Te jing 009

I haven't had much luck with the Bond rip-offs produced by Shaw Bros. in the 1960s, so I approached INTERPOL (1967) with some trepidation since I'd found little entertainment value in ASIA-POL, ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS, or THE ANGEL STRIKES BACK, all also reviewed on this site. And while INTERPOL is just as shoddily plotted as those films are, it compensates with a fast pace, abundant humor, and a charming lead actor who plays it at just the right pitch. Tang Ching was quite a versatile dramatic actor at Shaw Bros. and mixed contemporary films with swordplay adventures such as VENGEANCE IS A GOLDEN BLADE (1969). He was in the two ANGEL films with Lily Ho cited above, yet his performance here is still quite a revelation because he gets to cut loose and act the part of a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, womanizing gambler, with few restraints. Granted, he's secretly an Interpol agent, but he's allowed to have real fun in his cover role. The character is clever and funny and quite a fashion plate. He attracts women everywhere he goes and beds three of them in the first hour, with the promise of more at the end. In his very first scene, he's on a French beach with two bikini-clad women all over him, one Asian and one white. He's less like Sean Connery's James Bond than like Dean Martin's Matt Helm, who was evidently the more likely model for this film.

The half-hearted plot has to do with a gang running a counterfeit operation printing U.S. dollars in Hong Kong and shipping them out to other cities in Asia. Our hero, Chen Tianhong, Agent 009, has to locate the operation and shut it down before they can get the money out of the country. At one point, he gets into a fight with traffic cops and is thrown in jail, all to divert the bad guys pursuing him. In jail, he does card tricks and impresses the other prisoners, including a genial pickpocket (Li Kun), who winds up as his comical sidekick throughout. At another point he romances the femme fatale (top-billed Margaret Tu Chuan) who helps run the counterfeit gang.

There are a lot of ridiculously convenient coincidences along the way and whenever the plot starts to kick in, things slow down considerably. But when our hero is running around visiting clubs, gambling, making out with available women, and bantering with his new sidekick, it's genuinely entertaining. There are two songs in a nightclub sequence, the second one being a nice, melodic slow number performed by an unbilled singer. There's not much action to speak of, other than a grand, if far-fetched shootout in the villain's mansion parlor. The hero and his sidekick get handcuffed and locked in a basement workshop with a time bomb at one point and we have to wait and see what kind of hidden device the hero will come up with to get free. Early in the film, he introduces the most outlandish spy gadget I've ever seen--a special type of chewing gum that, when sprayed with perfume, turns hard as steel. He uses it to break into offices and hotel rooms by chewing the gum, sticking it into the lock, spraying it with perfume he's filched from one of his lovers, and then twisting it to open the door!

The director's credited name here, Yang Shu-hsi, was actually a pseudonym for Japanese director Ko Nakahira, who's best known for the cult film, RICA (1972), a Toho response to Toei's "pinky violence" series. He knows how to keep things moving and get the best out of his actors. There's a John Barry-style music score that fits the action smoothly throughout. Margaret Tu Chuan is an attractive and effective villain; Shen Yi plays a voluptuous nightclub singer who gives our hero some nice attention; and Lily Ho (co-star of the aforementioned ANGEL films) turns up in a very cute cameo at the end.

There's an international money counterfeiting gang in town, and Interpol agent 009, Chen Tianhong (Tang Ching) is sent to investigate.

Like Lo Wei's Golden Buddha from 1966, Interpol attempts to bring a Chinese James Bond to the screen, although the two films are otherwise unrelated.

Agent 009 has much in common with his more famous counterpart – he's a suave womaniser, heavy drinker (although he prefers brandy to a vodka martini) and is deadly with any form of weapon you can to give him. He's also got an arsenal of gadgets to get him out of scrapes, such as a watch with several uses (including a listening device), a lighter that can turn into a smoke bomb and chewing gum that can open locked doors. However, that's pretty much where the similarities end, as Chen Tianhong has the charisma of a housebrick. Perhaps sensing this, he is given a sidekick in the shape of Huang Mao (Lee Kwan – best known for his appearance as Ah Kun in Bruce Lee's The Big Boss) who runs around Hong Kong in a Beatle suit and provides comic relief.

Chen Tianhong (who proclaims, and I swear to God this is true: "Danger? That's my middle name") woos the ladies despite some stinky chat up lines (he even comes out with "do you come here often?" to one lady). This is perhaps the sauciest Chinese film from the 60's I've seen as Agent 009 canoodles with just about every lady he comes into contact with and there's even a bare bottom at one point. This is a far cry from the previous year's Golden Buddha, which is extremely coy in comparison.

The story concerns a money counterfeiting gang headed by a beautiful mysterious lady (the tragic Margaret Tu Chuan, who would commit suicide before the decade came to an end at the age of 27) and it's here that another problem becomes apparent – the villains are all a bit pedestrian and the locations are very domestic, with the action all taking place in Hong Kong. Part of the appeal of the Bond movies is the exotic locations and the overblown villains, and this film is a letdown on both points.

There is some enjoyment to be had from the film, despite its drawbacks. However, I'm not sure all the fun is intentional. There's a scene where the bad guys are beating up some guy, who manages to get away in an unguarded car. He gets away and then drives his car straight off the nearest quay and into the water. One of the perusing villains just mutters "silly man" and shakes his head – which I found hilariously funny. The final reel mercifully turns up the action a couple of notches, and another Bond device comes into play – the age-old ploy of the bad guys tying up the hero (with sidekick in this case), planning a grisly fate for them and then scooting off and assuming the hero gets splattered across a large area. In this case, the villains leave 009 to stew until the bomb they've planted goes off and turns Chen Tianhong into a disgusting red mess.

So how long do the villains give Chen Tianhong to ponder his fate while they make a speedy getaway? Two minutes? Five minutes? Surely no more than ten minutes? Actually, they give him two hours. In that time, Bond would have got out, killed an army of henchmen, downed a couple of vodka martinis, bedded the villainess, killed her and quipped about it to his leading lady while making a witty quip over the radio to an exasperated M. Chen Tianhong barely gets out with his skin intact, and this sums up the film in a nutshell.

Interpol is just too dull most of the time to be enjoyable and suffers from some plot logicalities to boot. It's not a complete write-off, and the 60's fashions and sensibilities are always fun to watch, but this is not even on par with the more cringeworthy Roger Moore-era Bonds.