Matt Helm il silenziatore

THE SILENCERS was the first in a line of spy films starring the legendary Dean Martin, but it will probably be enjoyed more by fans of old Dino than by fans of the genre. For one thing, there's no way it can be taken seriously as an action-adventure, with all of the star's mugging and leering, his double entendres, and frequent song parodies that come out of nowhere. But neither is it really a comedy, since there is a lot of realistic violence and mayhem.

Rather, it hovers back and forth and in between the two, a world in which Martin is completely at home as the all too casual superspy Matt Helm, agent for ICE (Intelligence and Counter Espionage). You know that he'll meander along in his own inimitable way, boozing, joking, and scoring, until he saves the world at film's end. If you accept that, then you can kick back and enjoy the show for its low-brow humor and the adequate action.

Forget the plot. I'm not sure that I can explain much beyond relating that the evil BIG O (Bureau of International Government and Order) is out to start WWIII between the superpowers. The main bad guys are played by Victor Buono (made up to be Chinese!), Robert Webber, and Arthur O'Connell. Each of them have done far better work elsewhere, and there's nothing in their roles here that couldn't have been handled by a call to central casting.

The ladies are another matter. Helm is joined by a partner, played by Daliah Lavi (in a step down from the previous year's LORD JIM), who tries very hard in her role. Making a better impression are Cyd Charisse and Stella Stevens. Charisse, the only female co-star in Martin's "over forty" age bracket, proves that she's still got it with a libido-raising routine during the credits, and turns up again later as an exotic dancer who passes along some vital microfilm during her act.

Stevens really livens things up, as a redhead who is suspected of being an enemy agent because she's the girlfriend(?) of Webber, and happens to wind up with the microfilm. She's innocent (well, at least of being a spy) but gets dragged along, accompanying Helm on his mission. Later on, her character turns out to be not quite so dumb, and does her part to battle the bad guys and save the world. While Helm is singlehandedly mowing down the enemy, she shows more ingenuity using her favorite new toy, the reverse-firing gun (a clever weapon, as you'll see).

Again, this film will be enjoyed if you know what to expect, and you'll know what to expect if you know Dino, who played Helm the way he played himself. If you're a fan of his well-worn persona, then that's probably good enough. Along with his easygoing style and humor, throw in assorted action sequences, and many beautiful women (especially sexy Stevens, who does a lot with her role), and you've got THE SILENCERS. It succeeds as very passable entertainment, and is certainly the best of the entire Matt Helm series.

By the mid 60's Dean Martin was on top of the entertainment world, even above his pal Sinatra. His hit records even knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts in 1964, his film career was going great after his break-up with partner Jerry Lewis nearly 10 years earlier, and his weekly variety show-part comedy, part music- was in the Top Ten. And in the film world, thanks to Sean Connery and the 007 franchise, spy flicks had become the biggest and hippest genre. So it was natural to pair up Dean in the first- and best- of 4 spy spoofs with Dino as super cool Secret Agent Matt Helm, who also doubles as a photographer of beautiful scantliy clad women for "Slaymate" magazine. The nonsensical plot in "The Silencers" isn't important, but Dean seems to have a lot of fun. But besides Dino playing the King of Cool the other reason to watch are a collection of drop dead sexy co-stars. Dalilah Lavi, Beverly Adams, Cyd Charisse-showing her incredible legs and figure in a couple dancing routines, and most notably Stella Stevens as a sexy bimbo, quite naive, who somehow gets caught up in esponiage ring ran by the Evil Crime Organization, "Big O." Double entendres flourish through out "The Silencers" as do the gorgeous women, all dressed provactively. Plenty of gimmicks and laughs in this...Bond movies of the period are serious dramas in compaison.

The Matt Helm movies were in fairly steady rotation on the local UHF channel in my town in the 70s. I watched them quite a bit as a kid, when I was little because they involved gadgets and explosion,and when I was a slightly older kid because they involved gadgets and explosions and literally acres of almost-naked gorgeous women. Needless to say, this movie was a pretty big hit in 1966 when it was first released, however it trades pretty much entirely on the desire of teen aged boys to see as many nearly-naked women as possible. This was back in the days before VCRs and DVDs and Cable TV made smut into a major industry, and when it was presumably much harder to get a copy of Playboy if you were a kid, so the appeal was not to be understated.

Alas, on this end of the 20th century, where you literally can't check your Email w/out someone offering you pictures of naked women, that aspect of the film has lost some of it's allure. The movie is something like a late night soft-core Cinemax film, only without the actual nudity. (Well, actually, there's plenty of nudity, most of which is conveniently obscured by a chair back, or a coffee cup or whatever) The plot is, well, mostly incoherent, and functions mainly as a means of getting Helm from one sexual situation to another. If the Bond formula is "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" then the Matt Helm formula is 3-parts Kiss Kiss to one quarter cup of Bang, so it actually gets rather tedious.

