The Wrecking Crew
The Wrecking Crew is the second book in the Matt Helm series, but for some reason they held out on using that title until the fourth film (which has almost nothing to do with the book, even less so than any of the previous film entries). The filmmakers decided to skip over The Removers (book number three, a powerful story in which Helm is enlisted by his estranged wife to save one of their children) completely. Although it's obvious that I am a fan of the films despite (and indeed because of) whatever faults they may possess, and that I am clearly aware of the fact that they bear little resemblance to the books, I also think it's a shame no one every took the actual stories in the actual tones and made them into movies, because they're damn good stories. Actually, maybe it's better that way, especially now. Dean Martin goofing off under the banner of Matt Helm was tolerable, even funny and entertaining if you weren't a die-hard fan of the books, but I don't want to see Ben Afleck or Ashton Kutcher as Matt Helm, which is what we'd be saddled with today. At least Dean Martin was a grown man, even if he didn't act like it. This way, at least the books remain relatively pure and untainted since you can hardly consider the Dean Martin movies to be actual adaptations any more than you could say the movie Casino Royale was an adaptation of Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.

But they are damn good stories, never the less, and if someone could do them up right without compromising the grim tone and the old-fashioned attitudes regarding the sexes, it'd be something worth seeing.

The Wrecking Crew is one of my favorites of all the Matt Helm novels. It's also one of the few stories where Matt gets to go to another country and spend at least a little bit of time in a nice hotel. Usually he has to stay at some Econo-Lodge type motor lodge in some Southwestern American city. Here he actually gets to go to Stockholm, Sweden, and stay in a nice place up until he's dragged out into the muddy, frosty Swedish north country to get shot at. But hey -- at least he got to have a nice bed for a while and see some sights besides New Mexican desert. Not that New Mexican desert is anything short of breathtaking, but I'd imagine if you lived in it, you might want a change of pace every now and again.

Matt ends up in Sweden in the hopes of tracking down and killing one of the most elusive espionage masterminds, a man named Caselius whom no one has seen and lived to describe. He's helped, or more accurately, hindered on his mission by a Swedish agent named Sarah Lundgren. The main problem with her is that she considers Sweden a peaceful, nonviolent nation and wants no part of helping Matt Helm assassinate another man, an act she considers disgusting and barbaric. Matt, surprisingly, is not especially sympathetic to her beliefs, which makes for some interesting philosophical debate, though Sarah herself doesn't stay in the picture for very long.

The primary woman here is one Louise Taylor. Her husband, a globe-trotting journalist of somewhat questionable professional morals, had recently been gunned down at an East German checkpoint, presumably because he'd learned and revealed too much about Caselius in an article he'd written. The death, however, was suspicious for other reasons. No body was ever identified, and Louise herself disappeared for a long time before turning back up again on the free and righteous side of the Iron Curtain, leading to speculation that her husband faked his death, or Lou was somehow responsible for it since she survived the attack -- though not without a scar from where a bullet hit her in the neck. Helm's cover is as a photojournalist aiding Lou on her own first job as a journalist covering some business about the Swedish mining industry. He is to find out what she knows about Caselius and, with any luck, find a way for her to lead him to his target.

Both Helm and storyteller Donald Hamilton are in fine form. Fresh off the life-altering events from Death of a Citizen, Matt's in a particularly bad mood. The ink on his divorce is still drying, and seeing no real alternative, he admits to himself that he's simply not cut out for a normal life and returns to his old job. Speaking of which, the exact nature of his old job is given a lot of thought here. Although most people allow Matt Helm to fall under the general banner of "spy," the point is made here that he's not a spy at all. He's an assassin. His job is not to collect information, identify leaks, or anything of that nature. His job is to go in and kill someone.

This is the central theme of the book's major philosophical debate. Helm knows he's in a nasty business, but he also regards it as a necessary business, and a not altogether dishonorable business. He ruminates about why people make heroes of men who indiscriminately drop bombs that kill thousands, many of them innocent civilians, yet are repulsed and vehemently opposed to one man with a knife or a gun being assigned to track down one other man. There is something in that relationship that is too personal, too close, for people to deal with. They prefer their death, apparently, to come in great waves and from a great distance with the push of a button -- a chilling thought considering the nature of modern warfare, in which it seems the safest place to be is in the military while civilians suffer the bulk of the casualties as a result of air campaigns. But this manner of mass death allows onlookers to disconnect it from humanity. Casualty numbers are too large to be personified, and those doing the killing are too remote and removed to be thought of as human. One assassin facing down another man forces people to recognize the fact that there are no monsters, and that it's regular ol' people who do the killing and the dying.

