‘Those sticks are diabolical tools.’
A British agent is shot and killed crossing a street in Paris. The woman he was meeting takes refuge with a special agent who has just been assigned to protect an English scientist who is arriving in the city for a top-level conference…
Uneven and obscure spy game from France with Jean-Claude Bercq running around town as this week’s ‘Bond On A Budget’. Pierre Zimmer co-writes and directs the shenanigans with the help of a supporting cast that includes Marilù Tolo, Perrette Pradier and Michael Lonsdale.
Clik here to view.
One morning in Paris, a man is gunned down from a passing car. He was crossing the street to meet young blonde Catherine Demange (Patricia Viterbo), seated at a street café. He hands her a codebook as he breathes his last on the tarmac, and she rushes to a local gym to find Marc Saint-Clair (Bercq). He’s a secret agent known as Le Judoka due to his proficiency in Judo. Installing her at a safe house, he takes the book to Commissaire Chaumont (Fernand Berset) of the Sûreté. Berset gives him another assignment: to babysit English scientist Thomas Perkins (Lonsdale) when he arrives in the city.
However, Lonsdale goes missing from the airport after his plane touches down. Neither Bercq nor his sidekick Jacques Mercier (Henri Garcin) can find any trace of him. The trail leads to the shady nightclub run by Paul Vincent (Yves Brainville, where Bercq meets the slinky Vanessa (Tolo). She also works at the recording studio run by Dominique Berg (Pradier), which Bercq becomes convinced is a front for the local underworld. However, his investigation goes awry when the safe house is breached, and Viterbo is kidnapped.
Clik here to view.
This French-Italian co-production is yet another underwhelming attempt to cash in on the popularity of James Bond in the mid-1960s, commonly gathered under the umbrella called Eurospy. Crucially, emulating the excesses of Bond requires a lot of financial clout, and it’s to Zimmer’s credit that he never attempts such an unreachable goal. Instead, he delivers a fairly grounded tale of espionage with a focus on small-scale action, mostly fistfights and hand-to-hand combat. Bercq shows a lot of ability in those scenes, and although not highly creative, these battles are well-choreographed for the most part and the highlights of the picture.
Elsewhere, unfortunately, the film runs into a lot of problems. The missing scientist angle is the apparent through-line of the plot, but it’s forgotten for long periods while Bercq and the story meander through the Paris underworld to no great purpose. None of the villains take centre stage as Bercq’s main antagonist, and their overall plans remain vague and undefined. Early scenes set Viterbo up as the obvious heroine, but she vanishes almost entirely from the film’s second half. The love interest role falls to Tolo, who is wasted in a severely underwritten role that comes over mainly as an afterthought.
Clik here to view.
There are also some puzzling developments. After investigating Lonsdale’s disappearance at the airport, Bercq and Garcin return there later on for no apparent reason other than for Bercq to get into another fight with one of the faceless bad guys. Why this henchman is still hanging about at the location is also a mystery. Fortunately, it’s a decent punch-up, although it is capped by a pretty dreadful ‘dummy off a balcony’ moment. At first glance, you may assume this was just a case of the filmmakers getting as much out of a suitable location as possible. However, there was likely an alternate reason that also explains the somewhat disjointed feel of the finished product.
One day, toward the end of the film’s production, Viterbo got a lift to the set with Garcin. When parking, he hit the accelerator instead of the brake, and his car plunged into the river Seine. He was able to escape, but Viterbo drowned. The production was too far advanced to recast her role and start again, so major rewrites were likely necessary, which would account for the uneven story and the overall fractured results. The kidnapping of her character does get wrapped up with a rescue scene, but it’s very brief indeed, and she’s never referred to again.
Clik here to view.
There’s little else worth noting about the film. Zimmer’s direction lacks any noticeable dynamism or style, and the project has few memorable elements. One of the most bizarre is the entertainment on offer at Brainville’s high-class nightclub, which consists of a young woman walking across the stage, apparently dressed as Santa Claus. At one point, she seems to put a hat on a snowman. She’s not singing, dancing or removing her clothes, but Zimmer only gives us a couple of brief shots of her act from the back of the room, so I guess any of those three activities might have followed. However, exotic dancing seems a tad unlikely when you have a well-heeled clientele seated at tables and dressed to the nines.
Seeing Garcin go undercover as an aspiring singer at the recording studio is much more fun. Sporting a terrible Beatles wig, he delivers a wonderfully atrocious audition accompanied by an apparent boundless self-belief regarding his musical genius. It’s a little out of place with the generally dour proceedings, but it’s one of the few times the film threatens to come to life. Of course, he’s actually there to take covert photos with a camera hidden in his guitar, which is just about the only spy gadget in the film. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the movie got a sequel in the form of ‘Casse-tête chinois pour le judoka’ (1967), which swapped Bercq out for Marc Briand and made a far more conscious effort to emulate Bond. Tolo did return but played an entirely different character who mostly doubled as comic relief, the complete opposite of her role here.
Clik here to view.
The one thing that might entice the more casual viewer to seek this one out is the presence of Lonsdale, who would later brush shoulders with Bond for real when he played the villainous Hugo Drax in ‘Moonraker’ (1979). Born to English-French parents, he studied painting in Paris after World War Two but switched to acting and began appearing in films in the latter half of the 1950s. He spent a decade in supporting roles, including one in Orson Welles’ ‘The Trial’ (1961), before his big opportunity arrived, courtesy of director François Truffaut. Significant roles in the filmmaker’s ‘The Bride Wore Black/La mariée était en noir’ (1968) and ‘Stolen Kisses/Baisers volés’ (1968) elevated his profile considerably, and his English language breakthrough came with Fred Zinnemann’s ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (1973). After his encounter with 007, he appeared in high-profile films such as the Oscar-winning ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981), the acclaimed ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1986), and many others, maintaining a complimentary and highly successful career in French-language cinema. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 89.
Anonymous spy games, unsurprisingly forgotten.