Modesty Blaise

I've briefly mentioned the movie Modesty Blaise on a couple of occasions, I think most recently when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month and this was one of the movies that did not air during the tribute, it having been distributed by Fox. It happens to be back in the FXM rotation, and it airs again tomorrow, December 21, at 9:05 AM, so I watched it to do a review. (It will also be on early on Christmas Eve.)

The movie opens in Amsterdam with the sort of nonsense epsionage tropes common to movies of the era, such as ridiculous costumes and coded speech to deliver something through multiple middlemen. The eventually gets to a building in the city where presumably the final drop is supposed to happen, but instead the building is blown up, killing a British agent. Sir Gerald Tarrant (Harry Andrews), chief of the Her Majesty's Secret Service, is called in to discuss what to do next.

This bit of espionage involved diamond shipments to a Middle Eastern emirate in exchange for British firms getting the rights to drill the oil the emirate has. Sheik Abui Tahir (Clive Revill) it the former head of the country, and could be vital in getting back into power to secure those leases. He's also the foster father of a former supercriminal Modesty Blaise (Monica Vitti), who has allegedly gone into retirement. So a call is put out to her to see if she'll do the job and get those diamonds where they're supposed to go.

However, there's a catch. In order to come out of retirement, Modesty wants full immunity, and the ability to work with a former partner, Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp). One big issue, however, is that Willie is supposedly in South America, and will be difficult to find. Of course they do find him, and he joins the case.

However, there are powerful interests trying to stop the delivery of those diamonds. Since this is nominally a spy movie, there has to be a mastermind working from a secret lair. That's Gabriel (Dirk Bogard), together with psychotic killer Mrs. Fothergill (Rossella Falk) from his island lair somewhere in the Mediterranean. One running joke throughout the movie is that Gabriel wants to carry out his plans on a budget; after all, he didn't get wealthy by spending that much money.

But there's somebody else interested in stopping Modesty, which is Sir Gerald himself. Together with one of his agents Paul, who used to be a boyfriend of Modesty, they trail Modesty and Willie and try to mess up her plans. It's no skin off their teeth if Modesty and Willie meet their ends.

Modesty Blaise was based on a British comic strip that was first conceived in the wake of the earliest James Bond movie. As such, the production design has a very over-the-top look that certainly works in portraying the utter unrealisticness of the whole story. However, the movie as a whole got mixed reviews, and it's not hard to see why. The story itself is muddled and complicated, and a lot of the time it feels like the parts aren't working together as well as they did in the more coherent Sean Connery Bond movies. It's as though Modesty Blaise would predict the parody of itself that the Roger Moore Bonds tended towards. On the bright side, in addition to the production design it mostly looks as though the cast is having fun making this, especially Bogarde.

If you're looking for a spy spoof movie from the 1960s you haven't seen yet, Modesty Blaise isn't half bad. If you're looking for a tense Cold War spy movie, however, this isn't it.