The direction is pretty much atrocious, and that adds to the proto-soft-core feel of the film. Production values are on the whole about equal to the level of a good Irwin Allen TV show, and the gadgets are pretty lame, even by the standards of the day, and there is frankly just too much sex. I don't mean that to sound prudish, but come on! That's why Playboy pads out each issue with articles about Peruvian oil wells, it can't *All* be about the T&A. Ideally, a spy parody like this should be something like an Oreo cookie, where the sweet, creamy middle of Stella Stevens (Pretty amazing as a redhead, BTW) is sandwiched in between the chocolate cookies of good storytelling and an interesting plot. Instead, this film plays out like you've scraped the filling off of three or four Double Stuffs, and piled it all on an Andes Candy, so that in the end all you've got is a big pile of sweetened lard and, well, it never ends up tasting as good as you thought it would when you started slapping it all together.

Other Caveats: The brilliant Victor Buono is horribly underused in this film playing a character that *might* possibly be Chinese, but more likely simply *wants* to be Chinese. Or he might simply be an overweight female impersonator with a particularly unfortunate fashion sense. Another odd feature is that the movie is at it's worst when Dino actually acts. Most of the time he sleepwalks through the film in his trademark personality, seeming slightly buzzed, but at random intervals he'll actually act and emote in a scene ("Did you think you bought me off last night?") and then suddenly you remember that Dino was one half of the second-most-successful comedy team of all time, and actually a pretty talented actor on occasion. Those glimmers pull you out of the films sugar shock, and, well, it's distracting. The film was apparently running rather short, so they decided to pad it out with a lengthy and pathologically un-funny scene where we spend about ten minutes watching Stella Stevens attempt to get out of a station wagon in the rain and repeatedly fall in the mud. It's painful to watch, and I can't believe they didn't cut it out. Horrible.

On the bright side, Stella is amazing looking, and not at all shy about it. Indeed, all the women in the film have that inexplicable mid-60s va-va-voom quality, but the most striking of them is the 45-year-old Cyd Charise who is just jaw-droppingly sexy in her two brief appearances in the film. And as ever, it's impossible not to like Dino.

Two notes for the DVD version of this film: If you saw this show on UHF back in the day, the uncut DVD version is...well, surprisingly lurid. There's nothing on here that wouldn't get past a network censor in 2006, but even so the tone of it is kind of aggressively pornographic, so keep that in mind before you screen it for the youth group on Wednesday night at church. Also, stick around through the end credits! There's a teaser for the next film in the series that features an almost-blooper by Martin, who's clearly thinking "What in the hell am I doing?" that makes the preceding 90 minutes of cheeze whiz all the more worthwhile.

I recently bought the DVD, and I forgot how much fun it was. It's not rocket science at all, and one could argue that even as an obvious spy spoof (in the best Bond and Flint traditions) it hiccups a bit throughout its own pretensions: Dean Martin's photographer-as-spy is properly cool, but there's a fine line between being laid-back and appearing to sleep on camera. (I could also say something about a modern audience being more than a bit startled at the immense objectifying of women throughout the whole film, but society is currently enjoying a renaissance of all things politically INcorrect and telling the rest of us to shut up- so I'll shut up.) Martin's female co-stars are all a smörgåsbord of beauty and sex appeal- every last one of them, but the one who seems to have emerged with the strongest impression is Stella Stevens' accident-prone klutz (whose airhead personality got on my nerves after a while, but I cannot deny that she looked fantastic as a redhead). For me, I preferred the enigma that is Daliah Lavi (a black-haired siren of Mideastern gorgeousness), who emerges a double agent and semi-lover of Helm's. The film does two brilliant things which take its visual appeal to dizzying heights: It launches the film with clever opening credits which peek under a bevy of gorgeous strippers, each doing a 'legitimate' strip-tease (no true nudity). Ending the strip parade is the film's other secret weapon: Cyd Charisse. I love that TPTB had the foresight to acknowledge a younger and older demographic at the same time- while simultaneously spotlighting one of filmdom's greatest dancers in a cameo (at the age of 45)- with the longest, most gorgeous legs in history. After singing the title song Charisse emerges a second time about 37 minutes into the film (in an important plot point) to perform a stunning dance in a Vegas nightclub to the Vikki Carr song "In Santiago-" then disappears much too quickly. Otherwise, there is a lot of fun with Martin poking fun at his own persona: many songs become sexual double-entendre, an audio cameo by Sinatra is quickly nixed, and so forth.

He's super spy Matt Helm.All the girls love him and all the men envy him.And some want to kill him.In the 1960's they made four Matt Helm movies.The Silencers (1966) is the first one of them directed by Phil Karlson.In this movie Matt Helm's job is to prevent WWIII.Not an easy job to do, except for Matt Helm.Matt Helm movies were James Bond parodies.They did the same Austin Powers did some decades later.And this agent could also sing! The actor who portrayed Matt Helm was super cool Dean Martin.The leading lady of this first movie was portrayed by super sexy Stella Stevens (Gail).Daliah Lavi plays Tina.The singing and dancing beauty Cyd Charisse is Sarita.The movie history has pretty much forgotten these movies.I found The Silencers rather entertaining.Matt Helm movies look very 60's.It's probably the nostalgia that raises the value of these movies.And the super cool Dean Martin.