I'm not a violent man, nor am I pacifist. I'm also not an opponent of the concept of assassination. As much as it would please me if this was a rosy world in which those who misbehave could be rationally debated and shown the error of their ways, or effectively prosecuted in global war crimes courts, the fact is that it's just not that easy sometimes. And I agree with Matt Helm - and presumably with Donald Hamilton expressing his opinion through Matt Helm. Assassination is the better route if it can be done. Better for one man to kill one other man than for thousands to die in a war that could have been avoided if assassination wasn't forbidden under current laws. Of course, everything today is much more convoluted even than in the 1960s, and the quality of intelligent officers (not to mention soldiers) has suffered mightily as a result of relying far too much on push buttons and technology to do the jobs for us. Not that I'm taking away anything from the folks who have to fly a plane over hostile territory, but even they'd have to admit it's a hell of a lot safer to be a soldier now than, say, if you were storming the beaches at Normandy.

Hamilton predicts this eventuality, though I suppose it's no huge leap of logic to see that it was coming and that warfare would shift from battles between armies to desperate attempts to catch lone men or small groups doing awful things. In a way, and it's a weird way I'll grant you, we were all better off during the Cold War. Then, for the most part, it was the United States and the Soviet Union, and regardless of the apocalyptic sense we all had that nuclear war was right around the corner, it turns out we were all relatively safe, much safer anyway than we are now that we're not scared of nuclear war even though it's a lot more likely to happen given incidents such as Pakistan leaking out nuclear weapons technology to damn near every screwball on the planet. One of these guys is a hell of a lot more likely to go and set off a nuclear confrontation than the Russians or the Americans ever were, and you should be a damn sight more nervous about it today than we were in the 1980s, or the 1960s. All things considered, give me the Evil Empire and the Cold War any day over terrorists and tiny little countries run by madmen. We seem as yet unable to make a successful transition from one to the other, and send in armies to catch individuals, because we've let our intelligence network get rusted and out of date -- and no, as a matter of fact I don't think better intelligence comes from prying into library records and other Patriot Act shenanigans. See? I'm a difficult person to figure out, politically.

Not that The Wrecking Crew is one big meditation on war versus espionage and the transformation of modern conflict, though it certainly slips in there. This is primarily the story of one bitter secret agent trying to kill one other secret agent, whose bitterness cannot really be accurately determined. It's a great story, very fast-paced and even funny at times since Matt's complicated cover is to pass himself off as a spy who is so rusty at the game that his cover as a photographer gets blown quickly and he's not much good at anything. It results in Helm taking plenty of lumps and waiting around for less adept agents to punch him in the face so he won't give away that he's actually not rusty at all. That would become a frequent plot device of the Matt Helm novels -- the requirement that he pretend to be a lot stupider than he actually is.

Matt's character is coming along nicely in this novel. We're getting to know him pretty well and see that there's quite a lot to him, far more than the "ruthless and grim" description with which he's commonly tagged. The supporting cast is quite good. Sarah isn't around for long, but she presents an interesting dichotomy to Helm, and perhaps to supposedly neutral countries and the countries that take a more, shall we say, proactive role in things. I can't say I'm not personally sympathetic to her cause, especially with the way a lot of people are behaving these days. A couple other agents pop up to flesh things out, but besides Matt, the only other main character is Lou Taylor, and she's one of the more likeable and sympathetic characters in any of the novels. Granted, she's not what she appears to be and has all the usual ulterior motives possessed by people in spy novels, but she's not at all a vicious or despicable person. It's easy to fall for and relate to her. The villain, Caselius, emerges really only in the final pages, though he remains an entity throughout. But it makes it hard to ascribe any real character to him. He seems to be a pretty standard issue reliable foil.

