SPY TODAY, DIE TOMORROW (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

This minor Italian-Spanish-German flick, while not actually good, is at least diverting at times in comparison to the most routine programmers in the Eurospy subgenre. 

For a start, it boasts three weird titles. The original German title, seen above, translates to "Mister Dynamite--Tomorrow Death Kisses You" and was meant to highlight the movie's connection to a popular series of German spy novels, whose hero sports the nickname "Mister Dynamite." (In the novels his real name is "Karl Urban," the same as the modern New Zealand actor, but SPY changes the character's first name to "Bob.") For the UK the title became "Die Slowly, You'll Enjoy It More," which really sounds like something the Italians would have come up with. (Some dubber liked the title so much, they had three separate characters in the film repeat the sentence as a catchphrase.) Apparently SPY is the title for continental Europe.

So, in shameless imitation of THUNDERBALL, a secret oiganization, headed by one Bardo Baretti (Amedeo Nazzari), apparently steals an atomic bomb and wants a payoff not to detonate it in some U.S. city. So far, so ordinary. Yet when we first see Bardo, he's certainly not acting like a normative spy-chief. He gets angry at his current girlfriend for leaving their house without his permission, kicks her out permanently, and then-- lies down on the floor and wraps a rug around his body, as if retreating to the womb. I confess I found this one scene a real hoot, even though the script never elaborates upon it. Bardo also plays with model trains in his office, suggesting that he's a few bricks short of a load.

The U.S. military doesn't seem much better off. Several uniformed men sit around a table, discussing how their computer systems have claimed that one of their bombs is missing. No one thinks to ask if the employees of the unnamed nuclear installation have verified the absence of a bomb; they just take the computer's word for the matter. This will have consequences later for the plot, such as it is, later.

Bob Urban (former Tarzan Lex Barker) is sent out to turn over various stones and ferret out the blackmailers. Like every other sixties spy, he first has to meet with some goofy version of Bond's "Q," who tries to fob off weird weapons on the agent-- none of which he uses. The tech guy describes two weapons but doesn't show them in operation. He also described a pill that produces a big smokescreen, then for some reason starts to swallow it, spits it out and creates a big smoke-cloud in his lab. The director plays this scene for obvious laughs and therefore it's not as funny as the intro of Bardo.

Like every other Eurospy, Urban begins wandering around various cities, getting into fights until eventually Bardo sends henchmen to pick him up. Prior to this, a mysterious girl named Lu (Maria Perschy) ingratiates herself with Bardo and almost immediately becomes one of the henchpersons, for she also helps Bardo's men capture Urban by coming on to the heroic operative. But since she's the only major female character in the story-- with just two other minor ones tossed in for quick effect-- Lu starts out a bad girl and is later revealed to be a good one in disguise.

It's soon apparent that director/co-writer Franz Josef Gottlieb is really only interested in the comic scenes, for all the fights and gun-battles are tossed out with an air of, "this is the stuff the punters came for, so here it is." There are various pointless scenes in which Urban teams up with a CIA agent played by Euro-favorite Brad Harris, and these seem designed just to burn time. Urban's not much better with the sexual conquest scenes, either. At one point, in the middle of his assignment, he takes a blonde girl to the beach for some sun and fun, and then gets called back to the job. Somehow one suspects the hero's conviction for his noble purpose is lacking.

There are two elements of the denouement which are, like the Bardo intro, not really good but are a little unexpected. First, Urban figures out that the threat of nuclear blackmail has been a huge bluff; that Bardo had an inside agent falsify the computer's findings-- making it even stupider that the military guys never checked their missile silos. Second, though Urban has a final shootout with the inside agent, Bardo does what no other evil mastermind has ever done in a Eurospy flick-- he escapes. He's last seen having donned military garb, which allows him to commandeer a car from some soldiers and simply drive off. Two explanations occur to me. One: the version I saw is missing a big climactic scene. Two-- because the producers hoped to launch a series of "Mister Dynamite" films-- they may have thought they'd have Bardo appear in one of the next movies, movies which never got made. Since I know nothing of the book series, it's even possible that Bardo might be a recurring villain therein, and that Gottlieb simply adapted the character's weird behavior patterns from a book source.

Most of Gottlieb's other directorial efforts didn't receive English dubbing or subbing, and so it looks like this was his only Eurospy film. However, he did direct three earlier "Krimis," and in my review of SECRET OF THE BLACK WIDOW, I noted that the performers were allowed to "camp things up." So maybe Gottlieb was like the American serial director James Horne, who frequently injected baggy-pants comedy into theoretically serious adventures.

One last phenomenality matter: THUNDERBALL sustains the trope of the "bizarre crime" by having its villains steal a real nuclear bomb. In this case, the mere pretense to such a crime does not satisfy that trope, but it does rate as a "phantasmal figuration."