Man Man

Another genre of films that I find myself getting jaded with is the 1960s spy movie. Well, not so much the parodies that sprang up after Doctor No made James Bond a big hit, but the "serious" spy movies that made the whole spy business seem like a cynical and meaningless game. That view was reinforced when I recently watched The Double Man.

The movie opens up with a brief establishing sequence in Berlin, which of course at the time was a divided city. Somebody leaves the American sector into the East, and there's talk between some intelligence types that results in a dossier showing the photo of Dan Slater (Yul Brynner). Cut to Austria, and a young man dies in a skiing accident that anybody watching the movie even without having seen the box guide synopsis of the plot knows fully well isn't really an accent. That man is Dan's son Robert, and news naturally gets back to Dan.

Dan works in Washington for the CIA under Edwards (Lloyd Nolan). Dan goes to the Austrian Alps in part to fetch his son's body and belongings, and in part to find out what really happened, since he has good enough reason to believe that it might not have been an accident. Presumably the Soviets knew that this was Dan's son and that Dan is a higher-up in the CIA, making him valuable for, well, reasons. Edwards and all the other CIA people have reason that this is a trap, designed to get Dan to some out of the way place where he can be captured or something; the exact nature of the trap isn't necessarily known.

Dan gets to the Tirolean ski resort of St. Anton, which in this print doesn't look quite as nice as it probably should. He begins to ask around, and goes up in the cable car that took Robert on his last ride, where he finds lovely young Gina (Britt Ekland), who was apparenty in the cable car with Robert and a couple of mysterious men on that fateful morning. But Gina won't talk to Dan. They get out at the same stop to ski the same route, and there's a third person, an older man who seems to be watching Dan.

Dan eventually talks to Gina's boss, Mrs. Carrington, which is an in to Gina, and learns that there were two men on the cable car, that older man and one wearing a ski mask so nobody can learn his identity. Further investigation reveals that all of these people are still in town, which piques Dan's curiosity. In any case, he also knows it's likely a trap, but he needs to be able to break it whatever it is. Edwards, for his part, is getting more worried and wants Dan to return home immediately if not sooner.

Sure enough, it is a trap, and the trap is that the Soviets have found a man that they can give plastic surgery to to look just like Dan. (Didn't they think about fingerprints?) They'll lure Dan to the ski resort, where they can capture him and replace him with the doppelgänger whom they'll send back to Washington. Yeah right this is going to work. Dan certainly has enough secrets that the replacement couldn't possibly figure out in such a short time.

And that's one of the big problems with The Double Man. The plot is daft, and in the end we just don't care all that much about these characters. And as I said earlier, although a good portion of the movie was filmed on location, it just doesn't look pretty at all. So I'm sorry to say that The Double Man isn't as good as it probably ought to have been.