Guet-apens à Téhéran

Stewart Granger may have been critical of his years with Metro Goldwyn Mayer but most of his subsequent European films are a sorry bunch and this one has to be the bottom of the barrel. Aimed at the slowest-witted viewer, it suffers from a moronic script, garish cinematography, atrocious score and the very worst type of mid-Atlantic dubbing.

A previous reviewer who referred to this as 'a little disappointing, considering the cast' has a genius for understatement. Granted that lifestyles have to be maintained and the taxman kept at bay, Messrs. Granger, Jurgens and Celi should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for taking part in this unadulterated trash, having presumably read the script beforehand.

It is generally accepted that audiences feed on crap but here it is dished up without a trace of originality. Should there be a Circle of Hell reserved for fifth rate directors then Herr Koehler surely resides there.

Of the numerous James Bond knock-offs produced in the 1960s, A TARGET FOR KILLING is a guilty pleasure. It may sport an unoriginal and tedious story line, but makes earnest stabs at satirizing Bond movie cliches, and features an excellent tongue-in-cheek performance by Stewart Granger, as James Vine, suave and debonair FBI agent.

We find Vine on a passenger airplane with Sandra Perkins (Karin Dor), construction company publicist and heiress who will inherit millions on her upcoming 25th birthday. The plane's pilot is played by familiar character actor Klaus Kinski, and the stewardess pouring poison into Sandra's drink is played by Erika Remberg. She, Kinski, and the co-pilot parachute out of the plane in mid-flight, leaving Vine and Sandra to land the plane.

Vine's intervention upsets the plans of The Giant (Curd Jürgens), an evil mastermind hiding out in a decrepit monastery with an army of thugs dressed as yellow-hooded monks. Sandra's uncle hires The Giant to kill her before she can collect the inheritance, but The Giant wants the cash for himself.

In a story that is more confused and complicated than most spy flicks of the period, Sandra continually dodges bullets and with Vine's intervention simply won't be killed. This frustrates The Giant no end. He resorts to kidnapping her, chaining her to an electrified cage (powered by electric eels!) and subjecting her to mind control via a telepathy expert.

This Austrian-Italian co-production, shot mainly in Yugoslavia, boasts a superior supporting cast of busy continental actors. Rupert Davies appears as a police inspector who enjoys handling poisonous snakes; Adolfo Celi is Sandra's uncle, who is eaten by starved rats; and Mollie Peters, a former Bond girl from THUNDERBALL, appears in a brief nude scene.

Around the same time A TARGET FOR KILLING was made, Granger appeared in a short run of spy thrillers that included THE TRYGON FACTOR and CARNIVAL OF KILLERS. Only THE TRYGON FACTOR saw any wide theatrical release in the U. S,. In 1968. A TARGET FOR KILLING was sold directly to American TV in 1969, where it played on the late-late-late show for years.

Manfred R. Köhler also wrote and directed AGENT 505: DEATH TRAP IN BEIRUT, also a spy thriller, the same year.

I have always been since my teens an avid fan of Stewart Granger, eagerly waiting for his next film to hit the screen. And I have been on the alert for films of his post-Hollywood period, to complete my collection. When this film came my way, I snapped it up eagerly. My disappointment was all the greater. What a waste of talent. Stewart Granger, Curt Jurgens, Adolfo Celli, Klaus Kinski in a minimal role, Karin Dor, all of them mixed up in a nonsensical and incomprehensible story, with any connection to reality being by pure chance. An awful soundtrack completed the disaster. I gave the film 3, not that it was worth it but for purely sentimental reasons. What a pity! I am sure that with better direction and a straightening up of the story, the film would have been quite a good one.

A secret agent (Stewart Granger) is charged with preventing a crime syndicate's plot to assassinate a young heiress (Karin Dor).

Stewart Granger is one of those actors who could make anything enjoyable- his charisma and charm is impressive as always and he's no different here in this fairly entertaining Eurospy thriller; the pace is brisk, and I liked the scenes where Granger and Karin Dor were interacting or Granger knocking out the villains, and Curd Jorgensen is quite menacing; definitely a warm up audition for his role as Stromberg in a future Bond film. Matter of fact, there's a bevy of actors - Molly Peters, Adolfo Celi, and the pretty Karin Dor. Klaus Kinski is good as a henchman with a conscious.

However, it's the budget that makes things appear tacky/ cheap. It's a bit rough around the edges and lacks stylishness. The execution, of lets say, the hero landing the aircraft wasn't tense enough. The guitar music became annoying after a while. Bond films would've been tacky without its significant budget and production design.

Bearing that in mind, there's some OTT stuff in here that you might like - Villainous monks, a listening device in an egg shell, brainwashing, a chess playing villain, a sadistic hench lady, and a snake loving Commissioner- there's some tongue-in-cheekiness, thanks to Granger, and some ok action. The ending, though, felt rushed and flat.

Stewart Granger is after a generally evil organization run by Curd Jurgens but the real story has to do with Jurgens' efforts to kill Karen Dor and get the money she is soon to inherit.

Granger is again an FBI agent and indeed, is even supposedly the same man who thwarted the smuggling racket in "Red Dragon" but he has a different name; James Vine. Luckily, this time the results for viewers are much improved as the groovy credit sequence will attest. Hip graphics and a cool rock song kick things off nicely. Here Granger isn't quite the smarmy character he was in "Red Dragon" but he is still the unlikely beneficiary of a relationship with a pretty young thing, even pledging to marry her in the end!

Director Manfred Kohler (From Beirut With Love) has made a vast improvement on Granger's previous spy outing and the talented cast is a real asset to the film's modest successes.