DOUBLE AGENT 73 (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I'll start by picking on the title of this infamous dog. Yes, everyone knows that that the "73" denotes the size of the knockers sported by star Chesty Morgan, and I suppose the "double" is thrown in to remind the intended audience that there were a whole *TWO* 73-inch breasts on display throughout much of this micro-budgeted production.

But the exploitative title provides more amusement than most of the script for AGENT, co-written by director Doris Wishman. A "double agent" is expressly a agent of one government who infiltrates another such agency, pretending to be loyal to the second group while actually funneling intel back to the agent's original employer. But that's not the case with Morgan's character Jane Tennay (IMDB claims it's Jean Genet, which I think must be someone's inside joke, but probably not Doris Wishman's). Jane is just an "agent." Her employers want to find out who's smuggling in drugs with aid from the Communists, so they give Jane a list of suspects. The entire plot involves Jane going from place to place and becoming acquainted with the suspects in order to suss out their criminal endeavors. In practice, though, Jane always fails to fool her targets, and there's some violence, with Jane managing to kill her opponents. Frankly, it would have made more sense if Jane's agency had just directed her to kill off all these crooked types, since she ends up playing the role of assassin anyway.

But if she was just an assassin, she wouldn't have need the gimmick that obliges Jane to expose her mammoth mammaries every 15 minutes. The agency somehow sticks a mini-camera into her boobs, and every time she kills or at least incapacitates a foe, she takes his picture with her tit-cam. Again, the info doesn't really seem to do the agency much good when they get it at picture's end, and certainly doesn't justify the bosses installing a self-destruct device in the camera, one that will destroy the evidence and keep Jane from falling into enemy hands. To be sure, Jane returns to her bosses before this happens, but she does not seem to resent the strategy in any way.

Wishman's gimmicks, by the way, were the only thing that interested me in reviewing this dull flick. Her tit-cam doesn't qualify as a diabolical device, but her cut-rate arsenal-- including am exploding lipstick and a spiked earring she can fling to kill an opponent, as with a shuriken-- certainly make the grade. She even has what appears to be an "acetylene ring," for when she's tied up in her last encounter with the main villain, she uses *something* to burn off her ropes. These weapons are the only things that mark Jane as a combative type, for there's no indication that Jane can fight. To be sure, no one else in the movie can fight either-- and that's probably because the exigencies of fight choreography would have strained the film's budget. (Jane does stun a guy by hitting him with a tit, though.) 

But there's no similar excuse for the banal dialogue, or for Wishman's over-reliance on extreme close-ups to cover for the fact that so little is happening. The sex scenes are brief and mediocre, as if Wishman was convinced that the near-constant display of the Size 73's was her film's only selling-point. She showed the same attitude in her only other film with Morgan, the earlier DEADLY WEAPONS, which I'll probably never review because it was even duller than AGENT, not to mention purely naturalistic. Of course, no one in the movie can act worth a damn, but since Morgan is the star, her deficiencies take center stage. Further, her sagging boobs aren't likely to inspire lust in any but the most breast-fixated. 

It's a shame that there were never that many female superspies in cinema, but Chesty Morgan adds nothing to their ranks. AGENT isn't amusing enough to be "so bad it's good," but I suppose it's interesting to wonder why Wishman undertook such a project. I still haven't fully evaluated her repertoire, but AGENT will probably add little luster to any such analysis.