Zowie!

Another movie that's coming up on TV that I have on my DVR is Our Man Flint, the first of the two Derek Flint movies. (The sequel, In Like Flint, was the subject of a January 2022 post.) Our Man Flint is on FXM tomorrow, June 2, at 11:10 AM.

Unfortunately, the movie, outside of the credits, is panned and scanned, as although the opening says it's a Cinemascope movie, the print FXM aired was in 16:9 and not the 2.35:1 Cinemascope ratio. That card is followed by a pre-credits sequence showing a bunch of weather-related disasters happening all over the world, and a bunch of international spy bosses led by Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) discussing what to do. They program their supercomputer, for some values of super since this was almost 60 years ago and the computer was probably no better than today's smartphones if that, which spits out a punchcard with the name Derek Flint.

Derek Flint, played by James Coburn, is a retired spy, now with a bevy of women he presumably collected from his spy days the way James Bond had one conquest after another. Cramden, and the rest of his spy organization ZOWIE (Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage), want Flint to investigate and figure out the source of all the disasters, and stop whoever is behind it since this clearly isn't natural. But already, whatever organization is behind it is also aware that ZOWIE is trying to bring Flint out of retirement. Two Marines outside Cramden's office are in fact enemy agents, which Flint could somehow tell just because one patch on their uniform is bogus. Yeah right.

The next clue Flint gets is even nuttier. At a restaurant, the enemy woman Gila (Gila Golan) -- because a movie like this always has to have one -- has infiltrated the restaurant's band, where she takes the part of the harpist and plans to use one of the harp strings as a bow with a poisoned arrow she'll shoot at Flint. But she hits Cramden who is able to get the poison out of Cramden and determine from residue on it that whoever fired the arrow must have been in Marseilles, France. Really.

The next clue takes him to Rome, looking for cold cream, and he finally finds Gila's company at a place called Exotica. This is, of course, a front, which is eventually going to lead to Galaxy Island, the secret lair of the evil organization Galaxy. There, a team of scientists (Benson Fong, Rhys Williams, and Peter Brocco) has learned how to control the weather. They claim to wish to use this for good, but they need to stop the governments of the world that have militaries and, horror of horrors, are using nuclear power. So they use their climate control device to cause disasters and ransom the governments of the world.

After the success of the James Bond movies, especially Goldfinger, studios wanted to come up with special agents of their own, replete with gadges, exotic locations, and pretty women. Most of the movies, however, were conceived as spoofs of the Bond phenomenon. Some of the spoofs work better than others. But for me, Our Man Flint was not one of them. The bad guys are just too stupid to have gotten where they did, and the spoof aspect isn't particularly funny here. The production also looks a lot cheaper than the James Bond movies. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.