1967, Great Britain. Starring Richard Bradford, Ron Randell, Yoko Tani, Anton Rodgers, Warren Stanhope, Aubrey Morris, Simon Brent, Mike Pratt, Alan White, Dave Baxter, David Scheuer, Norman Rossington, Gay Hamilton, Harry Landis, Jeremy Wilkin, Harry Tardios, George Zenios, Agarth Angelos, Maki Marseilles. Directed by Robert Tronson and Pat Jackson.

As we all know by now, the success of Dr. No and subsequent films in the James Bond series resulted in a flood of espionage films from all over the world. Some of them, such as The Ipcress File and Our Man Flint, were wonderful. Many were average, and most were prime examples of just how much better the Bond films were than the many films that attempted to emulate them. It wasn't just the budget that sunk these copycat adventures. While later films in the Bond parade enjoyed large budgets, Dr. No was a modest financial affair, but it managed to hide that fact completely. By the same token, The Ipcress File was shot largely on the streets of London, in abandoned warehouses and dull offices, yet it remains a stellar film. A film doesn't need lavish production values to be engaging. What goes wrong in most of the other espionage films isn't just that they lack the money to pass themselves off as international jet-set adventures. What sinks them is that they're often shoddily directed and dully acted. But you know? We tend to love them anyway.

Bond's popularity and influence wasn't limited to the silver screen, though, and many of the best espionage adventures came not from the movies, but from television. The Avengers, The Man From UNCLE, I Spy - there are plenty of shows we remember fondly, and many more that were enjoyable but simply lost in the herd. While copycat espionage films attempted to of very little unique or different from the inspirational material, television shows took bigger risks. Wild Wild West took the espionage theme and dropped it into the American Old West. Mission: Impossible gave s a team of spies who often relied primarily on their wits and featured an episode with Leonard Nimoy as a mod rocker in Beatle Boots and striped pants. Patrick McGoohan's Secret Agent, a.k.a. Danger Man, sought to actively subvert the James Bond archetype by giving us a secret agent hero who neither drank nor caroused with women, and in fact, never carried a gun. McGoohan really turned the spy genre upside down with his next series, the ground-breaking show The Prisoner, which remains to this day the smartest, most innovative, most daring, and most enjoyable series in television history - at least for my money.

Both of McGoohan's shows were produced by the British television studio ITC, and somewhere between Secret Agent and The Prisoner, they also produced a short-lived but intriguing show known as Man in a Suitcase (not to mention also being the studio that brought us The Saint starring Roger Moore) . The series starred American-born actor Richard Bradford, who had been struggling for years to make it in show business but found himself hampered by, of all things, prematurely graying hair! After scoring a role in the Marlon Brando film The Chase, Bradford caught the eye of producers looking to cast the role of former secret agent McGill in Man in a Suitcase. Like many of ITC's numerous spy shows, Man in a Suitcase came up with a unique approach that made it different from the scores of James Bond imitators. McGill was, for starters, a disgraced American agent who took a fall for a crime he didn't commit, all in order to protect the name of the Agency. With his career in ruins and nothing to live for in America, he picks up and moves to London, where he ekes out an average living as a private investigator who, naturally, often gets involved in matters of international intrigue. There exists only one person - McGill's old CIA boss -- who knows the truth about McGill and can work to prove his innocence. Unfortunately, protecting the reputation of the Agency takes precedence over proving McGill's innocence.

Compared to the jet-set, thrill-a-minute live of James Bond, McGill's future is rather bleak. He's rarely happy, and there's not much hope that he'll ever be redeemed, that his name will be cleared and his life returned to him. Bradford plays the character with a world-weariness that, rather than suggesting wisdom or inner peace, simply suggests world-weariness. McGill is exhausted, with very little to look forward to, yet he keeps on moving forward, his entire life contained in a single suitcase he takes with him as he moves from one place to the next.

Not that he doesn't try to enjoy life every once on a while. He has a so-so apartment and a decent car, and he seems to have had his fair share of experience with beautiful women. But ultimately, you can't be James Bond on Harry Palmer's salary, and even Michael Caine's frustrated blue-collar spy from The Ipcress File seemed to take life's pitfalls with wit and humor. Palmer had his cooking, he had a cranky boss who secretly respected the hell out of his "worst" best agent, and he had the love of espionage office secretary Sue Lloyd. McGill, on the other hand, has nothing but the suitcase.

With such a nihilistic character, it's no doubt that the series has become more or less forgotten despite the risks it took (and often succeeded at). Even Number Six in The Prisoner kept hope alive that he would one day regain his freedom and best the powers controlling The Village. With McGill, it's like your watching a man who's already been beaten yet is determined to play the game out to the bitter end. Although the show wasn't the success that Secret Agent or The Prisoner was (which is nothing to be ashamed of -- you'd be hard-pressed to find two better shows, and harder-pressed to find a writer and star more impressive than Patrick McGoohan), it was popular enough so that one of the two-part episodes, entitled "Variation on a Million Bucks," was edited together into a feature-length film called To Chase a Million.

