Irma the Sweet

TCM ran a night of Shirley MacLaine's films not too long ago. One of the films they ran then but that I hadn't posted on before is coming up again: Irma La Douce, tomorrow (June 10) at noon.

A narrator (apparently an uncredited Louis Jourdan) tells us about a particular working-class section of Paris that's up all night as opposed to some of the more well-to-do parts; the reason it never sleeps is because, well, the women there sleep for money. (OK. Sorry for the terrible pun.) Intersperesed throughout the opening credits is one such prostitute, Irma (Shirley MacLaine), whom we see giving different clients different reasons on why she became a prostitute.

The prostitutes are able to ply their trade mostly because the cop that patrols the beat looks the other way. Well, at least he looks the other way for a price, being on the take. He goes to the café run by Moustache (Lou Jacobi), where a lot of the prostitutes and their pimps, including Irma's pimp Hippolyte, gather; it's there that the cop gets his bribes paid. At least, until the police commanders go through the regular schedule of assigning rookie cops to their beats.

Nestor (Jack Lemmon) has been assigned to this particular part of Paris, and he's a decidedly honest cop. But one who's also a bit of a naïf, as he seems to believe Irma's excuses when he asks her about what she does. When he figures out what the women do, he has a whole bunch of them arrested and taken down to the station. Things don't go quite the way Nestor expects, however, as somebody higher up apparently wants to use the prostitutes as a safety valve. Nestor gets framed for bribery and summarily fired.

And yet, Nestor decides he's going to return to the neighborhood where everything went wrong. Then, in a wacky twist, he becomes friens with Irma, and tries to "save" her from her pimp. He does, but at a price of becoming a kept man. He moves in with Irma, but she insists that it's unbecoming for a prostitute not to be able to support herself, or even the man she's with. She very much believes that Nestor shouldn't have a job.

So Nestor comes up with a bizarre scheme of his own. He'll take an overnight job at the butcher's market, while also coming up with an alter ego, the British "Lord X". As Lord X, he'll become the sole client of Irma, with the money he makes at the meat market going to pay for Lord X's dalliances with Irma. Of course, Hippolyte is still in the background, and Irma wonders why Nestor is always so tired. And Nestor has not yet thought of a way to end this scheme. The way he picks, however, doesn't quite work....

It's a wonder how director Billy Wilder was able to get Irma La Douce made, since the Production Code was still in effect, even though it was beginning to weaken. It's based on a French stage musical, and you can see why Wilder would have liked the material, although the songs were more or less excised from the movie. (My understanding is that composer André Previn's musical themes here are based on the songs from the musical, but there's no singing of note.)

However, Irma La Douce is a bit of a one-joke movie, and unlike Some Like It Hot where the joke is only stretched to two hours, and the joke doesn't really begin until a good 20-30 minutes in, Irma La Douce runs over 140 minutes and the joke gets staler much more quickly. It also doesn't help that both Lemmon and MacLaine seem a bit miscast here. They both try hard and are definitely professional, but I'm sorry to say that Irma La Douce is not one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies.

Touched by a Mink

Many years back, well before I started the blog, I saw the Cary Grant/Doris Day romantic comedy That Touch of Mink. I never got to blog about it, so when Cary Grant was TCM's Star of the Month and they got the rights to show it, I recorded it in order that I could finally watch it again to do a blog post on it.

Under the opening credits, we get to meet both Grant and Day's characters. Grant is Philip Shayne, an executive who rides through Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine. Day plays Cathy Timberlake, an unemployed computer operator in the days when computers meant punch-card programming and a device that took up a whole room. As she's on her way to the unemployment office, Philip's limousine accidentally drives through a puddle, splasing it all over Cathy and ruining her outfit. He wants to make it up to her, so sends his executive assistant Roger (Gig Young) out to try to find her.

Cathy, meanwhile, is facing trouble at the unemployment office, as the man in charge of her case, Beasley (John Astin) keeps putting the moves on her, which is thoroughly unprofessional and should have gotten him fired even in those days, let alone today. She lives with her best friend Connie (Audrey Meadows), who works at the Automat across the street from Shayne's office. So it's only natural that Shayne is going to see Cathy on the street and get Roger to talk to her.