The story's main twist is a nice surprise, or at least it was to me. But unlike many "surprises," it still fits nicely into the story and is a logical progression. Otherwise, Matt Helm stories have always been less about guessing the next development than they have been about simply enjoying being taken on such an exhilarating ride. It's not that they're predictable, other than you're pretty sure Matt's going to succeed in his mission and get laid in the process, It's hard to believe Hamilton came out of the gate with such a powerful couple of novels as The Wrecking Crew and Death of a Citizen. But he did, and what's even more miraculous is that he managed to sustain it steadily for so many novels to come - which is more than could be said for the considerably shorter run of movies. The Wrecking Crew was the final entry in the film series, and whatever quality had been evident in the first film had long since dissipated.

I did learn from The Wrecking Crew that, in order to fully assess the amount of material in common between the books and the films, you can't rely on simply comparing each movie with its literary namesake. You would, in fact, have to have read every book up to the time of the film's release, because they seem to pick ideas at random from other stories besides the ones with the same titles. I would have learned this during The Ambushers except that I didn't read The Menacers until long after I saw that movie. The Silencers, for instance, also drew heavily from not just the book by the same name, but also Death of a Citizen. Murderers' Row the movie was set in the French Riviera, a location nowhere near the Virginia setting of the book, though The Riviera is mentioned as a future destination for Matt Helm at the end of The Devastators, the ninth book in the series. And Caselius shows up as the villain in The Ambushers movie, though he is less like the Caselius in The Wrecking Crew Book and more like the Nazi Von Sachs in the Ambushers novel. Got all that? Likewise, there are characters in the film The Wrecking Crew that seem pulled out of The Devastators, specifically Nancy Kwan's character of Wen Yu-rang seems very similar to the character of Madame Ling (why are female Asian operatives always called Madame something or other). Given that similarity, this movie actually has about the same amount in common with The Devastators as it does with the actual Wrecking Crew novel -- which is, not very much.

The movie shifts the book's action from Sweden to Denmark for some inexplicable reason, but it really makes no difference since the whole thing looks to have been shot in California. When a brilliant master criminal (dependable character actor Nigel Greene) steals a billion dollars in gold that could plunge the economies of the West into chaos, Matt Helm is called in to track down and retrieve the stolen booty - and speaking of booty, there will plenty on display here, much of it belonging to co-star Sharon Tate, who assists Matt Helm as fellow agent Freya Carlson (Sharon Tate), who is very loosely based on Sarah Lungren's character from the book. And that is about as much as the two stories have in common. Nothing of the plot from the book shows up on screen here, and while I've not read the entire series, I have yet to run across a plot that looks anything like the one used in this movie.

Said plot is simple enough, but then if you've gotten this far into the movies, a light plot is probably not of great concern to you. Luckily, if you call it luck, this film has plenty of other things wrong with it. For starters, if you thought any of the previous films were lazy, brace yourself. While I would stop short of pronouncing this film to be awful -- admittedly, I have a soft spot for Dean Martin and any spy movie packed with women as beautiful as Elke Sommer, Nancy Kwan, and Sharon Tate -- I'd still say it proved to be something of a chore to get through. Previous films seemed to have very little regard for following any sort of script, but this one seems even less interested in having anything planned out. When we meet Matt, reclining half-naked and getting a massage from a bevy of Slaygirls, he's taking a nap and dreaming about kissing each of the women. This dream is shown in a little bubble above his head, and it's funny once. But then the film seems determined to do the same "walk up and kiss her" routine for every girl, cutting away in between each one to a scene of Helm's boss, MacDonald, speeding along in a car trying to get in touch with his sleepy number one man. It goes on for a while, and it's just the beginning of the ways in which this film pads out its running time.

