Catch Me a Spy

A woman's husband is kidnapped on her honeymoon and accused of spying by Soviet officials. After the first swap for a Soviet agent falls through, the bride goes in search of another spy to swap for her groom.

What do you think of a spy movie starring Kirk Douglas? With other roles filled by the likes of Trevor Howard, Tom Courtenay, Richard Pearson and Jonathan Cecil?

Think again.

"Catch Me a Spy" isn't so much bad as simply slipshod and clumsy. And it looks like it had a budget of five pounds; ten pounds, tops.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But it's not a pretty sight.

For curiosity seekers only.

An amusing and adventurous espionage caper from the early-'70s. I like some of the imagery - the scenes filmed at Loch Leven, Perth & Kinross and Oban (?) are evocative and show the bleak beauty of Scotland. The adventure film ''Kidnapped'' was filmed nearby at roughly the same time at Stirling and Loch Fyne faeturing cockney actor Michael Caine. Those years '71-72 had a strangely ''Caledonian-ish'' feel. Auburn-haired, steely-eyed, lantern-jawed US actor, Kirk Douglas as ''Andrej'' a Rumanian spy is very good and is adept at comedy. He had recently been in the compelling adventure film ''The Light at the Edge of the World'' which was produced in Spain in the autumn of 1970. Some of the comedy scenes have a Python-esque sense of slapstick. Patrick Mower (''Emmerdale Farm'') is good. The writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are famous for brilliant '70s tv comedies ''Porridge'' and ''Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads''. Gaunt, darkhaired Swiss-born White-Russian actor Sascha Pitoeff is very good too.

You wouldn't guess from this film that the writers were amongst the most talented in the UK.Also come to it what is Kirk Douglas doing.Was he that desperate for work.Robert comes across best though it is not much of a contest.Avoid this.

When the Citadel Film Series book The Films Of Kirk Douglas was first issued, To Catch A Spy had been released in Europe, but not in America. It seems to have had very limited showings on this side of the pond.

The film is a lightweight spoof of the Cold War with Marlene Joubet a French girl married to a British subject trying desperately hard to get her husband back who has been arrested for espionage. Turns out he's made a deal with the Soviets and was deliberately arrested so they could affect a prisoner exchange. When the original exchange doesn't work out due to the most hilarious sequence in the film, Joubet looks to affect her own exchange and settles on Kirk Douglas, a most mysterious Romanian who keeps showing up all the time. She has to because her uncle, a member of Parliament played by Trevor Howard can't seem to close the deal.

Some nice location shooting in several spots in Europe is the best thing this film. The players look truly bored with this project and just phone in the performances.

To Catch A Spy will never make anyone's top 10 list of best Kirk Douglas films.

A light and completely inoffensive spy spoof, To Catch A Spy is not the kind of film that demands high calibre acting talent. Yet for reasons best known to themselves, established stars like Kirk Douglas, Trevor Howard, Marlene Jobert and Tom Courtenay lend their skills to this 1971 potboiler, making it seem a bigger and better picture than it really is. The first three quarters of the movie are virtually a total loss, with dispirited plotting and pacing, but it perks up into something resembling life during the final quarter as the action shifts to a secluded, deserted Scottish hotel. By this time, most viewers will have given up the ghost - but for the handful still watching these climactic scenes are actually quite amusing.

Married couple Fabienne (Marlene Jobert) and John (Patrick Mower) are honeymooning in Bucharest when the latter is arrested by the secret police. The anxious Fabienne is forced to return to Britain without him. Meanwhile, it is revealed to the viewers that John is actually a spy working for the Russians, and that his arrest was just an elaborate deception created so that they could contact him. Fabienne is duped into believing that John is now a hostage, his only hope of release being that the British secret service might release one of their Russian prisoners in exchange for him. Still unaware of the double-cross, Fabienne works tirelessly with her uncle Sir Trevor (Trevor Howard) - a foreign office diplomat - to get the British government to trade a Russian spy for her husband. Just when it seems that a deal has been struck, the spy they choose to bargain with is accidentally killed. Fabienne instead sets her sights on Romanian spy Andrej (Kirk Douglas), but as she tries desperately to trap him in order to use him in the exchange, she discovers herself to be falling in love with him. All is resolved in a last-minute revelation at an exchange-rendezvous-point near the Iron Curtain.

To Catch A Spy was penned by the expert comedy script duo Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement (the latter also directed), but they seem to be having an off-day. The film looks terribly dated, with a storyline that resurrects all the clichés of the spy movies and caper movies that were popular at the time. Of the main actors, Tom Courtenay registers best, providing some mirth as an inept agent. The others don't disgrace themselves, but they're stuck with nothing roles and can't really get across characterisations worth caring about. The film is occasionally pleasing to the eye, with some interesting locations, but on the whole it is a rather uninspired and unremarkable time killer. Everyone involved has certainly done much better.