Both of them would like to show Philip what-for, so Roger brings Cathy up to the office. However, Cathy is so totally taken by Philip that it's love at first sight for her. And it's similarly love at first sight for Philip. And since he's fabulously wealthy, he's able to take Cathy all over the place and do things that no mere mortal could do, like get Cathy into the dugout at a Yankees baseball game, which is an excuse for cameos for a couple of the Yankees' stars of the day.

But it's fairly quickly that Cathy realizes the relationship is getting serious, which means the possibility of sex -- and sex outside of marriage is a somewhat controversial thing for the early 1960s. Cathy is beginning to think she'd rather be married. At the same time, Cathy and Philip's friends are having misunderstandings of their own, with Connie still wondering whether Philip is taking advantage of her, while Roger seeing an analyst who completely gets the situation wrong.

Cathy finally comes to the conclusion that she's going to have to force the issue. She goes back to Beasley, and gets him to take her out in such a way that Philip will absolutely find out and do whatever it takes to win her back, leading to a climax that is madcap and more reminiscent of the old screwball comedies, with an ending that satisfies the Production Code.

That Touch of Mink is a physically pretty movie to watch, with lovely color showing off early 1960s design as it actually was (more or less), and not the idealized view people today have of the Kennedy era. As for the story, it feels really dated, and I hate to say that both Cary Grant and Doris Day are much too old for their roles. They do the best they can, and they're both still appealing as actors, but at times I can't help but want to reach through the screen and smack the writers.

But the appeal of Grant and Day makes That Touch of Mink a passable enough movie with flaws that some people are going to find easier to overlook than I did.

Woman Chases Man

Recently, while browsing through the Roku Channel (I really hate that name, since there's a bunch of channels in addition to all the streaming stuff) app, I was alerted to a new-to-me movie that sounded interesting, with a cast including several old stars whose movies I tend to enjoy, so I watched it. That movie was Woman Chases Man.

Kenneth Nolan (Joel McCrea) is a wealthy young man on a transatlantic liner coming home from Europe, about to surprise his fahter B.J. (Charles Winninger) when he gets home with the news that he's about to pop the question to Nina (Leona Maricle, and if you haven't heard that name before that might be a sign as to which character Kenneth will wind up with in the final reel) Tennyson. However, Dad surprises him first, with a collect radio call to the liner (in the days when this sort of thing would have been monstrously expensive) asking for money. However, Kenneth has heard it before.

Meanwhile, waiting outside B.J.'s office are a bunch of process servers. B.J. is no longer rich; his late wife had half of the couple's money, and when she died, she made certain the son got half of it so he'd have something to start on and so that B.J. wouldn't spend it all. B.J. isn't a bad guy; it's just that he has a habit of picking hare-brained inventions that won't work in real life and wind up costing him a bunch of money. The latest scheme, at least, doesn't sound so bad: a property development of planned houses for the lower social classes, to be called Nolan Heights. But he needs $100,000 to keep the creditors at bay.

Not knowing this is Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins). She goes to the building here B.J.'s office is along with a letter of introduction telling Nolan that she's an architect who would be good for the Nolan Heights project. Not that she has any clue that Nolan doesn't have the money to hire her, or anybody else, on. However, her moxie is able to drive the process servers away so the elder Nolan is going to see her. She faints, being in as bad a financial state as B.J. is and not having eaten in two days.

All this gives Dad an idea. Virginia should use her feminine wiles on Kenneth to get him to propose to her, or at least to sign a check for that $100,000 that Dad needs. That latter isn't going to be so easy, since as I said earlier Kenneth has seen all of the schemes up close and seen his father fritter away his money. Kenneth isn't about to let him blow the other half of the money that Mom had when she died. The former -- getting Kenneth to fall in love -- isn't going to be easy either, since as we know Kenneth is bring his girlfriend home with him.

Except that we eventually learn Nina isn't wealthy, and the "Uncle" Henri she's traveling with is really her boyfriend. She's just a gold-digger. And, since we know who the two leads are, we know where it's all going to go. As is so often the case with a movie like Woman Chases Man, the movie is more about how the characters get where we all know they're going.

