User reviews

This is a very funny, intelligently made movie. Reading the notes I took about it 40 years ago, made me feel again the happiness with which I left the theater then.

Definitely much more worth while to have on videotape than 745 342 other titles, and yet the movie producers don't think so. Oh, well, what I can I do?

Nifty movie with inventive seq. throughout and turnabouts. Rec. from Eurospy Guide by Matt Blake/David Deal in the Funny list. This movie is a pre-Goldfinger spy movie with the same outlandishness.

I have absolutely nothing against Black & White movies, but if there is one genre that I feel is served MUCH better by being shot in color, it's the Euro-Spy genre. A B & W mid-1960s French spy movie (which this one is) looks as awkward to me as a color mid-1940s American film noir would. The plot is decent if unoriginal (wrong coat -> mistaken identity), the hero is OK, the female lead is personable enough, there is one nice bit of stunt car driving, and even some (intentionally) funny moments, but overall "The Reluctant Spy" is just too drab and boring for me to recommend without reluctance (pun intended). Maybe if the striking Gaia Germani had a larger role....*1/2 out of 4.

What we have here is a delightful French romantic comedy with espionage overtones that even the most spy-hardened viewer will find diverting. Jean Marais is a married businessman with the unlikely moniker of Stanislas Everest Dubois who stumbles into true love and the danger of espionage in the same night.

Marais inadvertently picks up the wrong coat while on his first date with Genevieve Page and thus begins the sequence of events that leads him into a world of humorous cops, dimwitted spies, curmudgeon cab drivers, and other sundry characters that cause him much frustration.

Marais is a winning hero who deftly carries the film and Page is cute and clever as the love interest. Gaia Germani has a small role as a double agent who meets her end in Marais' apartment.

There are more throwaway lines and gags here that work than can be found in many out and out comedies. The score by Georges Delerue is unobtrusive but also unmemorable. The finale of this film charges wholeheartedly into improbability but all is forgiven by the viewer won over so completely from the start.

1963's French-Italian "The Reluctant Spy" (L'Honorable Stanislas, Agent Secret in France, Spionaggio Senza Frontiere in Italy) is an early, black and white example of the blossoming Eurospy genre, an Embassy Pictures release through Joseph E. Levine. Director Jean-Charles Dudrumet had the good fortune of casting the renowned Jean Marais in the lead, an actor whose association with Jean Cocteau yielded such classics as the 1946 "Beauty and the Beast" before international fame beckoned during the following decade. Stanislas Everest Dubois is a typical businessman running an advertising agency in Paris, living at home with his mother and grandmother, an ordinary fellow caught up in extraordinary circumstances while trying to romance museum guide Ursula (Genevieve Page). A simple exchange of coats leads to a meeting with the other owner, who suddenly drops dead in his hotel bathroom in the act of brushing his teeth ("hotels are almost like hospitals, they would rather see their clients die outside than inside!"). The Hitchcockian MacGuffin is a microfilm found inside a chess piece, Stanislas often resorting to fisticuffs to escape being caught, a lighthearted though lackluster vehicle carried almost entirely by its rugged star (a more apt alternate title is "How to Be a Spy Without Even Trying"). Gaia Germani (Christopher Lee's "The Castle of the Living Dead") has a small silent role as a murdered double agent, Genevieve Page best remembered by genre buffs as the femme fatale of Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," opposite Christopher Lee's Mycroft Holmes. Jean Marias would repeat the role of Stanislas in 1965's "Killer Spy" (from the same director), as well as playing Simon Templar in "The Saint Lies in Wait," and the "Fantomas" trilogy (followed by "Fantomas Unleashed" and "Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard"), all carrying the same wry tone.

The first of two movies ,based on the Monsieur Stanislas ,an advertising executive overtaken by events ,who wants to lead a peaceful life but is involved ,like the hero of "north by northwest",in a spy story :like him,he lives with mother (and grandmother).

It was the time Jean Marais was relinquishing the sword of the swashbucklers for the broader horizons of the spy thriller;Hitchcock's influence ("stagefright" "the man who knew too much") shows now and there but the characters are often funny : hats off to veteran Noel Roquevert and his syringe;Genevieve Page,who was fluent in English and worked with Wilder ,Cukor and Daves ,is an elegant leading lady who in her native country never got the parts she deserved.