Operazione terzo uomo

There's not much to recommend here, really. A good cast does not a good spy movie make. Rather, this plays like a late-cycle Edgar Wallace krimi with the Scotland Yard detective a secret agent and a murderer who happens to have stolen a top secret invention. The circus milieu (the Palladium in Vienna) is quite tedious but other Vienna locations are nice to look at like the empty amusement park where the villain hides out.

Pierre Brice is Philippe Taylor (changed from `Tissot' for the English dub apparently) an agent on the trail of the device. Brice was a looker who made a lot of westerns in the sixties and he was in the anthology Spy Against the World (66) but most may recognize him from Mill of the Stone Women (60). He's very bland here but that suits the rest of the film.

The score by Charly Niessen (arrangements by Gert Wilden), is okay but is occasionally inappropriate for the action on the screen. Director Alfred Weidenmann can't do much with this material either; the script is just plain weak. I had high hopes for this one but you can skip it knowing you haven't missed a darn thing.

The other reviews said it all. S L O W. One of the English titles is SHOT IN 3/4 TIME. This says it all. The entire movie never gets going to full speed. I watch a lot of Euro-Spy movies and did watch this, But...Beware. Larry Anderson

It's made according to the same already known recipe of Eurospy movies but it's decently made. The story is trivial, reminiscent of a Bond movie. But the actors, the direction, the image, everything else, are effective. Pierre Brice, famous for his role as Winnetou, is also acceptable as a secret agent. Very small role for the beautiful Senta Berger. Daliah Lavi, who is very weak here physically, has a slightly more consistent role. A very young Terence Hill in a small role. Anton Diffring, is the most elegant and efficient, in a role of secret agent, who manages to make you believe first that he's a negative character, and then to reveal that it's just the opposite. Jana Brejchová also plays a good role, also as a secret agent, in the same spirit as Anton Diffring.

Although it's fairly well-produced and shot in beautiful European locations (Paris, Vienna), this film (which I saw under the unlisted on IMDb title "Spy Hunt In Vienna") is a generally dull example of its genre (the Euro-spy thriller). For one thing, there is little action, as the main character - agent simply walks through the various locations and engages in some form of action not more often than once every 20 minutes. The people he is searching for may or may not be hiding within a traveling circus, which results in some overlong circus numbers. There are also some moments that are downright absurd: someone tries to kill the hero on a train, he fails, he runs away and the hero doesn't even bother to run after him; at least a dozen bad guys surround the hero in an underground train station and he escapes by causing a small explosion; but the most laughable of all is what happens to the suitcase containing the device that everyone's been after the whole time. The film even disappoints in the women department, as the two best lookers (Senta Berger and Paola Pitagora) have VERY limited screen time. *1/2 out of 4.