1966, United States. Starring Mark Richman, Carl Esmond, Barbara Bouchet, Martin Kosleck, Wendell Corey, Robert Quarry, Rafael Campos, Aliza Gur, Donna Michelle, Marc Snegoff, Chris Anders, Steve Stevens, Horst Ebersberg, Ray Dannis, Robert Donner. Directed by Gerd Oswald.

Think back for a moment to all the things that make cool, swanky spy movies just that: cool, swanky spy movies. You got the suave hero who probably wears lots of turtle necks, does karate and yoga, and only takes time out from killing so he can get it on with some go-go boot and miniskirt wearing female sidekick or spy. You've got the cool music full of offbeat avant garde jazz, fuzzed-out guitars, and psychedelia. You've got amazing and exotic locales, everything from Rome to Saigon to Hong Kong to New York to Rio to Moscow. You've got non-stop action, sex appeal, and high tech gadgetry. And all the best ones have a wonderful sense of tongue-in-cheek humor. They know they're being a bit silly, but that's all part of the fun.

All of these elements combine perfectly in their total absence from the film Agent For HARM, a film about a spy who, rather than romancing Russian counter-spies in Czechoslovakia or bedding some Italian beauty in Milan before offing half a dozen Marxist terrorists, decides to simply spend most of the movie hanging around the living room while wearing his official Mr. Rogers brand cardigan sweater. I'm already hollerin' for joy!

Mark Richman, who would go on to a long and prosperous career playing creepy fathers in bad horror films, plays Adam Chance. He's named Adam Chance because what are the chances of all spies having cool names like "Adam Chance" or Dominique Fortune or whatever? It's worse than the "ironic super villain name" conundrum where someone who is named Dr. Frieze or something will just happen to be in an accident that gives him super freezing powers and stuff. Come on!

Adam Chance works for HARM, because all spies with cool names like Adam Chance also have to work for cool covert ops wings of the government who's names just happen (by chance) to have an acronym that spells out some cool, violent word. Adam Chance is an agent for HARM. Pulp novel superspy Nick Carter was the killmaster for AXE. In a wonderful spoof of the genre, as well as one of the best genre films, James Coburn as Derek Flint worked for ZOWIE.

There must be a whole branch of the government that thinks up these names. You have your executive, your judicial, your legislative, and your "Ministry of Coming Up With Names That Have Cool Acronyms No Matter How Far You Have To Stretch Things." Myself, I am a member of the Secret Union of Proletariat European Radical Brigades Against Despots. Make your own! It's fun, and depending on your needs, you can either count or not count words like "of," "and," "the," and "is" as part of the acronym.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, not to mention this film. But then, it's pretty easy to get ahead of this film since it never goes anywhere. We begin in "The Eastern Bloc," which looks a lot like, oh say, some neighborhood in Santa Monica or something. But all good spy movies have to take place at least in part in some Eastern Bloc nation. You post-Berlin Wall kids may not remember the Eastern Block, but those of us who grew up during the Cold War remember with fondness the old days.

A professor who is probably German judging by the accent which he sometimes doesn't have, is escaping from the evil iron clutches of Communism with a super duper top secret weapon in tow. His ally is a French guy, complete with stupid goatee and a beret. They should have given him a loaf of French bread and had him say stuff like, "I am, how you say, French." At least that would have been funny on a sort of Jerry Lewis level. This guy looks like he went on later in the day to play some bongo drum pounding beatnik in a Frankie Avalon - Annette Funicello beach movie. But anyway, given the fact that the French are renown sell-outs to practically everyone else in the world, why would you trust one of them to help you escape from a country? Sure enough, the French guy betrays the scientist. A treacherous Frenchman! What will they throw at me next? A rude Frenchman?

The professor's super secret weapon from hell is a spore gun. Okay. No wait, surely it must be some massive nuclear warhead or a disease that could wipe out all of New York. No, it's a spore gun. If you shoot it at your enemy, it splatters him with some green goo that slowly kills him, allowing him plenty of time to just get a regular gun and shoot your ass dead. A spore gun? That's it? I mean, geez, shouldn't a super-spy be fighting guys who do things like hijack airplanes and steal neutron bombs? I mean, the spore gun is a pretty lame ultimate weapon. But what do you expect from a professor who trusts the French in matters of espionage?

Despite the evil ways of beret and goatee sporting Frenchman, the professor manages to escape. If you remember the wild car chases from many James Bond films, then you are a little off base in visualizing this escape sequence. If, however, you imagine, say, the 10 mph car "chase" scene from the Joe Don Baker film Mitchell, or if you simply imagine Joe Don Baker himself slowly plodding to the fridge to grab himself a beer, then you have a general idea of how exciting this whole escape sequence is.

A quick aside -- when I was doing research on this film, I lazily typed in the string "agent for harm" in an internet search engine, and here's one of the results I got: "Our toilet bowl cleaning agent is designed to automatically clean bowl when flushing, giving a fresh and clean bowl after each use. It is convenient and saves time and energy."

I was amazed to see that other people had reviewed this film as well!

