That time Blake Edwards made a Bond movie

Tomorrow (August 4) on TCM, Summer Under the Stars is honoring Julie Andrews. One of her films that I'd been wanting to see for a while shows up: The Tamarind Seed, at 12:45 PM. So I looked to see if I could watch it on one of the FAST streaming services, and both the Roku Channel and TubiTV had it, albeit with some commercial breaks.

The opening titles looked like they could be straight out of a James Bond movie, and sure enough, the titles were done by Maurice Binder. Not only that, but the score is by John Barry. Anyhow, after the opening credits, which clearly show the faces of the film's two stars: Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif, we get to the action, such as it is, with shots Judith Farrow (that's Julie Andrews) walking on a beach in Barbados and looking pensive. These are intercut with shots of a car going over a cliff, as well as Judith cutting off a relationship with her boyfriend Paterson, who is in fact married.

Staying at the same resort on Barbados in a bungalow next to Judith's is one Feodor Sverdlov (that's Omar Sharif, as if you couldn't tell). He's ostensibly on vacation here, but he's Soviet, and this is the 1970s, so you wonder whether that's actually the truth. And, as it turns out, he'd have a good non-vacation reason for being in Barbados in a bungalow next to Judith's. Judith works in the Home office with Ferguson, who would be a valuable source of information for the Soviets. Sverdlov, for his part, is a military attaché to General Golitsyn (Oscar Homolka) in the Soviet embassy in Paris. Judith would be a good target for someone like Sverdlov to try to "flip".

Now, the logical thing here would be for Judith to run screaming from a Soviet attaché, thinking that of course he's not there for any personal reason. But instead, the two decide to start having a relationship that each is going to insist is nothing but that, although of course everybody else would have good reason to insist is a major security risk. Indeed, when Judith gets back to London, she's met by spymaster Jack Loder (Anthony Quayle) and his assistant MacLeod. The spy agency already knows about the lengthy meetings between Judith and Sverdlov, and they tell her what to do in the cast that Sverdlov does try to flip her.

Sverdlov does eventually wind up trying to do it, although with a twist. He wants to keep seeing Judith, so he tells her that he's going to act like he's trying to get her to spy for the Soviets, since that's what everybody is expecting him to do. It also gives him an excuse to keep seeing her. But Sverdlov is beginning to get disillusioned. When he returned from Barbaros, he discovered that his personal assistant had been replaced and the one he had sent back to Moscow with an excuse of "exhaustion", which Sverdlov suspects really means that the previous assistant had been arrested and will implicate Sverdlov.

Back on the British side, Loder learns that MacLeod is having an affair with Mrs. Stephenson (Sylvia Syms), wife of a diplomat (Dan O'Herlihy). Somehow, something in this love triangle is resulting in information that really ought to be confidential winding up with the Soviets.

All of the plot strands in The Tamarind Seed eventually come together, but this isn't really like a Bond movie in that the Bond movies were better known for their action and gadgetry and whatnot. The Tamarind Seed is a lot closer to the dark and moody John le Carré-style spy movies from the late 1960s.

I think I've suggested before -- at least, I've certainly argued it having blogged about a couple of those more "serious" spy films like The Looking Glass War -- that this isn't my favorite genre, since the films tend to be too moody for their own good. Indeed, while I was watching The Tamarind Seed, I didn't think just about the Bond movies, but about another surprising comparison: Woody Allen's Interiors. If you haven't seen Interiors it's the film Allen made as an homage to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and the Bergmanesque nature of the film really shows. By the same token, The Tamarand Seed at times really feels like an homage to those "straight" 1960s spy films.

Having said that, I think The Tamarind Seed does what it does quite well, with Andrews and Sharif both giving good performances. It's just that, like a lot of movies in the genre, The Tamarind Seed takes it's own sweet time getting where it's going. If you like the serious spy genre, then you'll definitely like The Tamarind Seed.