For instance, any time Matt enters a new hotel room, we have to watch him sort of wander around aimlessly inspecting the pillows and bar. This, too, goes on for a while. And if you thought his double entendres and goofy sex jokes were getting stretched pretty thin in The Ambushers and often becoming so nonsensical that they qualified as non-sequiters more than sex jokes, well apparently so did the people writing (or making up on the fly) this film, because rather than make any lewd comments this time around, any space that calls for one is instead filled by Dean Martin staring bleary-eyed at something off camera for about ten second and then stammering, "Yep." He spends a while looking at Tina Louise's butt, then just mutters, "Yep." Come on, man. We expect better from you. In fact, roughly 90% of Dean Martin's dialogue is either some such half-hearted utterance or, more annoyingly, him repeating whatever was just said to him, but in the form of a question. Pretty much every single thing Sharon Tate says is then repeated as a question by Dino. Sometimes, his lines are slurred and mumbled so bad they you couldn't even understand what he was saying if Sharon hadn't just said the same thing a couple seconds earlier. I'd always heard that Dean's ultra-boozer image was just that, and while he enjoyed a drink as much as the next guy, much of what he did was just a put-on (drinking juice instead of Scotch on stage, for instance). Well, you'd never knowing it watching his performance in The Wrecking Crew, where he seems barely able to spit out even the simplest lines, and he always seems just about ready to fall over every time he lumbers into action.

The first hour of the film moves slowly, with much of it consisting of Dean walking in and out of hotel rooms accompanied by little snippets of himself crooning about whatever is happening to him on screen, sort of like if the classical Greek Chorus had been the Rat Pack. That, at least, was sort of a funny joke, especially since there's no effort made to make any of the lyrics go together. It's just Dean stating facts in his warm, musical voice. "If your sweetheart...hides a pistol...under her pillow..." Things pick up for the final third of the film, but by then plenty of people will have been lost to the tedium.

Of course, even with Dean seemingly oblivious to everything going on around him, and even though he's looking particularly worn-out and has way too much greasy stuff in his hair, he's still Dino, and charm comes easy to him. He can't help but be likable, even when he obviously doesn't give a damn. Maybe because of that. I mean, anyone who went into The Wrecking Crew all serious about their job and thinking "time to make some art" was sadly misguided, so Dean's "what do I care" lack of delivery works to his advantage. And there are other things about this film that keep it from ending up in the trash bin alongside truly awful spy fare like my favorite whipping post, Agent for H.A.R.M. -- or A View to a Kill, for that matter.

Chief among these assets is a fabulous supporting cast. As his bumbling assistant, Sharon Tate is a joy. She shows a knack for comedy and has pretty good timing despite the fact that Dean sometimes seems to fall asleep in between lines. And she wears a cute little tour guide outfit with tight fitting pants -- the literary Matt Helm most certainly would not have approved. She spends a fair amount of time bending over and sticking her rump in the camera to reveal that, all things considered, it's rather nice.

It does, even for a dirty old man like me, feel a little weird to be assessing the assets of Sharon Tate in this way given the tragic turn of events that lead to her untimely death. Anyone my age or older is most likely well acquainted with the story, if not the particulars, but I hear there are a few among the younger generation who come here to see what the old cranks are ranting about this time, so for their benefit, I'll offer a cursory run-down. Sharon Tate was a star on the rise. Married to as-of-yet not a statutory rapist Roman Polanski, having starred in hits like Valley of the Dolls, she was proving herself more than just a pretty face and nice body. On August 9, 1969, she was at a party with some friends and taking time off from movies in anticipation of giving birth to her first child when members of the notorious Manson Family murdered her and several other party guests. No one understood why the hell Charlie Manson would want to kill Sharon Tate, or nay of these people for that matter, but the pieces began to fall into place when it was discovered that the house in which the party was being thrown had, until very recently, been the home of a music producer who had refused to sign budding musician Charles Manson to a recording contract. It's widely suspected that this producer -- who also happened to be the son of Doris Day -- and anyone associated with him were the intended targets of the attack, but Manson and his crew were unaware of the fact that he had moved some months prior. That's what happens when you send a bunch of drugged-out hippies to kill someone over folk music.

It's a melancholy ending to a life that was only just starting to get going, but we can at least sit back and enjoy the fact that Sharon turns in a fun and energetic performance in The Wrecking Crew, and like everyone else, seems to enjoy getting paid a lot of money to basically goof off in front of the camera. Her character retains the cover story of Sarah Lungren from the book, as well as some of Sarah's naivety, but if you were waiting for earnest debates over the nature of espionage and the morality of killing, even for the so-called right reasons, well, need I remind you that it's Dean Martin up there on the screen?