Like Harry Palmer and The Ipcress File, To Chase a Million grounds itself very firmly in reality. Where James Bond enjoyed his flights into fantasy, and other films followed, To Chase a Million - partially because of its origins as two episodes of a relatively low-budget television show - remains stuck firmly in the real world. Make no mistake about it - I am a huge Bond fan, and like many people part of what I love about them is the pageantry and lack of realism. I even dig most of the Roger Moore adventures. They are the thrill-a-minute escapism while a movie like The Ipcress File is the "so familiar you can't help but relate to it" excursion into the world of espionage populated by frustrated military officials, endless paperwork, and dull staff meetings that, rather than featuring Desmond Llewellyn showing off an exploding fountain pen that can also remote pilot a gyrocopter, instead features a mid-level bureaucrat's out-of-focus slideshow and droning narration detailing surveillance of some guy in a raincoat. Both types of film work well, and I have no interest in pitting one approach against the other or making any judgment as to which is better. I like the over-the-top bombast of Bond just as much as I like the gritty realism of Palmer, and wasn't the Cold War ultimately all about defending our right to freely watch more than one type of spy film?

So while movies like To Chase a Million may be more realistic in their approach to the world of espionage, that doesn't make them any better or worse. They're just different. To Chase a Million, in fact, exists somewhere in between the two extremes. Closer to the world of Harry Palmer than James Bond, but you still never see McGill have to wake up and make some eggs. And in fact, all three have some common threads running through them. Ipcress File was produced by Harry Saltzman, who along with Cubby Broccoli was the producer of the James Bond movie series. It also sported Ken Adam as art director, a role he fulfilled in the Bond films as well, and Bond composer John Barry. To Chase a Million, or rather the series from which it was culled, was filmed on location around London but also frequently used lots and stages at Pinewood Studios, known primarily as the home of the James Bond films. So you see? They're really all one big Cold War era family, so there's no need to make choices between them.

The film opens with McGill running into an old flame played by Eurospy film stalwart and one of my favorite actresses from the genre, Yoko Tani. The estranged couple rekindle an old romance, and for the first time in a long time, it looks like McGill might achieve some semblance of happiness in his otherwise dismal life. His best friend, a Russian defector named Max Stein, completes the happy trio. Of course, Max is hiding something big, which just happens to be a cool million in cash he swiped from the Ruskies before defecting. It's safely hidden away in a safe deposit box somewhere in Lisbon, but that doesn't stop Russian and American agents from tailing both Max and McGill in hops of recovering the cash. When Max is murdered, McGill realizes that his only hope of having a normal life with Yoko is if he can find the money, smuggle it back into London, then get the hell out of town, possibly moving to Japan to finally settle down and put the cloak and dagger business behind him once and for all.

Since "Variation on a Million Bucks" occurs rather early in the series, you can guess how well McGill's plans work out in the end. It has the same sting as when the Rat Pack realized what was happening to their stash at the end of Ocean's Eleven.

There is a lot going for To Chase a Million, as well as a fair number of things going against it. On the negative side, first and foremost, is the fact that this is a television show masquerading as a feature film. As such, it has the look and feel of a small-time production. There's a lot of dialogue, and most of it isn't especially interesting. The sets are appropriately claustrophobic and small-scale, which isn't entirely a bad thing as they also don't look cheap. I've seen Eurospy feature films where the office of the CIA were nothing but an empty classroom with red sheets draped across the windows and an American flag propped up in the corner. While To Chase a Million may have small-scale sets, at least there's an attempt to dress them up properly. So while the small-screen origin works against it as a feature film, at the same time the fact that you'll be watching it on your television set makes it easy to overlook these limitations.

Another strike against the film is Bradford's sometimes somnambulistic performance. Although his bleary-eyed, tired reading the character does a lot to convey the hopelessness of his character, it can also wear the viewer down. Max Stein goes for the same muddled, monotonal delivery, and that makes for some really dull exposition scenes. Yoko Tani acquits herself nicely, as she always does, but her character is given very little to do. I would have appreciated more of her, but I guess I can always go elsewhere for that. Aside from a number of decent Eurospy features, she also starred in a couple episodes of McGoohan's Secret Agent.

The uneven pacing and action is, however, offset by what the film does well. On the most basic level, it's well-written and constructed, with a plot that generates some real thrills as you root for McGill to succeed against all odds with his plan. Part of what makes his character so sympathetic is the fact that he isn't doing this so he can live a jet-set lifestyle full of women and glamour. He's not doing it to stop some megalomaniac madman in a hollowed-out volcano. He's doing it so he can get the goddamned Man off his back and settle down into a nice quiet life with a woman he loves. His motivations are so simple, and so familiar, that it endears him to us even when Bradford is giving a less-than-shining reading of his lines. Where we all know Bond is going to succeed and come out smelling like roses and getting laid, McGill's success is never guaranteed. In fact, we're pretty sure he's going to fail, but like the character, we keep hoping anyway that it'll turn out for the better.