Unfortunately, Woman Chases Man is one of the weaker screwball comedies I've seen. The situations are even phonier than in most screwball comedies, and the characters are almost all people it's hard to have sympathy with, the possible exception being Kenneth. But even he does a 180 just in time for the final reel. Of note, as a friend of Virginia's pressed into service as a butler, is a young Broderick Crawford.

Woman Chases Man isn't a particularly good movie. But at least it's mercifully short. And the print Roku showed had relatively few commercials -- I think 8½ minutes for a 70-minute movie. Traditional cable channels would probably have had 20 minutes.

Cornelius Ryan

Today is June 6, which is of course the anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and this year it's an exact number of decades. So TCM is running a day full of films about the invasion. One that was sitting on my DVR was The Longest Day, airing at 11:00 PM. So with that in mind I watched it to do a post in conjunction with tonight's showing.

The Longest Day is based upon the book by military historian Cornelius Ryan, a man who wrote sprawling epics trying to cover World War II battles from a multitude of angles, his other famous book turned into a movie being A Bridge Too Far (that one is also on my DVR because it has former Star of the Month Dirk Bogarde in the cast). But Ryan's books tried to present things in as factual a way as possible; they're not historical or military fiction.

As a result, the film version of The Longest Day is also mostly a docudrama on an extremely grand scale. A very large cast (named only at the end) portrays the invasion from the point of view of the Americans, British, French, and the Germans. In fact, it starts off a few days or weeks before the invasion. The Nazis knew full well that the Allies were going to be invading on the western front, although the key question was where. The most obvious place to invade would be across the Pas-de-Calais/Strait of Dover as that's the closest point on the Continent to England. With that in mind, the Allies knew that this was also going to be the most heavily fortified area, which is why they thought about invading somewhere farther west despite the English Channel being wider there.

The preparations for the invasion were meticulous and complicated. Soldiers were getting antsy having to sit around in the UK and wait. But at the same time, there was the question of whether to invade in bad weather; rough seas seems like a major no-no for an amphibious invasion and the Nazis knew this. Indeed the Nazis as portrayed here all seemed surprised that the Allies hadn't invaded in May.

Additionally, the invasion is personalized somewhat by having some of the smaller parts of the invasion focused on, such as the need to take and hold a particular bridge or how paratroopers were dropped in on the night between June 5 and 6 before the beach landings at dawn. And then when the landing does come, the Americans under Brig. Gen. Cota (Robert Mitchum) get bogged down on Omaha; it's vital that they break through for the invasion as a whole to succeed.

As we know from history, the invasion did succeed. But does the movie succeed? For the most part, I'd say yes. The screenplay does a good job of explaining everything that's going on without being too dry or didactic. Not having opening credits apart from one title card showing the title of the picture is also a big plus; there are so many big-name actors here that looking for them all from the credits would be a bit distracting. Coming off best is probably John Wayne, who I think has the biggest role as a commander of paratroopers. The wordless look of horror on his face when he sees those paratroopers who died because they were off course and parachuted right into town says more than any dialogue (and John Wayne's delivery isn't the most helpful in that regard) does.

Others who have smaller roles are Henry Fonda and Edmond O'Brien as American generals; Richard Burton as an RAF man; Curd Jürgens as a German chief of staff; and many many more. A lot of the Americans only get one or two scenes, while there are fewer Germans so all those actors get more screen time.

Where The Longest Day doesn't always work, however, is in the pacing. The subject is sprawling, and there's not really enough done either with the subplots or anything to narrow it down. The result is that of a relentless slowness. I understand that the invasion itself took a long time, but cinematically it feels like a whole lot of the same thing happening and not ending, especially once we hit June 6.

Overall, however, The Longest Day is a very well-made movie and one that, if you haven't seen before, you really should.

King of Hockey

For those of you who are ice hockey fans, the Stanley Cup finals are coming up soon. With that in mind, I watched the movie King of Hockey.

