THE THREE FANTASTIC SUPERMEN (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Most "make-it-up-as-we-go-along" films turn out poorly, but at least the first entry in the "Fantastic Supermen" has a certain comic brio that sustains it even throughout the most nonsensical situations.

So the concept here is James Bond crossed with Superman, if Superman only got his bulletproof powers from his costume. FBI agent Brad McCallum (Brad Harris) learns about two acrobatic thieves who wear bulletproof uniforms during their crimes. Brad tracks down the twosome, who also sport the same names as the actors playing them, Tony (Tony Kendall) and Nick (Nick Jordan, though Jordan's original cognomen was Aldo Canti). Unlike the two super-handsome guys, Canti's character is kind of geeky as he's a mute who makes a lot of nonsensical gabbling sounds all through the film. Canti only played this role once, after which other actors played similar roles in subsequent "Supermen" flicks.

Once Brad gets the thieves' attention, he convinces them to work with him and the FBI to ferret out a counterfeiting conspiracy, in exchange for clemency. The cheery crooks agree and they either give Brad a spare costume or he makes his own, for in jig time they've become-- the Three Fantastic Supermen!

So they alternate between "James Bond mode," as they wear plain clothes and follow down clues, and "Superman mode," where they don their costumes, wade through bullets (since the costumes can apparently protect their heads), and get into lots of acrobatic fights. The film's quotient of beautiful women is more appropriate to a Eurospy film than a Euro-super flick, suggesting that Golem, the evildoer behind the counterfeiting plot, has better taste than the usual Euro-super villain.

Though it's unclear as to why Golem (portly Jochem Brockmann, very reminiscent of Gert Frobe's Goldfinger) builds his hideout under a children's orphanage, but it may be that the scripters just wanted to use kids in the film to lure in a kid-audience. Once the Supermen find their way to the hideout, it's revealed that Golem's counterfeiting is just the iceberg-tip. The villain possesses a universal duplicating machine that can make copies of anything, even living humans, and his sci-fi lab easily excels all of the evil lairs of other Eurospy villains put together. Perhaps inevitably, Golem even makes copies of the Supermen and makes them fight their real models-- though as a side-note, the copies degrade and turn into piles of gemstones.

There are a few choice lines here, as when Golem complains that one of the orphan-kids got in trouble because he got hold of a henchwoman's "laser-compact." There's a cute if pointless scene in which one of the heroes wanders into a gymnasium full of pretty women practicing judo and boxing, and though one woman (carrying around a short-handled whip for some unknown reason) calls them the "Acrobatic Resource Team" or something like that, the ladies never appear again. I also appreciated that even by the end of the film, Tony and Nick are still rogues. They make off with a bunch of cash from Golem's lair, and are only foiled because they realize it's all counterfeit.

I don't think the later SUPERMEN films are quite this lively, and I certainly don't remember any of them having as good a villain as Golem.