The Assassination Bureau

I mentioned a week or two ago that a group blog I frequent has one member who posts "interesting" (read: usually schlocky fun) movies available on Tubi in a series of weekly posts so everybody can at least in theory watch the movies together in more or less real time. Althought the movies are mostly low-budget or so-bad-it's-good stuff, every now and then something that tickles his fancy for a different reason is the selection. This latter category certainly fit when he recommended The Assassination Bureau. Because of my work schedule, I usually don't watch the movies live with everyone else but later, if I watch them at all, so it was only recently that I finally got around to watching The Assassination Bureau.

An opening sequence that reminded me of everybody but John Mills and Ralph Richardson in the tontine at the beginning of The Wrong Box getting killed off in amusing ways shows us the actual bureau. It's operating in the first decade of the 20th century, and as its targets selects bad people who needed killing, although the selections are also nominated by people willing to pay a high enough price to have these targets killed.

Not quite fitting that model is Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg). She's an emancipated woman who can take on the world more or less on her own, and who has dreams of becoming a jorurnalist, and she has just the story. She approaches newspaper publisher Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas) with her story idea, which is to infiltrate the Assassination Bureau and write a shocking exposé about it. But she needs the money to nominate someone for killing. Bostwick actually agrees to the idea, although as we're going to find out later he's got his own reasons for liking the idea.

Sonya goes through the sort of spy stuff necessary to meet with somebody from the Bureau, and eventually meets the head of the Bureau and son of the founder, Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed). Sonya's proposal is a shocking one: the person she wants killed is none other than Ivan himself! Ivan accepts the proposal, mostly because he's got an idea of his own, which is to dare the rest of his colleagues to either try to kill him or else be killed themselves. And we learn that Lord Bostwick is the second-in-command at the Bureau. If Dragomiloff gets killed, then it's Bostwick who becomes the new head of the Bureau.

Of course, all of this is also dangerous for Sonya, as they'd like to kill her lest the story about the Bureau be published in the newspapers. So it winds up being Dragomiloff and Sonya on one side, and the rest of the Bureau on the other side. Dragomiloff and Sonya have to make a run for it, eventually working together as they make their way across Europe to Paris, Switzerland, and Venice among others.

Meanwhile, when Dragomiloff was in Vienna, yet another assassination attempt went wrong. While previous assassination attempts might have backfired and killed the member of the Bureau trying to kill Dragomiloff, this one kills a Franz Ferdinand-like archduke, which means that it's a killing that threatens to plunge Europe into a World War, which they haven't yet had at the time the movie is set. European heads of state, many related to one another anyway, decide to hold a secret peace conference to try to stave off war. But Bostwick and company learn about the conference, and attempt to bom the conference from a zeppelin, beheading Europe's leaders in one fell swoop and starting that war! Dragomiloff and Sonya have to stop it.

The Assassination Bureau is another of those movies where it's easy to see why people would really get a kick out of it. It's stylish, and it's pretty much non-stop entertainment. But I have to be honest that it wasn't just the beginning of the movie that reminded me of The Wrong Box. Both of them are period pieces clearly influenced by the late 1960s era in which they were made, and both of them have something about them that just feels slightly off to me. It's not that I didn't like the movies; it's more that I can see why other people will love The Assassination Bureau while I only liked it. Still, it's definitely worth a watch.