Modesty Blaise, súper agente, súper espía

This is a parody is based on a British comic strip, and the film came off as another one of the James Bond spoofs that littered the screen in the 1960's (The Matt Helm series, the Dr. Goldfoot series, etc).

The movie is about superspy Modesty Blaise (Vitti), who can change her appearance just by snapping her fingers. She is hired by the British government to protect a shipment of diamonds, which international thief Gabriel (Bogarde) is after. Blaise only accepts the job if Willie Garvin (Stamp) is allowed to work with her. Film goes on its way from there.

Script is infuriating because it misses opportunity after opportunity for satire. It assumes that just because Blaise is a woman superspy, that alone is hilarious. Vitti does her best, and sounds like a smoky voiced Garbo, but the script leaves her high and dry. She gets most of her laughs from intonation, sight gags, and the glint in her eyes. Stamp is on the sidelines, although his appearance changes at will also. Bogarde as Gabriel is the funniest person in the film, whether he's refusing an egg because it's overcooked or reminding a potential killer that it's rude to point.

This one does have Bogarde, and Blaises' changes are spectacular, and so are the sets. There are setpieces that are homages to famous directors, which I found amusing. However, it just goes on too long for what little it is trying to do, there are too many dry spells without laughs, and Bogarde and company are off-screen for too long. Still worth a watch--maybe.

A delicious phantasmagoria of feathers, frolics, fashion, false eyelashes, frivolity, fol-de-rol, foppish frothiness and all that was mod and mad in that giddy year, nineteen-sixty-six. Monica Vitti is nothing like the comic book character created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway--the original stories have been reprinted and are worth checking out. In his memoirs Terence Stamp recalled that Vitti was so clumsy it was hard for her to get through even simple stunts. The film is in reality a paean to style and to the triumph of presentation over substance which was a lot of what Sixties fashions were about. Vitti's wigs pretty much steal the show--Dirk Bogarde, in blond toupee as evil mastermind Gabriel, and Rosella Falk as Mrs Fothergill (a sort of sadistic Emma Peel) clean up on what's left. The music is a lot of fun--indeed fun is the operative word here. Serious squares can keep their dull movie critic vibes out!

Following the success of the Bond franchise, spy films were highly popular in the sixties, and Peter O'Donnell's popular comic strip "Modesty Blaise", which featured the adventures of a glamorous female secret agent, must have seemed like a natural subject for cinematic treatment. This film was the result. The basic plot is a simple one; Modesty is recruited by British Intelligence to foil a plan by gang of jewel thieves to intercept a shipment of diamonds to a Middle Eastern sheikh.

The heroine is played by the Italian actress Monica Vitti in her first English-speaking role- something I have always regarded as an uninspired piece of casting because Vitti's spoken English was not particularly fluent, although she certainly had the looks for the part. O'Donnell's Modesty was always a brunette, but Vitti mostly plays her as a blonde, although her looks, costume hairstyle and hair colour seem to change at random. Male viewers might be disappointed to note that Vitti only spends a short time dressed in the skin-tight leather catsuit which is the hallmark of the Modesty Blaise of the strip cartoon.

Some spy films of the era, such as "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", took a serious look at intelligence work, but the majority aimed to emulate the relatively light-hearted tone of the Bonds. Indeed, many aimed to go even further in this direction and treated their subject-matter in a comedic way. "Modesty Blaise" falls firmly into this category. Although the plot involves what in real life would be serious crimes, notably robbery and murder, the scriptwriter Evan Jones and the director Joseph Losey refuse to treat the story with any seriousness, instead aiming for something light, camp and at times verging on the surreal. Jones's script was, officially, based upon a story by O'Donnell, but he departed from it so radically that O'Donnell virtually disowned the movie.

I felt that making the film in this way was a mistake. The Bond films, at their best, have always relied upon striking the right balance between tension and humour. This balance has occasionally been upset; some of the Roger Moore Bonds were too jokey and light-hearted, and the Timothy Dalton ones from the eighties tended to be too heavy-handed, but in the Sean Connery era of the sixties the film-makers generally got it right. The makers of "Modesty Blaise" get it very wrong indeed. There is no tension, and we never care about what happens to any of the characters. Moreover, "comedic" does not always equate to "humorous"; the script is supposed to be light-hearted but never produces any actual laughs.

