Antonio isasi – The Magnificent 60s

Action-packed superior James Bond rip-off belonging to the Eurospy subgenre and elevated by memorable lines, wit and visual imagination. So if you recall any movie where ricochets play havoc in a room, this is where it originated. Flying through a window on a rope and then crashing through a series of rooms and not stopping, ditto. That famous line uttered by Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean (2003) about “the marchandise,” yep, you’ve guessed it. Although it did steal a nice touch from Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), the one where an illegal drinking den (illegal casino here) is remarkably transformed.

And all the promise star Horst Buchholz showed in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and kept stowed away all these years, that’s back in spades. Chases, fistfights, shootouts, saloon (well, casino, actually) brawl, competing ruffians, safe-cracking, hitmen, infiltration of secret hideout, a pair of femme fatales and the inevitable atomic scientist.

Some clever thugs including Schenk (Klaus Kinski) dupe the U.S. government out of a million bucks by only pretending to hand over a missing scientist, instead pocketing the cash and blowing up a plane with him on board. With for the time suprising use of forensics, the CIA determines the man killed in the plane wasn’t the missing scientist and work out that he might well be getting sold on to China.

Camera footage taken of the plane crash scene points to mysterious underworld figure Tony (Horst Buccholz). Against her superior’s wishes, agent Kelly (Sylva Koscina) heads off to the titular city in pursuit, tracks down Tony with no great difficulty to his illegal gambling den just in time to witness the electronic miracle of the roulette wheels disappearing into the floor when the cops turn up. The electronic scam would have worked except for a drunken customer who demands his chips be cashed and the only way to silence him being for Tony to slug him and trigger a brawl.

Under the cover of which, Kelly sneaks into Tony’s office whereupon finding no evidence of either a million bucks or a missing scientist, she asks for a job. “Strip!” he demands. But that’s not for licentious reasons it transpires, but to examine the labels on her clothing, from which he and his henchmen deduce (I won’t bore you with the details but they do match up) she’s a plant.

However, she is the one, accidentally, to trip over the Chinese conspiracy, in, of all places, a cemetery. Eventually, she persuades Tony to help her out, although that’s for financial rather than patriotic reasons. She’s got a few tricks of her own up her sleeve, and under the guise of kissing him, steals his keys.

Kelly kind of fades in and out of the picture – which is a shame because she’s good value in a feisty seductive clever way – while all the chasing of opposing sets of criminals is down to Tony. First target being the man with the steel hand (though not the steel claw that in the old British comic The Valiant allowed him to become invisible).

The non-Chinese criminals are as likely to kill their own men to stop them coughing up. But mostly, Tony and his gang are stalking the two sets of criminals, Kelly mostly waiting in a car or popping up to ask questions, with Tony being driven off a mountainside, thrown off a tower, duelling underwater and avoiding a scalding in a sauna. But we’re talking the Houdini of spies and none better than when escape involves commandeering a bulldozer and ramping up over a bunch of vehicles (that idea’s got to have appeared in a later film, too).

Kelly’s the good kind of femme fatale, the spy who has to use her wiles to snare the bad (or badd-ish) guy. But she’s a rookie compared to Elizabeth (Perette Pradier) who leads Tony a merry dance by first of all pretending to be a victim.

But there’s style by the bucket load, clever reversals by the ton. There’s a marvellous scene where Tony knocks out a guy and then with nowhere to hide him props him up at a piano only to be undone when the fella slides over and hits the piano keys. Ever seen someone use the rolling coin distracting device. Or when the rope between two stanchions snaps mid-air casually sliding down the broken end. Or sex indicated by one person hanging their bathrobe over a door after the other person has done the same. Or the hero doing up a bikini top instead of undoing it. And a leading man who spends more time in a state of undress than any of the females. And, for good measure, a couple of times, and this very much in the contemproary idiom, breaking the fourth wall.

Once we get going it’s the kind of non-stop action we later equated with Taken (2008) or John Wick (2014). Horst Buchholz was never better, a brilliant light touch with the lines and good deal tougher with the fists. Sylva Koscina (A Lovely Way To Die, 1968) has less to do than you’d like once the rival femme fatale appears but she shows just how capable an actress she is in displaying in non-verbal fashion and in a three-shot of all things her jealousy.

If you’re familiar with Spanish director Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi from They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968) stick that to one side because this is way better. Screenplay by Giovanni Simonelli (Django Shoots First, 1966), Nat Wachsberger (Starcrash, 1978) and Luis Josep Comeron (They Came to Rob Las Vegas).

