It's hard to imagine it today, but the public went insane for spy films in the 1960s...and not just the James Bond and other familiar spy movies. In addition to the Matt Helm and Flint films, many European studios made their own Bond-like movies. Many of them never made it to the States and most were soon forgotten...though MANY (such as the George Nader films where he played super-spy Jerry Cotton) were actually pretty good. Also, many are on YouTube...you just have to know where to look for them.
One of these strangest YouTube offerings is "Operation Kid Brother" (also called "OK Connery"). As you can guess from the alternate title, the movie is a knockoff of Sean Connery's spy films and they use his own real-life brother, Neil to star in the movies. In many ways, he looks like Sean in the movies...but sporting an evil goatee and with slightly fairer features. To further the lookalike aspects of this movie, they even used the same man to play the villain (Adolfo Celi) who had previously played the villain in Sean's "Thunderball"! But it didn't stop there! Nope, Bernard Lee ('M'), Lois Maxwell ('Moneypenny'), Anthony Dawson (a Dr. No lackey who tried to murder Bond in the first film) and the female lead from "From Russia With Love" ALSO appear in the film! There could be others...but those are a few I recognized. Due to copyright reasons, each plays a different character than the ones they played in the Bond films. Obviously, they were hoping Sean's success would somehow rub off on his brother.
An oddity about the film is that you really don't see much of Neil until well into the film. Another oddity is that he plays a doctor who is a world-class plastic surgeon and hypnotist...definitely less of the Bond-type. It seems that James isn't available in the story so the forces of goodness engage his brother to fight THANATOS, an international organization of evil almost exactly like SPECTRE from the Bond films. So, Neil is Sean Connery's brother in real life AND he plays the brother or 007 as well! I wonder how that went over within the Connery family.
So is this 'Spaghetti Spy' movie worth seeing? Well, definitely if you are the curious type. Seeing Neil channeling his famous brother is pretty weird and worth a look. Also, the film looks pretty nice, as the costumes, sets and European locales look quite nice. As for the story, it's full of a lot of psychic stuff instead of the usual spy stuff...which is odd but interesting but probably not what the fans were looking for from this film. But the story has plenty of dumb moments (such as the costumed women attacking the MPs) and Neil has little in the way of charisma or charm. I am sure he's a nice guy...probably nice to his mother, small children, and dogs...but hardly the sort to be able to carry a film. An odd curio of a film! Perhaps worth seeing once....and only once.
