Double Agent 73

"Double Agent 73" is an amateurish and inept movie, yet there is an honesty about its amateurishness and ineptness: you get the feeling that the people involved didn't want to cheat you, they really did try to make an espionage / action movie, they just lacked the talent and budget required. Sure, you could complain all day long about the pointlessly long shots of, say, horse-racing, or the sped-up "car chase", or the lack of logic in the story, but you also have to give credit to the film's creativity: it's not every day you can see a punch with the breast replacing the fist, or death via ice cubes stuffed into the victim's mouth! Chesty Morgan gives a somewhat catatonic performance (she's no worse than anyone else in the cast, mind you), and there can be little argument that her breasts are unerotic (bigger is not always better), however she does have a pretty face and nice legs. (*1/2)

In a comment I wrote about Doris Wishman's 'Nude On The Moon' recently I described it as one of those cult "classics" that you only really watch just so you can say you've seen it. Well this is even more the case with 'Double Agent 73', a movie which is literally a chore to sit through. Despite having a running time of just over an hour and ten minutes I'd say it's still about twenty minutes too long. Wishman's freakish discovery Chesty Morgan plays super spy Jane Genet (hyuk, hyuk) a.k.a. Agent 73, cos she's got a 73 inch bust, see? Chesty can't act to save her life, and is seriously unsexy. I really don't see her appeal, and it's no real surprise that her career as an actress was short lived. The plot? Agent 73 is called in to help kill drug lord Toplar. She's given an address book with some leads but as no one knows what Toplar looks like she's told to photograph all the bad guys she kills, and they'll sort it out later. She does this via a camera surgically implanted in her left breast. Some of her methods of execution are also novel. My fave is death by ice cubes. If you're a big time fan of Seventies sleaze you might enjoy 'Double Agent 73' a lot more than I did, but my response was a yawn and please pass me the Russ Meyer.

So hard to rate. I want to give it a low score for being one of the worst films I've seen in ages. But I want to give it a high score for being absolutely hilarious. I guess it all depends on how you take the genre. If you're a fan of grindhouse and low-budget exploitation flicks, look no further. If you don't get why people find bad movies good, maybe this isn't for you.

While I think Chesty's unfeasibly large breasts were somehow supposed to be titillating (excuse the pun), they're actually rather unfortunate. As the plot revolves entirely around her hauling them out at every opportunity, it's a bit like watching a car wreck. You want to look away, but can't. Her 'acting' is self conscious verging on just plain scared.

The cameraperson hoses their rig around zooming and panning with total disregard for their shadow. If they'd been able to afford a mic boom instead of badly overdubbing, I'm sure the camera would've caught that too.

The cutaways are absolutely classic. Found footage is spliced in with total disregard for what's around it. My favourite scene involves a car blowing up. If you look really closely, you might just notice it's not the car they were driving. Especially as it's a different colour. And make. And it's not in the same place…

In short, Double Agent 73 is pure genius. You couldn't make a movie this bad if you tried. And that's exactly what makes it so good.

Double Agent 73 is the second film exploitation auteur Doris Wishman made with Chesty Morgan, she of the 73-inch bust. The first being Deadly Weapons (1974). The fact that both movies were released in the same year is an early indication that Wishman didn't necessarily waste a lot of time making them and knocked both out very quickly. Consequently, both these films never remotely betray their low budget origins and are truthfully very amateurish throughout, with the camera-work in particular being of an especially terrible standard. Random objects being focused on is the order of the day here. So there's not a massive amount between both films I suppose but I would definitely opt for Deadly Weapons as being the better of the two, I think it has a better overall focus plus the idea of huge breasts being used as deadly weaponry was a more inspired idea than having them being receptacles for a hidden camera.

I guess you would have to describe this as a sexploitation spy film. It's about a secret agent played by Chesty who hunts down a gang of heroin traffickers. A secret camera is installed in one of her mammoth breasts in order to allow her to gather espionage evidence, unfortunately, if she does not complete her mission within a week the camera will self-destruct, killing her in the process. This story-line is more or less a framework to allow for a lot of scenes of Chesty exposing her huge hooters. Not really a bad idea in principle but it is oddly unerotic to be perfectly honest, which means that events in the story-line become more important. But it's all pretty limited stuff on that front, with the odd unexpected moment such as a bloody murder in a shower appearing out of nowhere to enliven events. But on the whole, this one is only interesting to an extent but certainly of curiosity value at least.

Doris Wishman followed up the immensely successful Deadly Weapons with this all-you-can-eat lunatic buffet. Ivan Toplar and his gang are flooding the market with bad smack. Who is the only secret agent with the stuff to bring down these slimebags? Burlesque grotesque Chesty Morgan, the girl who makes Candy Samples look like an ironing board! As Jane Genet, Agent 73, Chesty has her vacation at the nudist camp (!)--dig the hilarious cuts between literary-minded Chesty and a puppy--interrupted by this little assignment. So she puts on her red-and-black rhinestone-studded platforms and hits the streets, eliminating the bad guys and taking photos with a tiny spy camera (complete with flash) implanted in her humongous left breast. The deaths are violent, and the victim's last sights are shaky, blurred shots of Chesty's mountainous mammaries. What a way to go.

This violent, uproariously crazed excuse for Chesty to unsnap her bra and maul those monsters (FLASH-CLICK!) is like Deadly Weapons ratcheted to new heights of inanity (if such a thing could be possible). Who better to carry out a top-secret mission than the most conspicuous person in the world? And if her physical appearance weren't eliciting enough looks, the peroxide-wigged Miss Morgan's wardrobe is even frillier and sillier than before--the prime offender being a white-on-red polka-dotted number straight from Clarabelle's closet. Chesty's dubbed voice has a slightly harder edge this time around, but her acting has, thankfully, not improved. Her face is expressionless for ninety percent of the running time; occasionally she smiles, as if being ordered to at gunpoint, and Band-Aid removal brings a grimace of vague bewilderment that must be seen to be disbelieved. Though the dialogue is mostly in sync, Doris Wishman still indulges in her trademark cut-aways and obsessive close-ups of feet (giving us great views of the star's endless arsenal of platforms and spike heels). Then, in an unexpected "poetic" shot, backlit Chesty holds her ruffled robe aloft and whirls for no discernible reason. And of course, the car chase, where Chesty and her pursuer drive the legal limit as the film is sped up.

A third Chesty epic was planned but never made, since Wishman found the star unbearably difficult to work with. Even more unfortunate is the fact that, after working with Fellini, the Polish sight gag--I mean, STAR--never made another film, and has since completely disappeared (how could she hide?). Some say that Chesty (Lillian) is now living in Florida, but...who knows? O Chesty, where art thou?