The result is a film which is supposed to be a comedy-thriller, but which might more accurately be regarded as a thriller which does not thrill and a comedy which fails to amuse. There are some well-known stars involved, such as Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde, but their talents just seem wasted. It is no surprise that "Modesty Blaise", unlike some of the Bond copycat franchises, such as the "Man from UNCLE" series, did not give rise to a single sequel. 3/10

Clive Revill as the Scottish book keeper is superb. His depiction of the stereotypical penny-pinching Scot is a comic highlight of this film. In one scene, he and Gabriel sit at a table while Mrs Featherstone is hanged in the background. Gabriel is self absorbed in soliloquy and McWhirter is lost in his financial analysis. Neither sees the action behind them. Later, he even tells one of Gabriel's men not to waste ammunition in the midst of a gun battle! And in the closing scene of the movie, his loyalty to Gabriel is comically both touching and courageous. While Gabriel, staked out in the sun cried out for "champagne", McWhirter, dressed in a kilt, sneaks up indian-fashion on the arab camp to rescue him. Sure the film was disjointed, but Clive Revill's McWhirter made it all worthwhile.

Truth be told, I hated this movie on first viewing many years ago and, in fact, I only just now purchased the utterly bare-bones Fox DVD for three reasons: the disc is now out-of-print; I found it very cheaply (surprisingly) at a local retailer; and, most importantly perhaps, I was prepared to give it another chance thanks to my ongoing (and very rewarding) Losey-thon.

To say that Joseph Losey was a strange choice to helm this picture would be a massive understatement. In his previous films, very rarely (if at all) had he shown that he had any sense of humor, much less the kind of campy, knowing and irreverent one essential for successful comic strip adaptations. As it happens, the film was not well-received and both leads - Monica Vitti (who apparently phoned Michelangelo Antonioni everyday during the shoot) and Terence Stamp - were unhappy making it; there are those who even go so far as to consider it not just Losey's nadir but quite simply one of the worst films ever made! Well, based on that first TV viewing of it, I probably would have endorsed such sentiments myself...

However, my re-acquaintance with it proved something of a minor revelation: while still as uneven as I recalled, I couldn't now deny that there were some delightful elements which, on the whole, made the film palatable and, at times, even endearing: Evan Jones' script was occasionally quite witty, Losey's own trademark odd compositions (usually so overpowering in his melodramas) suited the "anything goes" mood of the material, Jack Hildyard's glossy cinematography of attractive Mediterranean locations, outrageous outfits and groovy production design was top-notch and Losey's frequent composer Johnny Dankworth provided an infectious score.

And what about that cast? Monica Vitti (who would have guessed that she could ever be as attractive and sexy as this judging by her work for Antonioni?), Terence Stamp (gleefully throwing knives, bedding women and engaging in a charming, impromptu singing duet with Vitti while driving up a mountaintop and reprising it for the action-packed finale), Dirk Bogarde (ironically named Gabriel, he was never campier - or gayer - than as the silver-wigged, self-proclaimed "villain of the piece"), Michael Craig (as Vitti's ex-lover and pursuing British agent), Harry Andrews (as a top British Secret Service official firing away bullets from his umbrella), Alexander Knox (as a bumbling British MP forever mispronouncing names and giving out the wrong information), Clive Revill (for no apparent reason in a dual role: as Bogarde's right-hand man who keeps the accounts even on the field of battle and as Vitti's "father", an Arabian Sheik!), Rossella Falk (as the lethal Miss. Fothergill, Bogarde's manly assistant, who keeps a regiment of mostly aging men in shape through arduous physical exercise), Saro Urzi (as a lowly, opera-singing henchman of Bogarde's), Tina Aumont (as an ill-fated conquest/informer of Stamp's) and real-life magician Silvan (as a duplicitous circus performer).

Ultimately, while the plot is too convoluted to follow at times and the film itself may not be in the same league as Mario Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968) or even Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA (1968), it's certainly an engaging spy spoof and far better than its reputation suggests.