The Silencers

I recently bought the DVD, and I forgot how much fun it was. It's not rocket science at all, and one could argue that even as an obvious spy spoof (in the best Bond and Flint traditions) it hiccups a bit throughout its own pretensions: Dean Martin's photographer-as-spy is properly cool, but there's a fine line between being laid-back and appearing to sleep on camera. (I could also say something about a modern audience being more than a bit startled at the immense objectifying of women throughout the whole film, but society is currently enjoying a renaissance of all things politically INcorrect and telling the rest of us to shut up- so I'll shut up.) Martin's female co-stars are all a smörgåsbord of beauty and sex appeal- every last one of them, but the one who seems to have emerged with the strongest impression is Stella Stevens' accident-prone klutz (whose airhead personality got on my nerves after a while, but I cannot deny that she looked fantastic as a redhead). For me, I preferred the enigma that is Daliah Lavi (a black-haired siren of Mideastern gorgeousness), who emerges a double agent and semi-lover of Helm's. The film does two brilliant things which take its visual appeal to dizzying heights: It launches the film with clever opening credits which peek under a bevy of gorgeous strippers, each doing a 'legitimate' strip-tease (no true nudity). Ending the strip parade is the film's other secret weapon: Cyd Charisse. I love that TPTB had the foresight to acknowledge a younger and older demographic at the same time- while simultaneously spotlighting one of filmdom's greatest dancers in a cameo (at the age of 45)- with the longest, most gorgeous legs in history. After singing the title song Charisse emerges a second time about 37 minutes into the film (in an important plot point) to perform a stunning dance in a Vegas nightclub to the Vikki Carr song "In Santiago-" then disappears much too quickly. Otherwise, there is a lot of fun with Martin poking fun at his own persona: many songs become sexual double-entendre, an audio cameo by Sinatra is quickly nixed, and so forth.

Good fun. A James Bond spoof, made 30 years before Austin Powers!

Has all the Bond ingredients - debonair leading man, stunningly beautiful women, random plot, weird "when would you ever use that?" gadgets (which then are used!), bloated megalomaniac villains, hero-gets-captured-but-not-killed-instantly-just-so-that-he-can-escape silliness.

Dean Martin is great in the lead role.

Retired secret agent Matt Helm (Dean Martin) is a photographer of beautiful models with beautiful assistant Lovey Kravezit. His former boss Macdonald at Intelligence Counter Espionage with deadly Tina recruit him back in the fight against the evil Big O organization led by Tung-Tze who plans to use the underground atomic bomb test in New Mexico to start WWIII. Andreyev is the evil henchman. Matt encounters bumbling bosom blonde Gail Hendricks (Stella Stevens) and Sam Gunther.

Before Austin Powers, there was Matt Helm. This is a semi-spoof of Jimmy Bond. Dean Martin is the perfect lady's man to play the role. It's a lot of scantily clad beautiful women and outrageous spy stuff. It is semi-spoof because it's not that that far from the actual Bond franchise. It's got some song and dance as long as the dancing has the girls jiggling. The most important part is that this is fun and Martin seems to be having fun winking at the audience.

The Matt Helm movies were in fairly steady rotation on the local UHF channel in my town in the 70s. I watched them quite a bit as a kid, when I was little because they involved gadgets and explosion,and when I was a slightly older kid because they involved gadgets and explosions and literally acres of almost-naked gorgeous women. Needless to say, this movie was a pretty big hit in 1966 when it was first released, however it trades pretty much entirely on the desire of teen aged boys to see as many nearly-naked women as possible. This was back in the days before VCRs and DVDs and Cable TV made smut into a major industry, and when it was presumably much harder to get a copy of Playboy if you were a kid, so the appeal was not to be understated.

Alas, on this end of the 20th century, where you literally can't check your Email w/out someone offering you pictures of naked women, that aspect of the film has lost some of it's allure. The movie is something like a late night soft-core Cinemax film, only without the actual nudity. (Well, actually, there's plenty of nudity, most of which is conveniently obscured by a chair back, or a coffee cup or whatever) The plot is, well, mostly incoherent, and functions mainly as a means of getting Helm from one sexual situation to another. If the Bond formula is "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" then the Matt Helm formula is 3-parts Kiss Kiss to one quarter cup of Bang, so it actually gets rather tedious.