Another thing I like about the film is the fact that McGill gets his ass kicked a lot, and when it happens, it really hurts. It's real-world ass-kicking. He's not a bad fighter, but when someone gets the jump on him, or when he's outnumbered, he's going to go down, and he's going to hurt. This isn't the sort of movie thrashing where get the tar kicked out of you and then pop up in the next scene as if nothing has happened. When McGill gets the stuffing beat out of him, he feels it for a few days. When he gets shot or stabbed, he bleeds profusely and almost dies. And even in recovery, he's groggy and unable to use one of his arms. By the end of the movie, he looks like he's being held together by fraying duct tape and might just drop dead at any second. Death warmed over. He can't fight anymore, and in fact he can hardly even walk. It's a wonderful change of pace from heroes who get punched, shot, and run over but then can still run down the street at full speed, leap onto a moving train, and take out a dozen henchman without breaking a sweat. McGill is most definitely one of the most believably human characters in any espionage film.

That vulnerability - he falls in love, wants a normal life, and can be seriously wounded - makes him all the more interesting and sympathetic. While Richard Bradford's performance may be uneven in spots, it's never anything less than competent. He draws you into the character, an underdog who you know isn't going to triumph in the end against all odds. The supporting cast is pretty good as well. There are a host of guys whose job it is to wear fedoras and lurk in shadows and take potshots at people. Anton Rogers as Max Stein is lukewarm, but his primary function is to play chess and get murdered. The rest of the bunch are solid character actors, and Gay Hamilton is superb as Lucia, the sympathetic woman who shelters McGill after he arrives in Lisbon having been beaten up by shifty smugglers aboard a boat, stabbed in the shoulder, beat up some more, and dumped on the side of the road to die.

While the sets may be small, the location work is pretty impressive. Scene sin a gothic opera house hearken back to From Russia With Love's scene in the massive cathedral, and the street chases in Lisbon (which aren't actually in Lisbon, but do have that opressive walled-in labyrinth effect so many European streets seem to have) are great. The interiors are convincing as well. While it's not a feast for the eyes, it's also not an eyesore. McGill isn't as snappy a dresser as James Bond or Derek Flint, but he gets the job done. So it goes to for the film as a whole.

The action sequences are fairly realistic, meaning they're kind of sloppy and awkward looking but also fairly brutal and convincing, especially if you ever seen any real fights, which rarely look all that spectacularly choreographed. Shootouts are few and far between, and McGill lets his fists do most of the talking. Unfortunately for him, there are a lot more fists talking back. As far as bad-asses go, the man is no John Shaft or Bruce Lee. If the odds are against him, he's going to lose. He's not going to bust out any kungfu moves, and he's not going to perform any near-superhuman feats of combat prowess. And he has almost no one-liners. About all he does after a fight is grunt and pass out and bleed all over the caret. Like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, McGill exists in a very believable world where it's a lot harder to be a bad-ass. McGill's toughness come from his determination to press on, his dedication to Yoko Tani's character Taiko, and his ability to take a severe beating and stumble on, even in the face of certain defeat. He's kind of like the tough woodland animal who gets killed by a larger predator, but at least causes the predator to choke to death on the way down. He may not be flashy, and he may lose most of this fights, but there's something undeniably cool about him never the less.

What really carried the film is the plot. As I mentioned, the fact that McGill's character will likely fail in his bid for a better life really draws you in. It's not entirely hopeless, so you can keep on clinging to the notion that he just might pull off recovering the million dollars and starting life over with Taiko in Japan, but you seriously doubt it. Most of the people he meets double-cross him, but not everyone. You can never be entirely certain who McGill can trust, and the writing keeps you off-balance enough so that everyone's motivations remain suspect. There's no sparkling dialogue to speak of, but the situations are smartly constructed and intriguing. Not having seen the original two episodes, I don't know what was changed between them and the film. They do a nice job of integrating McGill's backstory into the plot, though, through a series of exchanges witht he head of the CIA. You get enough information to understand what's happening without knowing the full story. Bbased just on this movie, we never know what it is that McGillw as framed for and what brought him to London, and we only have a vague idea of what it is he does for a living. But we get the idea, and even though it's exposition, it doesn't feel overly forced or out of place.

If you're not sympathetic to talky films, or if you're not a fan of Man in a Suitcase going into the picture (I'd never seen it myself, but I'm interested now), then it's unlikely To Chase a Million is going to appeal to you. It is pretty slow in spots, and while slow and interesting is okay, slow and dull tends to lose people. And To Chase a Million does have its dull spots. For me, however, it does more things right than it does wrong, and I appreciated both the sense of realism and the change of pace it offers from so much other spy fare. It's not a knock-out, but it's a solid punch never the less. It is slow-moving in spots but still thrilling in others, small-screen in nature but with an ambitious premise and above-average writing, and it's low-rent without being low-class or low-quality. To Chase a Million may not be James Bond, and it may not be The Ipcress File. It may not be Secret Agent or The Prisoner - but that's the point. It is film (and a series) that goes for something different and attains it. You can appreciate that without actually liking the film, of course, but I was lucky and did both.

Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1967