Das verräterische Auge

American spies are try to locate and rescue the daughter of a dead nuclear scientist. It's believed she may have some of his secrets. The Russians also want to the woman and are somehow able to thwart the Americans at every turn. But how? How do the Russians know what the Americans are doing? Is there a double agent? Or is it something else?

I love Eurospy films from the 60s. So it really pains me to discover a new one that doesn't click for me. Spy in Your Eye includes a lot of the things I look for in a Eurospy film, so it should have worked. The movie features some fantastic European locations, a cool jazzy/loungey spy score, a nice cast (Brett Halsey, Pier Angell, and the incredible Gastone Moschine), a cool secret lair with lots of moving parts, and a fantastical plot device - the bionic eye. However, even though all the ingredients are here, it never really works as well as it should. The reason - I blame the mess of a plot. There are ideas and threads going in all different directions, but none of it ever feels like a coherent story. About half way through, I forgot all about the woman with the nuclear secrets. I couldn't remember what Halsey and Co were trying to do. I just seemed like everyone was doing the most random things. Like the Chinese spy shooting the parade float with the camera-gun. Why? And the ending felt awfully rushed. The movie just ends without much in the way of a resolution. What happened to Dana Andrew's eye? How did Halsey and Angell suddenly end up together? What happened to the rest of the Russian operatives? Where did the Chinese spies go? What happened to the crazy Napoleon statue? There are too many unanswered questions.

Another thing that bothered me about Spy in Your Eye was how underutilized the titular eye was. I would have thought the screenplay would have included a more elaborate use of the spy-eye to trick or set a trap for the baddies. The eye is just sort of forgotten about.

And very ingenious for 1965, a real competition for the original James Bond series, although made on a low budget. Original gadget the radio and knife hidden in a human hump, obviously fake. Some Chinese spies, dressed in black suits, black hats, tie, not even blinking, American spies, Russian spies (Comrade Kommissar), transplanted camera-eye, dehydrating pills, pistol-camera, smart lines, a cool babe (Tania Béryl), action in Berlin, Paris, Amman, Portofino, and a secret formula that everyone wants, tattooed on the scalp of the heroine played by Pier Angeli (it would have been much more interesting if it was tattooed in the groin area). Dana Andrews is cool and credible as the head of American spies, Gastone Moschin is funny as the villainous boss Boris, and Luciano Pigozzi, the Italian equivalent of Peter Lorre, present in many films of the same genre in the '60s, is credible as an assistant villain. Nice music by Riz Ortolani. Worth 8 stars!

Of eight movies Dana Andrews appeared in from 1965, the unknown SPY IN YOUR EYE aka BANG YOU'RE DEAD has the lowest budget, seeming as if filmed on 16MM as Dana's an eye-patched operative provided a glass eye in its place and, unbeknownst to him there's a camera inside care of villainous surgeon Gastone Moschin, who'd later become the most formidable, deserving-to-die baddie The Black Hand in THE GODFATHER 2...

But like most situations when big (or once big) veteran actors get star treatment, there's a young buried lead here in Brett Halsey, whose mission, including taking a train aided by an intrepid cohort with a hunchback that's actually a knife, is to... well...

He travels around a lot and winds up in Arabic countries (supposedly) with intriguing blonde ingenue Pier Angeli, holding back a few mysteries and countered by a brunette femme fatale in Tania Béryl, whose actually more vulnerable than wicked since Gastone, her boss, is as bad as they get.

Meanwhile, an expository Andrews merely bookends the adventure, leaving the action sequences... which actually flow pretty well... to Halsey in a curio too obscure for a cult following but that's, overall, surprisingly satisfying, fitting neatly into Dana's other 1965 low-budgets BRAINSTORM, TOWN TAMER and CRACK IN THE WORLD.

Saw film at a double-feature second run house in the '60s. The spy-in-your-eye alternate title refers to an implanted micro television camera in a spy's eye. I can't remember if it was Dana Andrews. There's a tunnel under the Berlin Wall for the west to spy on the east that figures in the plot. Of course, the tunnel is discovered. There's a gimmick character who's hunchback deformity conceals a radio transmitter. Never understood why, if they could get the camera that small, why not the radio? I remember it fondly, but then I was 12 years old. Representative of '60's spy cycle, but at least they referenced real cold war players instead of made-up spy organizations. Don't know if its available.

I saw this in the theaters on the big screen in brilliant color. Unfortunately all that remains is a red DVD in my collection and a faded one on Y/T. The story moves along at a Bond-like pace with gadgets galore and sets not matched in many other imitation Euro-Spies. During the filming, they used many different European locations including the Baalbek ruins in Lebanon. Pier Angeli is her usual vulnerable self and Brett Halsey is the spy who figures everything out in the end. If you can find a good copy, watch it.