture above, which takes place overlooking Rio harbor and Sugarloaf mountain – apparently for the sole purpose of proving that the film did actually shoot on location, and not fake it with the aid of some stock Mardi Gras footage. Given the paucity of his role, I suspect the pitch for this went something like, “Fancy a couple of weeks in Rio, Klaus? Just need you for a scene or two.” Can’t say I blame the man for accepting on that basis, though having to wait 87 minutes into the film for him to show up, is certainly going to tax the patience of most Kinski fans.

Random trivia: the German title, Gern hab’ ich die Frauen gekillt, translates as “I am happy to have killed the women,” and is a riff on an operatic aria by Franz Lehar, Gern hab’ ich die Frauen geküsst, “I am happy to have kissed the women.” I only mention this, in the light of Kinski’s presence, because the name and subject of the operetta is Paganini…