K 2 operazione controspionaggio

The story is very predictable but everything is well done so 74 minutes pass very quickly. Especially since there are some very good actors, all of them, Märta Torén, Howard Duff, Philip Friend, Robert Douglas, Philip Dorn, Walter Slezak, Otto Waldis, etc. Plus, no joke, there are also two dogs that play the role of followers very well. And, even better, two black panthers (if they really exist...), who actually perfectly play their roles to be hunted by everyone, people, all the characters, and the two dogs. I don't know how they managed to film those scenes with the panthers. And, all in the picturesque setting of the mountains of Switzerland.

This is a very good spy film with an astonishingly novel story element. Amongst the 'actors' are two ferocious black panthers. They get loose from their cages in a train and spies from both sides are hunting them because of some microfilm concealed in the collar of one of them. Howard Duff plays the stalwart good guy American who was supposed to be transporting the panthers to a zoo. He is not a spy for either side. He meets the alluring Märta Torén amd falls for her. She is the one who concealed the mircrofilm in the panther's collar after drugging the panther. There are various mysterious men who may be goodies or may be baddies, and most of them have hunting rifles. George Sherman directs this caper and makes the most of it. The entire adventure takes place in the Swiss Alps. How many dogs and men will be killed by the panthers? How many will be killed by spies of the other side? This one is certainly different. The acting and production are good, but one may well be a bit more nervous the next time one visits the big cat section of a zoo.

Howard Duff has picked up a couple of black panthers -- the animal kind -- which he is delivering by train to a circus in Germany. Little does he know that spy Märta Torén has hidden important microfilm in one of their collars. Other spies have gotten wind of this, so they derail the railroad car he is traveling in with the beasts, sending him tumbling down a Swiss mountain. When he awakes, he is in a hotel being tended by the owner, Doctor Walter Slezak, and various characters, all made suspicious by their non-American accents are showing up. Are they there for a newspaper story, or to sketch the beasts, hunt them, or to get the microfilm?

The story of how the term 'maguffin' came to mean something in a film that everyone wants, but it doesn't really matter what it is, is an joke. Two men are traveling in a railroad car. One points to a device the other has. "What's that?" "That's a maguffin." "What's a maguffin." "It's a device for hunting tigers in the Scottish highlands." "There are no tigers in the Scottish highlands." "Then that's never a maguffin."

I'm pretty sure that's the impetus behind the Victor Canning novel this movie is based on. Making them panthers in Switzerland was just intended to obscure the origins. Director George Sherman continues the joke by using he opening music from the Universal Sherlock Holmes series as the opening music to this one, but mostly he handles the story in a straightforward fashion. It's moderately suspenseful. With Philip Friend, Robert Douglas, Philip Dorn, and Kurt Kreuger.

George Sherman, better known as a second feature or assistant director despite having an A flick like COMANCHEROS in his curriculum, comes up with a visually spectacular spy yarn in SPY HUNT, further enhanced by the entrancingly beautiful Marta Toren, herself a spy trying to conceal a negative with supposedly crucial data.

Although what the negative might contain, who it might belong to, and who the information is intended for is never clarified, it is safe to assume that either the action relates to WWII and Germanic-looking heavies are after it, or this is already the Cold War boiling over in the Italian/Swiss Alps.

Regardless of the conflict, it is a riveting film with credible dialogue, good acting from Duff, Friend, Douglas, Donn and Slezak, here playing against type a non-sleazy medical doctor and inn owner. The show, though, is stolen by the mesmerizing beauty of Toren and the panthers roaming wild over lovingly shot rocky, snowy, or arborous landscape. Great action sequences involving the felines, including a fight with a bloodhound. Truly wonderful cinematography by Irving Glassberg.

Well worth watching: 8/10.

Universal-International's grade B suspense film is built around an outre gimmick MacGuffin: incriminating microfilm is smuggled out of Italy on a train in the collar of a male black panther, which Howard Duff has been hired to transport along with its female mate to America. The rest of the show is the hunt for the deadly escaped panthers, with a group of unsavory spies also on their trail.

This movie desperately needed some star power to punch it up. Since Robert Mitchum starred in "The Night of the Hunter" and "Track of the Cat", two classics shot several years later, he would have been perfect as the lead, and throw in his famous co-star of the '40s, Jane Greer, and wow! But instead we have Duff and Marta Toren, plus a colorless supporting cast.

Lousy script gives zero sympathy to the beautiful panthers -instead they're described as symbolizing pure evil. Not for me, I was rooting for them from the git go.

I guess we'll have to wait for Ryan Coogler to direct a big-budget remake! At least he'll know who the true hero and heroine of this story are.