Suspense au deuxième bureau

This film essentially begins with a noted French professor boarding an airplane which then crashes under mysterious conditions. As it so happens, a French secret agent by the name of "Lieutenant Bordy" (Gil Delamare) was also on this plane and, even though the professor is killed, Lieutenant Bordy manages to survive. Since the professor was carrying documents related to a top-secret invention with him when the plane crashed-which have subsequently disappeared-Lieutenant Bordy is then given instructions to impersonate the professor with the hope of smoking out the enemy agents responsible for the airplane disaster and recovering whatever plans they may have on their possession. The problem is that once he arrives at the professor's home the people who live and work there begin to act quite suspiciously and he soon realizes that he has nobody there that he can really trust. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a rather odd EuroSpy film which, judging by the film quality and the poor editing, was obviously made with an extremely low-budget which clearly had a negative impact on the final product. It does, however, manage to capture the Cold War era to a certain degree-but even then that one attribute cannot alter the fact that this was not a good film and for that reason I have rated it accordingly.

Spy films are typically known for their exotic locations but the bulk of this film's short running time is spent inside a house. A cramped house. This (obviously) low budget entry does have a couple of things going for it however. The lone bright spot in the acting department is this early role for Michel Lemoine, he of the glowing eyes you would most probably recognize from Antonio Margheriti's Wild, Wild Planet (65).

Other than Lemoine's limited role, there are two main reasons for sticking with the film. One is the score; a mixture of experimental free jazz and traditional jazz that is fun and interesting entertainment for the ears while there isn't much for the eyes to feast upon. The other is the last fifteen minutes that contain a car chase through the Parisian night and subway fisticuffs. Photographed in the film noir tradition, these sequences take on an almost expressionistic look while the free jazz adds another level of tension to the goings on.

Gil Delamare was a famous stuntman who died young, at only 41 years old, I've read a book written by him, "My job is risk", long time ago, when I was a teenager. Here in this "The Spy Catcher" he's the actor in the lead role, a kind of idiot James Bond. The film starts promisingly, but after only a few minutes, the "action" moves inside a house and stays there for about an hour. Nothing happens anymore and you want it to end as soon as possible. Finally, we have a chase through the tunnels of the Paris Metro, which, if it hadn't been so slow, would have been interesting.