The Violets are the champions of one of the minor leagues, since Warner Bros. couldn't use the NHL and the league didn't have much popularity outside of Canada anyway. So the Violets are barnstorming in the offseason to make money, taking their talents to one of the colleges that is rather a surprise to have a hockey team at all since Warner Bros. probably filmed a building in Los Angeles, if not something on the backlot, that looks like it has the sort of tree not suitable for a school with long winters.

Anyhow, the star of the college hockey team is Gabby Dugan (Dick Purcell), playing in what he thinks is his final game since he's planning to hang up his skates after college and make the real money selling bonds, something that very obviously dates this movie if you couldn't figure that out already. It being the mid-1930s and there still being a Depression on, lots of 20-something men thought they too could sell bonds, so Gabby isn't able to get him a good job. That makes him go crawling back to Trotter (Joseph Crehan), coach of Violets, looking for that job that Trotter had suggested was open.

Gabby rooms with Jumbo (Wayne Morris), and on their day off from the team, they decide to go to a commercial ice rink, because Jumbo knows that's where a hockey player meets the classy women. Jumbo meets young Peggy "Princess" O'Rourke, there taking skating lessons and escorted by her adult sister Kathleen (Anne Nagel). Gabby meets Kathleen and for him it's love at first sight, although for her it's just a nice day out and fun to meet a hockey player, but that's the end of it. At least until Peggy suggests the family go see a hockey game since none of them have ever done so before.

Meanwhile, professional gambler Nick Torga (George Stone) has been betting on hockey, and losing by betting against Gabby. He gets the brilliant idea to have Gabby, if not throw games, at least do the hockey equivalent of basketball point-shaving and take penalties that will keep him off the ice. Gabby sees Kathleen sitting behind the penalty box, so he decides he will in fact take an inordinate number of penalties so he can hit on her, not because of anything Nick wanted. But Nick sees the penalties and expects Gabby to keep doing Nick's business.

Jumbo is no dummy, and since he knows Gabby talked to Torga, he thinks Gabby is on the take too. Jumbo is ticked, and gets in a fight with Gabby that concusses Gabby and affects his eyesight. This combined with the dalliances with a professional gambler get Gabby kicked off the team, after which he goes blind. Except that it's one of those forms of movie blindness that can be totally cured, if only the victim gets "an operation".

King of Hockey is one of those ultra-B movies under an hour long. So there's not much of a story here, at least not much original. And not exactly a stellar cast, either. It's all fairly dumb stuff, but at the same time a fairly good example of the genre of movies even more B than the studio stuff that ran in the 60-70 minute range. And at least Wayne Morris got to go on to supporting roles in A movies.

TCM "Star" of the Month June 2024

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, we don't get one star. Instead, TCM is putting the spotlight on Fox and a bunch of the contract players who became stars. Every Tuesday in prime time, TCM will be highlighting them, a whole bunch of stars with most of them getting one or maybe two films.

I'm sorry to say I'm not the biggest fan of this, as I feel it would be better if some of them could get a real tribute. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was more difficult for TCM to get the rights to a bunch of films from one star, since some of those would be rather lesser-known movies.

Anyhow, looking at the lineup, Shirley Temple kicks things off tonight with Bright Eyes, which is a movie that I love although it's more for the presence of Jane Withers who's tremendous as the child villain of the piece. There's also The Gang's All Here, which has Carmen Miranda and some absolutely ridiculous musical numbers from Busby Berkeley.

Linda Darnell is one of the people who gets a pair of movies, both of those coming on June 11. Even Marilyn Monroe only gets one (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on June 18). On June 25, there's the 1933 version of State Fair, which is listed for Janet Gaynor, although it's as much of a vehicle for Will Rogers, who really deserves to be mentioned more as one of Fox's early stars. (And speaking of Rogers, I still have that box set that I'll finally start getting through the rest of now that I've got the upstairs Blu-ray player and can watch movies any time without being disturbed.

Indián történet

I finally purched a larger TV for my upstairs bedroom several weeks back, and then a week or two ago got around to picking up a Blu-ray player to plug into it. No 4K player yet; I don't have any discs in that format. Anyhow, one of the Blu-ray box sets I picked up recently is a four-disc set of some of the films of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, a name that I have to admit was completely new to me. I took out one of the discs and popped it in the player, ready to watch a short so that I'd have a quick review in the hopper for one of those days where there's also something else worth mentioning. That short was Indian Story.