The direction is pretty much atrocious, and that adds to the proto-soft-core feel of the film. Production values are on the whole about equal to the level of a good Irwin Allen TV show, and the gadgets are pretty lame, even by the standards of the day, and there is frankly just too much sex. I don't mean that to sound prudish, but come on! That's why Playboy pads out each issue with articles about Peruvian oil wells, it can't *All* be about the T&A. Ideally, a spy parody like this should be something like an Oreo cookie, where the sweet, creamy middle of Stella Stevens (Pretty amazing as a redhead, BTW) is sandwiched in between the chocolate cookies of good storytelling and an interesting plot. Instead, this film plays out like you've scraped the filling off of three or four Double Stuffs, and piled it all on an Andes Candy, so that in the end all you've got is a big pile of sweetened lard and, well, it never ends up tasting as good as you thought it would when you started slapping it all together.

Other Caveats: The brilliant Victor Buono is horribly underused in this film playing a character that *might* possibly be Chinese, but more likely simply *wants* to be Chinese. Or he might simply be an overweight female impersonator with a particularly unfortunate fashion sense. Another odd feature is that the movie is at it's worst when Dino actually acts. Most of the time he sleepwalks through the film in his trademark personality, seeming slightly buzzed, but at random intervals he'll actually act and emote in a scene ("Did you think you bought me off last night?") and then suddenly you remember that Dino was one half of the second-most-successful comedy team of all time, and actually a pretty talented actor on occasion. Those glimmers pull you out of the films sugar shock, and, well, it's distracting. The film was apparently running rather short, so they decided to pad it out with a lengthy and pathologically un-funny scene where we spend about ten minutes watching Stella Stevens attempt to get out of a station wagon in the rain and repeatedly fall in the mud. It's painful to watch, and I can't believe they didn't cut it out. Horrible.

On the bright side, Stella is amazing looking, and not at all shy about it. Indeed, all the women in the film have that inexplicable mid-60s va-va-voom quality, but the most striking of them is the 45-year-old Cyd Charise who is just jaw-droppingly sexy in her two brief appearances in the film. And as ever, it's impossible not to like Dino.

Two notes for the DVD version of this film: If you saw this show on UHF back in the day, the uncut DVD version is...well, surprisingly lurid. There's nothing on here that wouldn't get past a network censor in 2006, but even so the tone of it is kind of aggressively pornographic, so keep that in mind before you screen it for the youth group on Wednesday night at church. Also, stick around through the end credits! There's a teaser for the next film in the series that features an almost-blooper by Martin, who's clearly thinking "What in the hell am I doing?" that makes the preceding 90 minutes of cheeze whiz all the more worthwhile.

Yep, that's the premise, and the beginning to the silliest spy series, before a certain dentally-challenged International Man of Mystery arrived.

Dean Martin starred as Matt Helm, the lead character in a series of novels by Donald Hamilton. The books were serious spy adventures; but, there is nothing serious about the film series. Dean plays it tongue-in-cheek, often making fun of his own image and rivalry with fellow Rat Packer Frank Sinatra. The films are filled with strange characters and silly gadgets.

Martin has fun with the role and keeps the film rolling along, but Stella Stevens makes it memorable. She is sexy as hell, but is such a lovable klutz that she dominates every scene. Victor Buono gets to chew the most scenery this side of his Batman appearances.

The gadgets make James Bond look like a documentary: a gun that shoots backward unless the trigger is pushed, exploding buttons, a station wagon with a fold down bed and bar, and Helm's many household appliances.

These films were anything but serious, but this one is very entertaining. The films tended to get worse with each new entry, but most of the elements work well here. If you are looking for serious spy cinema, try 007 or Harry Palmer. If you want some goofy fun, try this.