In Like Flint

One of the movies that's been showing up in the FXM rotation recently that I haven't blogged about before is In Like Flint. It's got a few more airings on the FXM schedule, tomorrow (Jan. 26) at 9:20 AM and Thursday, Jan. 27 at 6:00 AM. So recently I watched it in order to do a post on it here.

A year before this movie, Fox had released Our Man Flint, which was apparently a hit, so this sequel went into production, which would explain why there are things that aren't explained. James Coburn plays semi-independent secret agent Derek Flint, although we don't see him for a bit. Instead, the movie starts with the other parts of the story. There's a luxury spa called Fabulous Face in the Virgin Islands that caters to a certain class of women, although it's a front for the women in charge, headed by Lisa (Jean Hale). They go to watch a rocket launch, which puts a new space platform into outer space, overseen by Lloyd Cramden (Lee J. Cobb), head of the spy agency ZOWIE. The women then discuss putting "Operation Duffer" into effect.

Cramden, who received a congratulatory call from the President (Andrew Duggan), is invited by the President to a round of golf. However, the women of Fabulous Face have developed some sort of gas that stops time for people within a small radius, which gives them just enough time to gas the President and Cramden, and replace the President with a lookalike. Cramden, fortunately, had been using his stopwatch, which isn't stopped by the gas, so when he comes to he realizes that three minutes have passed that he can't account for.

This leads Cramden to call Flint, who apparently used to work for ZOWIE although I haven't seen the first Flint movie. The need for Flint's services becomes greater after Lisa, again in disguise, meets Cramden at a restaurant and drugs him so that she can frame him cavorting with hookers. This gets him relieved of his duties at ZOWIE, which is just what Cramden's second in command, General Carter (Steve Ihnat), wants. Carter has been planning, with the help of the women running Fabulous Face, to arm the space platform with nuclear missiles; the ability to rain death from the sky is obviously one that would change the world balance of power.

However, that's only part of what the women of Fabulous Face want. Lisa and the others, including Elisabeth (Anna Lee), have determined that women have been running a lot of things in the background, either as wives running households or secretaries keeping businesses running smoothly. Men have been messing things up long enough that perhaps it's time for women to run the place. And to help things along, the hair dryers at Fabulous Face are equipped with subliminal messages to get the women to go there to vote for only women, hastening the positioning of women into places of real power.

Eventually Flint and Cramden both figure out independently that something is going on down in the Virgin Islands, since the rocket launch site is there, and each of them makes his way down to Fabulous Face. But while the women have one idea, Gen. Carter has another, and might be able to use the fake president to do his bidding instead of the women's.

After the success of Dr. No in 1962, the sort of heroic spy movie where the spy has the latest in equipment became something ripe for parody. Derek Flint is surrounded by a bevy of beautiful (but apparently intelligent too) women as his assistants, and seems to be able to do anything he wants expertly, from ballet to evading a bunch of Gen. Carter's men at ZOWIE headquarters.

Unfortunately, In Like Flint seemed to me as though it couldn't decide how serious it wanted to be, and how much a parody it wanted to be. The three-way conflict is an interesting one, and there are some very humorous scenes, most notably with Lee J. Cobb in drag to get into the Fabulous Face resort. But most of the time it felt more like Cobb and Flint had been put into a sequel for perfunctory reasons, and nobody was certain how to catch lightning in a bottle again. Perhaps if I had watched Our Man Flint first I would have gotten more out of In Like Flint.