Come Spy with Me

This is a film I saw as a child at a local matinée. It was supposed to be like a "James Bond" movie so I eagerly went expecting an action packed two hours. What I ended up seeing (even as a child I realized it was a really bad movie) was a film that was entirely derivative of other spy films.

Troy Donahue, like so many pretty boys of the 60's, did not have the acting ability to pull off the kind of character the film was trying to create. Connery was Bond; Caine was Harry Palmer, and James Coburn was Derek Flint. They defined the roles. They were interesting and magnetic. The hero in this film is not even a faint echo of those great spy film characters.

The film was cheaply made with scuba scenes reminiscent of Thunderball. However, in one of the underwater fight scenes, the injured diver has his hand in his wet suit clearly pumping a plastic bottle full of stage blood that is then permeating the water. I watched thinking surely a mistake like this couldn't slip through any professional film editor--but it did.

If you can even find this film, don't waste your time--unless bad movies as humor is your gig. Oh, and I almost forgot. The theme song is catchy but and performed by Smokey Robinson, but with ridiculous lyrics: "Come spy with me, live a life of danger and of mystery! etc etc etc" Regardless, the film is truly bad!

When CBS used to show late movies years and years ago, I remember staying up to watch this. There's only about two things I really recall: that Troy Donahue was in it, and that the theme song, performed by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (!) was at least halfway decent. So the previous reviewer certainly can't be blamed for not remembering the song or the lyrics (which rhymed "spy with me" and "variety".) Like many of the Bond knockoffs of the day, the song was about the only thing the audience was even meant to remember, if that. I just recall that the single was a much bigger hit than the movie ever was. So if you happen to stumble across it on cable, it's more of a curiosity piece than a "must-see."

I watched this film in 2021, hoping I could determine if I had ever seen it before, since the title sounded familiar. Alas, I did not recognize anything from it. The film is so unremarkable that I may have seen it once but then completely forgot everything in it. Despite my love of the James Bond film "Thunderball" (1965), underwater scenery, attractive ladies, and spy films in general, there was nothing in this film that stood out as interesting, exciting, or particularly attractive anywhere. It is surprising to me they could they have so many great elements in place but still fail to produce even a moderately interesting movie that fit my taste.

Some of the copied elements from Thunderball are: opening credits with a silhouetted lady dancing in front of colored lights, a Paris scene in the beginning with the Eiffel Tower, an outdoor band with congas, a sprawling estate on the seashore with a guard shack, snooping around a suspect's room, a hotel lobby and stairs to the second floor, a (faked) shark attack, a lady agent who is interrogated in an underground room, pulling an enemy agent down from below a deck, an underwater cave, a headquarters with head agents among field equipment and a black technician, a Felix Leiter-looking agent wearing sunglasses, guests around a pool at the estate, an underwater battle with spear guns and knives, a U. S. Navy warship, and boats blowing up at the end.

How did all this fail to make a favorable impression on me? Possibly it was the unrealistic shark jaws device, the intended humorous narration, the leading lady (Andrea Dromm) who bleached her hair beyond blonde into white, beach party type music and dancing instead of classy classical music and romantic dancing, lack of any music in the action scenes, lack of spooky music in the snooping scenes, a limited budget that omitted bomber aircraft and a fleet of warships, lack of classy European settings and mysterious foreign languages, lack of clever gadgets, lack of a good mystery element, and unrealistic fight scenes. Overall it seemed as if the film was intended to be a beach party / comedy film instead of an exciting, believable spy film, and it ended up failing to be any of those genres.

By the way, Andrea Dromm was known from a Summer Blonde commercial in the 1960s. Also, the origin of the film name was hinted at in the film scene where the snooping spy comes across a Frank Sinatra album: remember that the song "Come Fly With Me" was a popular Frank Sinatra song. In fact, that room snooping scene was probably the most entertaining part of the film, due to the humorous narration at that point that sarcastically pointed out the spy's repeated failures to find anything of interest in the room.

I saw this as the first of a double bill with 'In Like Flint' as the main attraction in a second-run theater matinee.

Like the others my main interest was Andrea Dromm, who I had seen on Star Trek.

Besides Andrea, the only other memorable part of this film was the unique "shark-jaws" weapon, where the bad guys made their kills look like the result of a shark attack.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be the extent of the imagination of the creators of this film.

Since the next film on that double-bill was the vastly superior 'In Like Flint', I left the theater thinking of Jean Hale, not Andrea.

Well, there's only one reason (two, if you want to be funny) to see this movie and that's Andrea Dromm. She became a "star" because of a commercial and she made this, the first Star Trek pilot and THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING. This movie is the least of her works. It's been more than forty years since I saw this in a theater and I don't remember anything of the plot. I'm reasonably sure that Andrea spends a lot of time in a bikini. If that's not reason to watch, I don't know what is. At the end, the guy want to become a spy, too. If you met a spy like her, you'd join up immediately. From what I do remember, the movie was pretty silly.

But there's always Andrea!

Sam Tomaino