Anyway, back to this spore gun. I mean, what's the point? It's like five times more complicated to use than a regular gun, but half as effective. I mean, it'd be different if the spore killed one person, then went on to spread and consume countless others. But it just tosses some pond scum on someone's face, and that's it. Do we really need to send our best agent in the world to defend the spore gun? And if this was the zenith of the Communists' Cold War technology, then it's no wonder they lost. Cuban cigars probably kills more people per year than the stupid spore gun. What's next? Trying to pass that "spud gun" novelty potato shooter off as a secret weapon? My god, what if the Commies get a hold of our closely guarded slingshot technology? There would be a legion of pinko kids in rolled up jeans on little soapbox scooters rolling toward us bellowing Marxist slogans as they zing us with pebbles and deliver copies of Grit magazine.

Actually, that's pretty scary. Agent for HARM would have been much cooler if it had been about Communist sympathizer newsies trying to disrupt the town's ice cream social.

So eventually, and I mean eventually, we get to the rest of the film. Oh wait, it's only been like ten minutes. God damn. We're in for a bad one here, folks. Adam Chance is assigned to protect the professor once he makes it to the United States, where we set him up with a fancy beach-front bungalow. Damn, no wonder all those scientists tried to defect. Wendell Corey plays the boss for HARM, and he seems every bit as drunk as Jack Webb was stoic. I mean, if this guy is the leader, it's no wonder their star spy is a middle-aged made-for-tv movie actor in a cardigan sweater instead of James Coburn or Dean Martin. Most of Wendell's lines are slurred beyond the point of recognition. I guess they had to liquor him up in order to get him in this film.

He assigns the job of protecting the professor to Chance, who promptly hops in his super-cool ultra-slick spy car to head for the coast. Oh wait, he gets in a station wagon. What the hell? What kind of loser super-spy drives a station wagon? I bet if he was a leprechaun, Adam Chance would be the one they make guard the Lucky Charms instead of getting a pot of gold like all the other leprechauns. I wonder if he knows how uncool he is, or if he is like the loser guy who hangs out in the gym as the "basketball team manager" or whatever and thinks that by associating himself with the athletic team he is as cool to everyone as they are. Does Adam Chance know other spies get to drive Stingrays and Lotuses and stuff like that?

Upon arriving at the beach-house of the professor, Chance takes time out to flirt with he guy's sexy bikini-clad niece. This is sort of like watching the 45-year-old lounge lizard with a big medallion hitting on some high school girl. I guess we're supposed to see some sort of romantic flame there, but I really don't see what he does to make her fall so helplessly in love with him at first sight. He just sort of strolls around on the beach in his old man clothes pretending to be a brush salesman. Ooo, my panties are flying off just thinking about it! Adam Chance is the reason the kids coined the slang word "square."

When he finally gets around to talking to the professor, the professor unveils the evil Commie plot to dust our crops with the deadly spore. Okay, so that's a little better than the gun, but it's still pretty stupid. They're going to dust the crops of the entire nation and no one is going to notice? And hey, like evil Commie spores are any worse than good ol' American DDT.

In order to get the secret formula, spies from some country or other casually drop by the professor's pad, which might not happen if he was, oh, secretive or something. His beach house is about as covert and clever as hiding members of the federal witness protection program in a crowded Holiday Inn in a wing specifically marked "Members of Witness Protection Program only. All others must sign in at desk." Luckily, Adam Chance is there to, well, kick their ass, but he's such a weenie that it's not really ass kicking. It's like ... I don't know. Eddie Deezen could whup ass better than this guy, and he'd be twice as cool doing it.

Meanwhile, we all learn that the niece is a Commie pinko spy. That was a big shock. Adam Chance spends most of his time hanging around in the guest house doing "spy stuff," and by "spy stuff" if you think I mean partaking in helicopter crashes and hovercraft chases, you'd be incorrect. Spy stuff for Adam Chance seems to consist mostly of taking apart common household appliances then putting them back together. While you may thrill to watching James Coburn jump from rooftop to rooftop while evading Russian hitmen, it pales in comparison to the excitement of watching Adam Chance sit in the floor and take apart a television set. It has all the tensely coiled energy of watching your dad try and fix the television reception.

In fact, watching your dad maintain an appliance would be even more exciting than this. At least your dad might curse or knock something over.

After what seems to be an eternity, the Commies finally kidnap the professor and take him to Mexico, which looks a lot like California and whatever Iron Curtain country it was this film started in. While some super villains have ultra-cool space-age lairs in hollowed-out mountains or tropical islands, these super villains seem to have just rented out one of those storage warehouses. Adam Chance mounts a motorbike and looks totally ridiculous. They might has well have had him ride in on a motor scooter. This leads to the exciting final shoot-out, which is exciting because it means this movie is finally over.

Let's get one thing straight -- a chimp could shit out a halfways decent 1960s spy film. It's not that hard to do, even on a limited budget. I mean, there were crappy spy films, but most of them managed to still be entertaining, or at least entertainingly bad. The glory of Europe is that everything is really close, so you can shoot in Rome, Venice, Berlin, and Paris with relative ease, giving your film a tremendously exotic feel to it. Or you could film it at a Travel Lodge somewhere along the California Coast. The choice is yours.

Agent For HARM is the type of film you might be forced to watch if you were captured by evil Communist agents.

You wouldn't think that you could take sexy girls in bikinis, super spies, evil alien spores, and international espionage and make them boring, but you also wouldn't think you could have all those things but still spend most your time sitting around in a bungalow watching television. International men of mystery the world over hang their heads in shame at Adam Chance. You will hang your head as well, because you'll probably be asleep before the end of the film.

Labels: Espionage, Year: 1966