As I said, I didn't know anything about Jancsó going into this, so I had no idea what to expect. The short has the visual look of a Ken Burns miniseries: much of the visuals are of stills that the camera pans over to give the illusion of motion, first of New York City and then of the Old (American) West, since the "Indian" of the title does in fact refer to American Indians/Native Americans. The movie was made in 1961 and is also referred to as a newsreel; apparently Jancsó made a bunch of newsreel-like movies at the beginning of his career. Of course, 1961 was not only during the Communist era, but also not long after the failed uprising of 1956 that was a reference of a couple of Hollywood movies, most notably The Journey which I don't think I've ever actually blogged about.

That date means there's definitely some propaganda. The short basically tells how Europeans went west, encountering the various Indian tribes who at first tried to consider the white man friendly. But as we know, the white man took over the whole continent, leaving the various tribes to reservations where they feel subjugated, nearly wiped out, and unable to hold on to their traditional culture. Jancsó definitely makes clear in the narration (I don't know whether it's his voice or a professional voiceover person and I don't think the credits mention it) that the western Europeans are the villain here, although there's not anything mentioned about Communism. So I can't help but think something like this was a "safe" subject for a director early in his career to do a short on. There aren't much in the way of non-Hungarian minorities in Hungary, so I don't think it could have been seen as an allegory to any sort of Communist mistreatment of ethnic minorities either.

Does it say anything about Jancsó as a director? I haven't watched any of the narrative films yet, so I can't comment on that. Eventually, I'll get around to the other movies in the set, at which point I'll have more to say. As for the physical nature of the set, something I like to discuss whenver I mention a new-to-me box set, it's in a traditionally sized Blu-ray case with separate spindles for each disc (four in all), although it's two inserts with spindles on either side of the insert. There are also brief liner notes courtesy of Martin Scorsese, and commentary audio for the features; again not having watched any of the features yet I haven't heard those and so can't comment on them.

Ill Met By Moonlight

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last September, and it's taken me a while for me to get around to all of his movies that I put on the DVR. But we're getting close to the end of them, with one that I haven't mentioned yet being the World War II movie Ill Met By Moonlight. (TCM had it on the schedule as Night Ambush, but that was the title on the original American relese and, according to Wikipedia, the original US release was cut by about 10 minutes. The print TCM ran was the running time of the British version, and had the title card Ill Met By Moonlight.)

A bit of opening narration tells us how Crete is an ancient island in the Mediterranean Sea, but that in World War II it was occupied by the Nazis. Some of the Cretans joined the underground, but they were also joined by some other islanders, those being from the island of Britain. One of the Brits is a man named Maj. Patrick Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde). Fermor was a real pesron, as was W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), who wrote the book on which the movie was based. Fermor is also known by the code name Filedem. He could speak Greek, well enough to fool the Nazis, although he believes he's got enough of an accent that it would give the game away if the Nazis' Greek collaborators heard him.

Fermor tells Moss about German general Kreipe (Marius Goring), who is the head of the German paratroopers stationed on the island, presumably for running operations all over the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the British who were still in control of Egypt at the time. Fermor has heard that the plan is to ambush Kreipe, kidnapping him and taking him to a cove where a small British ship is set to anchor, taking Kreipe to Egypt. It sounds like a daft plan but then there were a lot of odd schemes that actually did happen during the war. And this is one of them.

In any movie, there is a buildup to the actual operation, as the people carrying it out prepare a meticulous plan. In Ill Met By Moonlight, however, that planning stage seems a bit shorter compared to some other movies in the war movie, or the heist genres. Eventually, the time comes for the operation. The kidnapping seems to go OK, but then they have to get him out of the mountains to where they're supposed to rendezvous with the ship. There are a ton of Nazis looking for Kreipe. And he's got an injured arm to boot, making the operation more complicated.

Ill Met By Moonlight was the final film together for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and unfortunately it's not quite as good as their earlier works. To be fair, however, many of their earlier collaborations are widely considered outstanding films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or The Red Shoes. Ill Met By Moonlight is competent enough, but something about it feels like it could have been better. I can't help but wonder whether Powel and Pressburger didn't have as much of a budget as they would have liked.

