People say that all you need to make a movie nowadays are a couple of actors in front of a greenscreen. The Jerry Cotton series proves they were doing it forty years ago, only with back projection. The series of bi weekly pulp novels were brought to the screen starring Rock Hudson's friend Georg Nader, and using the most American looking Germans they could find as support. This is the third entry, in which the crafty G-man has to find a stolen truckload of nitroglycerin (Wo is der Nitro?) before the stockshots of New York city surrounding him are evaporated.
You gotta be amazed by the sheer amount of grainy and faded footage of the Big Apple they found for every occasion (though sometimes it looks looks more like Vegas). Only once did they have to go out and film near some real life bushes. None of the cars have any windows either, leading to a crazy sequence where Cotton is disguised as a window cleaner to spy on some thugs. They try to shoot him but only hit glass and he almost falls to his death. At that moment his useless partner Phil walks in from the other side and gets hit on the head with the glass from a car window! This was probably cheaper to get than a breakable vase and also meant they could use the same sound effect twice.
This is the sort of series Roger Corman would have made had he lived outside of the U.S. (Rogier Kormann?). Bad guys include a jewelery stealin' platinum blonde and a crime boss who is lying down all the time (being massaged, having a steam bath or just relaxing while his cronies torture people). One of the best things is the soundtrack which changes style (cocktail music, blues) per scene. Jerry himself seems to have the Shadows as a backing group and sometimes we here "Thomas Crown Affair" like madness going on complete with incomprehensible lyrics. Time is running out and the temperature is rising, but it proves hard to get excited about action sequences on top of a bridge or in front of a train when there is such an obviously difference between the fore- and background.
5 out of 10 for effort