Tina Louise, the bombshell best known for her role as Ginger on Gilligan's Island, has a brief but memorable role as a female informant who ends up on the wrong end of a an exploding bottle of Scotch. There was, incidentally, a trick bottle of Scotch in The Devastators, though not an exploding one, meaning that this movie actually might have more in common with that book than with the one from which it draws its name. She's great for the few minutes she is on screen, especially when she does her wild gypsy dance, and if you only know hew from Gilligan's Island, you don't how sexy she can be. Sure, she was plenty sexy there, but that's nothing compared to what she's allowed to do in the more liberal world of spy cinema.

On the evil end of the spectrum are the delectable Nancy Kwan and Euro-babe Elke Sommer. Both are hitwomen working for chief villain, Count Massimo Contini, played by Nigel Green. It's not the first time Green has employed Elke Sommer as a hitwoman. He was in much the same position when the two starred together in the spectacular spy spoof Deadlier than the Male. She, like him, is in pretty much the same role here as she was there, and she fills it just as nicely as she fills her brassiere - and she does manage to fill those with considerable beauty. Nancy Kwan, best known for her role in the notorious World of Suzie Wong and less notorious Flower Drum Song, gets to spend this movie in a slinky mini-dress, do kungfu, and spend a lot of time in the back seat of cars chasing Matt Helm -- which is the aspect of her character that makes her similar to Madame Ling in The Devastators. She's top-notch here, and looks absolutely breath-taking -- a state she has managed to maintain well into her sixties, which is where she is now. She had a fistful of spy thrillers under her belt before coming into this one, including The Peking Medallion and an episode of Hawaii Five-O. Although The World of Suzie Wong continues to this day to draw fire from critics for racial stereotyping that proves especially harmful to Asian women, I personally think the most sordid-sounding film on her long list of credits is a 1975 film about cockfighting entitled Supercock. You'd get pretty weird reactions if you walked into a casting agent and said, "Well, I recently appeared in Supercock."

Nigel Green is, naturally, as reliable a stuffy criminal mastermind as he always is. He plays the role with such grace and ease that it's easy to forget how good he is at it. In fact, just about everyone seems to be putting effort into their part, if not seriousness, besides Dean Martin and scriptwriter William McGivern, who up until this point had mostly written for television, though he did have several hard-boiled detective novels and serials to his name. Dean, as we mentioned, is looking worse for the wear, like a formerly smart suit that has simply seen better days and just needs to be retired -- which is sort of what he did. The Wrecking Crew was sort of his last hurrah with filmmaking. He appeared in 1970's all-star disaster pic Airport, and after that worked a schedule as casual and laid-back as his Matt Helm character, with his best work oddly enough being his two appearances alongside Sammy Davis Jr. in the Cannonball Run films. While it's not exactly an artistic high point on which to start winding down your acting career, The Wrecking Crew is an oddly fitting beginning of the end. It's not very good, but once you get over the initial portion of the movie that coughs and sputters like someone trying to learn to drive stick for the first time, it manages to be fun and even endearing.

Most of the rest of the cast are hired goons, many of them karate and judo experts -- including a young Chuck Norris in a "blink and you'll miss him" part as a karate-kicking guard who gets beat up by Dean Martin a couple of times. In real life, Bruce Lee had been a fight instructor and/or friend to a lot of people who ended up making spy movies, including Steve McQueen and James Coburn. Chuck Norris was also in the mix, at the time well known as a world-class tournament fighter. He worked on this film as a fight advisor and, one would assume, choreographer. He would have been, at the time, extremely green when it came to such a job, plus Dean was really getting on in years as opposed to someone like Coburn who was still quite fit in the late 1960s. So most of the fights wouldn't wow a modern martial arts fans, but it's cool to see so many of them in an American film of this vintage, and with Chuck trucking in so many other fighting masters, it means that there is still some good action to be had, even when it's obviously being performed by someone in a cheap Dean Martin wig.