Great treat.

Actually, they didn’t. The thieves planned to pull off a heist of $7 million from a security truck as it travelled through the Nevada desert en route to Mexico. Las Vegas pops into the story every now and then, criminal mastermind Tony (Gary Lockwood) employed there as a croupier in order to romance the girlfriend Ann (Elke Sommer) of millionaire Steve (Lee J. Cobb) who owns the security business being targeted.

The picture’s overlong and a shade complicated but the robbery is terrific, if a bit unbelievable, while the ending is existential and almost Boorman-esque. It’s futuristic, too, with computers programming routes for security vehicles to make them harder to follow, pretty sophisticated visual communications for the era. The trucks are more like armored cars, tough as tanks, steel so thick it’s impervious to an oxy-acetylene cutter, and with machine guns mounted on the roof.

You’ll scarcely have heard of the director, Spaniard Antonio Isasi (That Man in Istanbul, 1965) whose career only spanned eight movies. And while you might be familiar with Gary Lockwood (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Elke Sommer (The Prize, 1963), Lee J. Cobb (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968), and Jack Palance (Once a Thief, 1965) who plays Douglas, an F.B.I. agent investigating Steve’s Mafia connections, you’ll struggle to keep tabs on the myriad other characters who flit in and out of what ends up as a four-way narrative.

So we start out with Tony’s brother (see, I told you it was complicated) who has bust out of jail and wants to go back to old-style heists that involve shoot-outs in the street, nostalgia getting the better of him as he winds up dead. Then we’ve got Steve who wants to quit the underworld. That seems to be a trope of the time, The Brotherhood (1968) and Stiletto (1969) going down a similar route. When the truck is hijacked, Steve comes under suspicion from his Mafia buddies, who reckon he’s looking for an easy way to fund his retirement.

Meanwhile, as well as the $7 million in legitimate cash, the truck is also carrying millions in Mafia loot to be laundered across the border in Mexico, a notion that’s already attracted the attention of Douglas and his team.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, Tony is carrying out some low-grade casino theft, as croupier dealing Ann some very helpful cards and topping up his salary to the tune of $400-$500 a day. Ann, who could as easily be water ski-ing or living the high life in Acapulco with the married Steve, still takes time out of the mistress gig to undertake her ordinary job at the security company’s head office where she is in charge of the seemingly mindless task of feeding route cards into the computer.

While this takes quite a while to get all the wheels in motion and the various sub-plots and characters to fall into line, when finally we get to the robbery, it’s a cracker. Though you might find yourself asking who was funding the heist, with its five-man crew, helicopter, flame-thrower, machine guns, plus what can only be described as a giant vault buried in the desert.

At first, the heist appears patently old-fashioned. Gangsters dressed as guards replace the real guards but once in the back of the truck they have neither access to the loot nor the driver’s cabin. No matter, they know where the truck is headed, out into the desert, where they have made the road impassable with heaps of sand and just in case that didn’t work shoot out a tyre. The flame thrower finishes the job.

Thomas Crown would be impressed by their planning for they have another tyre buried in the sand to swap for the useless one and they also have metal tracks that can be laid over the sand to ease passage. They need the tracks because the truck goes off-road over the top of a dune and is lowered into the vault while the rotary blades of the whirligig serve to cover the top with a layer of sand, returning the desert to its normal pristine condition.

But we’re far from finished. We still have betrayal, underground paranoia, Steve being stalked by Douglas, the Mafia getting uppity with Steve, Steve becoming suspicious of Ann, a hapless motorist caught in the crossfire, squads of cops and goons descending on the hijack spot, and Tony still having to work out how to open the unbreakable truck.

At times, the plot comes together with devastatingly simplicity, but at other times the various strands merely serve to blow the whole thing apart. None of the principals is on their A-game, most appearing overly stiff and clichéd, while you’re still trying to work who all these other characters are.

The heist itself is splendidly done and the twist ending worthy of comment. Most of the time it’s pretty watchable but what should be a relatively seamless narrative is undone by over-plotting.

While the time was ripe for an ingenious heist, the crime thriller had taken one of those periodic leaps into new territory, what with Point Blank (1967) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), so it was virtually impossible to accommodate a movie with so many narrative jumps, where motive was unclear, characters diffuse and the tone widely variable.

On the other hand, as I said, the heist had me enthralled and the twist ending had me intrigued.

Tag: Antonio isasi

That Man in Istanbul / Istanbul 65 (1965) ****

They Came To Rob Las Vegas (1968) ***