Matt Helm, agent très spécial

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.

The first in the Matt helm series; some say the best of all the James Bond spoofs. Violence and humor are equally mixed, as they are in the Bond pictures. *The Silencers* probably has the most alluring collection of femmes fatales as Hollywood has ever assembled. Klutzy (or is she really?) Stella Stevens, brunette Dahlia Lavi, blond Nancy Kovack, and dancer Cyd Charisse all have important roles. It is not giving away too much to say that of these four women, two are good, two are bad, and three of them suffer the fate of getting shot to death at surprising moments.

A bit of trivia: Beverly Adams, Helm's curvaceous secretary, married Yvres St. Laurent. And deadly Nancy Kovack married conductor Zubin Mehta, the lucky devil. Kovack, clad in only her high heeled shoes and one of Martin's white shirts, tries to seduce him into coming back to work for ICE, his old outfit. It is perhaps the most erotic three minute scene in any spy movie.

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.

My favorite part of this "tongue-in-cheek" espionage flick, is when Dean Martin, convinced that Stella Stevens has the micro-film tape on her, completely rips her dress off of her, leaving the sexy Stevens standing there in her bra, gartered-panties, nylons and high-heels. Great scene !! I'm sure it was Stella Stevens who kept the attention of male viewers throughout this silly movie. Sure , there were other attractive women in the movie. But Stevens was tops !! Dean martin, pretty much being himself as opposed to acting, was entertaining to a degree. However, it was Stella Stevens who stole the show. I didn't even consider being annoyed by her "flighty" character. She's just too damn pretty.

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.