Despite everything that is wrong with it, there are some funny moments. There are a couple times where Sharon Tate does something silly and Dean Martin casts a very subtle, sly glance at the camera. It's not the obvious sort of gag where someone makes a funny face at the camera accompanied to wah-wah-wahhh music as if to say, "Can ya get a load of this, audience?" It's extremely subtle. At one point, I think it's only the eyes that shift ever so slightly to glance directly at the audience in exasperation, like when you're filming someone and they don't know it, and they look your way for a fraction of a second and then look away again, or perhaps like someone trying to slyly figure out if the scene is over. Whatever the case, the fact that it is so subtle and almost imperceptible makes it a lot funnier than if it had been the usual obvious "shattering of the illusion." The interaction between Sharon and Dean is also funny. There is, needless to say, absolutely no romantic chemistry between them even though she'll end up dancing in a sexy nightie for him. But the comedic chemistry actually clicks pretty well, with her as the overly energetic yet hopelessly clumsy young recruit and Dean sort of spoofing his old straight-man role from the Martin and Lewis comedies. With some good, breezy lounge music thrown in, the positives manage to outweigh the drawbacks and keep The Wrecking Crew from being a total wreck, even if it is a little much to take if you watch all four films in the span of a few days.

Matt Helm movie fans -- and yes, there are some of us out there -- agree on very little. Most everyone concedes that The Silencers was an entertaining movie regardless of being a travesty to book fans, but opinions vary wildly on all the others. Well, I guess a lot of people agree that The Ambushers was bloody awful, though we ourselves are not among them. But division on The Wrecking Crew and Murderers' Row is sharp, with each film being heralded as the best and decried as the absolute worst in the series. For my money, The Wrecking Crew is the worst in the series, but I still didn't dislike it. It has a drunken charm to it, and a warmth of spirit that carries the day even when pieces are falling off the vehicle at a dizzying rate. It's a movie that has had a few too many but still manages to maintain its charisma despite the smell of scotch. If you're not partial to the Matt Helm films, then Wrecking Crew is certainly going to try your patience, but if you've made it this far then chances are things like Dean's lazy performance and the lack of much of a script aren't going to bug you any more than they bug us.

At the end of things, we see once again that there's really very little reason to hold the books and the movies up to one another, but it was fun never the less to trace the evolution. Like the Bond books and movies, the Matt Helm of page and screen started out at least somewhat faithful to the plot of the book but got increasingly detached as things went along, until ultimately, the films used the book title and maybe a character name, but very little else. The movies are an acquired taste because of the whimsical, laid-back approach they took, and the fact that quality varies greatly between the first and last of the series. The books are probably also an acquired taste thanks primarily to the violence and rough attitudes about sex and what is and is not acceptable between a couple of adults. Funny that in stories about people paid to kill other people, it's always something about sex that upsets the sensitive. Regardless of that, each of Hamilton's novels maintains a shockingly high level of quality that remains consistent throughout. As far as espionage and thriller novels go, I dare say they can't be beat. And since most of the titles he wrote in the 1960s are slim volumes - clocking in somewhere right around 150 pages each - you can read them in just a little bit more time than it might take you to watch the corresponding movie.

There were, of course, fans that could never reconcile the books with the slapstick nonsense that made it on screen. Hamilton himself was doubtless among this group, though I wonder if his opinion of the movies has softened any now that so much time has passed. I'm glad I had the chance to experience both mediums and am under no requirement to pass judgment on which is better - though I will say at the end of The Wrecking Crew movie, I agreed that it was pretty much time to call things quits. Although the end credits announce that Matt Helm will return in The Ravagers, the returns of The Wrecking Crew weren't good enough to justify one more outing, and it's doubtful Dean Martin would have been up for it anyway. On the other hand, I'm up to The Betrayers in the books - number ten if you are counting - and going at a rate of about two a week (though that will slow since, in the 70s and later, the books started getting considerably thicker). And at the end of each one, I'm happy that there are still so many more to go. Martin's Matt Helm movies are a joyous lark, even at their worst, but it was indeed time for them to wrap things up after The Wrecking Crew. Donald Hamilton's novels are rough and tumble, grim and violent, not entirely easy for the feint-of-heart to digest (though I'd guess they're not the sort of books the feint-of-heart would seek out). And frankly, I can't wait for the next one, and the next one after that.

And so on and so forth.

Labels: Espionage