Not that Ill Met By Moonlight is a bad movie by any means; it's just that it's another of those movies that isn't as good as it might have been.

Miracle Mile

Recently I was flipping through PlutoTV to see what movies they had on. One on their 80s channel that had an interesting plot synopsis was Miracle Mile. Based on the synopsis, I decided to give it a watch.

Anthony Edwards, later of the TV show ER, plays Harry, a young man living in Los Angeles. One day, he visits the museum at the La Brea tar pits, and sees a woman he's intrigued with. The two run into each other outside, where he finds that her name is Julie (Mare Winningham). They hit it off, and decide they'll meet again later that evening at the all-night diner where Julie works.

Unfortunately, Harry falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he finds that his alarm never went off and that it's four in the morning. So he goes down to the diner, hoping to find Julie still on her shift. She's gone home, of course, so Harry decides to call her and apologize. He gets her answering machine, and is about to go back into the diner when the phone rings again. Now, this is the late 1980s, so Julie wouldn't have had caller ID to tell her what number the call came from. And obviously, almost nobody has a cell phone unless they're rich (indeed, one character later on will have a brick-sized cell phone). But Harry picks up the receiver anyway.

On the other end of the line is a man claiming to be named Chip. Chip thinks he's called his father tells Harry how sorry he is, and that the missiles have been fired from the silo in North Dakota where Chip is stationed, and that, as a result, Dad only has about 70 mintues until the incoming Soviet missiles hit. Harry naturally figures that this is a prank, and tries to get Chip to admit to this. Eventually, Chip realizes he's dialed the wrong area code, while somebody on Chip's end of the line does something that might possibly be shooting Chip, before that guy gets on the phone to tell Harry to forget everything he heard.

Of course Harry can't forget it. He goes back into the diner, asking the other diners if they have a son named Chip and other questions about things he heard in the phone call. Eventually, one of the diners does recognize something Harry says. That diner is the well-dressed Landa (Denise Crosby, Tasha Yar from the first season of Star Trek: TNG), and she believes Harry has identified some of the launch codes from nuclear missiles! She, being a power player, gets on her cell phone and starts calling people she knows in Washington, only to find that they've supposedly all decamped for Antarctica, which is a sure sign that nuclear war is on the way!

Landa tries to arrange for a helicopter to get the folks in the diner to LAX from where they can fly... somewhere; who knows what part of the world won't be affected by the nuclear war if there really is one. And it's not as if there are any commercial flights to Antarctica. In any case, Landa and the rest of the patrons in the diner get into the cook's catering van for the drive to the nearest helicopter landing pad.

Unfortunately, Harry decides that he can't face the possible end of the world without Julie, so he begs Landa and the cook to make a detour to Julie's apartment. They rather sagely point out there isn't time, so Harry gets out of the van to try to make his way to Julie's place and then, hopefully, to the landing pad before Landa's helicoper takes off. But he's going to have to get through a city where word has begun to filter in about the possibility of a nuclear attack....

After watching Miracle Mile, I read some of the reviews on IMDb, and have to agree with one of them that stated that the first portion of the movie feels like it's going into bad TV Movie of the Week territory. But then Harry gets that phone call, and things start going in completely different directions. Some of the reviewers think this make the movie great, while others argued that the movie as a whole doesn't work at all. It really came across to me as a movie that sharply divdes opinion among the relatively limited segment of people who have actually seen it.

I think I'm actually somewhere in the middle. I can see why people might not like Miracle Mile. There's a whole lot of suspension of disbelief required, with plot holes that I don't think would happen in real life, not that I've ever been anywhere about to be hit by nuclear missiles. On the other hand, the movie feels like an extended-length episode of one of those sci-fi anthology shows of the early 60s like The Twilight Zone. It's always different enough that you don't really know where it's going to go next; unlike, say, Ladybug, Ladybug it's not clear fairly early on whether the alarm is a false alarm or whether something more ominous is going to happen.

So Miracle Mile is definitely an uneven movie. But for me it was one that was more worth watching that it was a miss.

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.