‘Who completes the experiment rules the universe!’
In the last hours of World War 2, a Nazi plane dumps two crates in the Bosphorus containing gold and plans to anti-gravity technology. Twenty years later, several governments and private concerns hunt the treasure and will go to any lengths to obtain it…
Somewhat misleadingly titled Eurospy, with this week’s (probable) ‘Bond On A Budget’ played by Lang Jeffries. Pino Mercanti directed this international co-production from Spain, Italy and France and has genre cinema mainstay Ernesto Gastaldi as one of his writing team.
Hours before their final surrender, the Nazi High Command scrambles to salvage what they can from their defeat. A small plane is launched, and the crew is instructed to drop two crates containing gold bullion and records of scientific experiments in anti-gravity into the waters off Istanbul. Mission complete, the pilots swing back to kill all the officers on the ground but then discover that the cover-up includes them as well and that their plane has been sabotaged. Crashing into the side of a mountain, one of the pilots survives, but the traumatic experience sends him into an asylum for the next 20 years.
When the pilot unexpectedly escapes the institution, it provokes a sudden race to locate the missing crates. International tycoon Hoover (George Rigaud) is particularly interested when a man (Jeffries) claims to be the missing pilot and confirms that he knows the location of the lost treasure. Rigaud is already funding the work of a marine archaeologist, Professor Richard (Philippe Hersent), who comes with his own private bathysphere. Unfortunately, the existence of the crates seems to be common knowledge and various other governments and their field agents are watching closely.
Given that Bond itself is a parody to some extent, it can be hard to establish whether some of the dozens of European copycat productions of the 1960s are intended as comedies or not. Mercanti’s film is a case in point. Everything is played straight, except for an agent with a shoeshine stand and radio, but so much is thrown at Jeffries in the first two acts that it’s hard to take events very seriously. He can’t go anywhere without people trying to beat him up, kill him or offer him a large cheque drawn on a Swiss Bank.
It’s all pretty entertaining stuff, and the production clearly has a larger budget than many of its contemporaries, which provides Mercanti with better opportunities to deliver the action. There’s good stunt work with a motorbike and sidecar, a ski-lift shoot-out and a well-choreographed fight in the marketplace, where Jeffries uses a dead pig as a weapon! There aren’t that many gadgets, but there is a guitar that fires bullets, a mysterious hand with a blowdart gun, and plenty of shady figures in the shadows trying to get the upper hand. These include Vassily (Umberto Raho), the slimy Maitre (Andrea Scotti) and bald strong-arm Yang (Pietro Ceccarelli).
Rigaud also shows some excellent staff recruitment skills, with his first team including the sexy Lynn (José Greci), secretary Sheena (Janine Reynaud) and the beautiful Helga Liné, who plays Hersent’s sister, Luana. Ok, one of them betrays him in the end, but it was probably still worth it. All were Eurospy veterans, particularly Greci, who gets a rare opportunity here to showcase her fighting skills. Liné is too peripheral to the action as she often was, but bringing up two children as a single mother in the 1960s dictated taking all the work she could possibly get. On the other hand, Umberto Raho just seemed hellbent on breaking some kind of big-screen appearance record at the time.
All the former sounds very positive, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it comes with a rather significant caveat: the film’s last half hour. It’s at this point that the search for the crates gets real. Sadly, this means a lot of murky underwater action, with Jeffries piloting the bathysphere, unconvincingly accessorised with spindly mechanical arms. These scenes bring everything to a shuddering halt and drag on forever, as underwater scenes often do if you don’t have James Cameron in the director’s chair. The excellent work of the film’s first hour is undone, and the viewing experience becomes a tiresome slog.
The wrap-up is also frustratingly brief, although it throws up an interesting movie parallel. When the villains finally open the crates, it has disastrous consequences, and, given the Nazi involvement, one can’t help making the connection with the Ark of the Covenant and a little movie called ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (1981). It’s certainly not close enough to warrant accusations of plagiarism. However, the sequence is undeniably similar, so it’s possible that George Lucas, or one of his writing colleagues, took inspiration from this film. A bigger question is why it’s called ‘Special Cypher’ in the first place (almost a direct translation of the original title) because there is no secret code. Reference to an ‘anti-gravity formula’ is made at one point, but the film’s McGuffin is usually termed as ‘documents’; all we see at the climax is a cardboard folder, which isn’t very exciting.
Jeffries is more than capable of leading a film like this and already had plenty of experience in the Eurospy arena. When he relocated to Italy after a stop-start American career, he made a handful of historical, sword and sandal films before scoring the lead in ‘Agente X 1-7 operazione Oceano’ (1965). ‘Spies Strike Silently/Le spie uccidono in silenzio’ (1966), ‘The Beckett Affair/L’affare Beckett’ (1966) and ‘Our Man in Casablanca/Il nostro agente a Casablanca’ (1966) followed in short order before he played secret agent Francis Coplan in ‘Mexican Slayride/Coplan ouvre le feu à Mexico’ (1967). Interestingly, although many sources confirm that Jeffries plays an American agent in this film, the print I viewed had no such definitive identification. His character might be an independent adventurer pursuing a personal agenda, and without the status of a government agent, his heroic actions could be interpreted as motivated by self-interest. This would add an intriguing layer of ambiguity to his character, but, of course, it’s far more likely that clarification was lost in the subtitles or the print I saw was incomplete.
An entertaining first hour or so dissolves into a vey soggy final act.