Berlin, opération 'Laser'

Saw film at a double-feature second run house in the '60s. The spy-in-your-eye alternate title refers to an implanted micro television camera in a spy's eye. I can't remember if it was Dana Andrews. There's a tunnel under the Berlin Wall for the west to spy on the east that figures in the plot. Of course, the tunnel is discovered. There's a gimmick character who's hunchback deformity conceals a radio transmitter. Never understood why, if they could get the camera that small, why not the radio? I remember it fondly, but then I was 12 years old. Representative of '60's spy cycle, but at least they referenced real cold war players instead of made-up spy organizations. Don't know if its available.

Dana Andrews was one of those second rank movie stars who was finding roles becoming scarce in the USA and went to Europe for work. He's top billed and the title character in Spy In Your Eye, but the action and possible romance are left to Brett Halsey and Pier Angeli.

Halsey is given the assignment to bring out from behind the Iron Curtain Pier Angeli who is the son of a scientist who's been doing all kinds of work before he died in lasers developing that death ray gun the tool of so many futuristic space heroes like Flash Gordon and Rocky Jones.

In the meantime Andrews has sacrificed for God and country one of his eyes. But not to worry Dana has had a bionic eye installed which not only makes him see better, but it transmits video when needed. When the Reds start pirating his eye broadcasts things go wildly wrong for our intelligence before they're set right. Lee Majors never had these problems.

This is James Bond type stuff on the cheap. The film is also badly edited and you have to read between the lines a lot to figure out what's going on.

One thing though a lot of European and Mid Eastern cities were used for location shooting. On travel the budget did not stint.

James Bond this is not.

American spies are try to locate and rescue the daughter of a dead nuclear scientist. It's believed she may have some of his secrets. The Russians also want to the woman and are somehow able to thwart the Americans at every turn. But how? How do the Russians know what the Americans are doing? Is there a double agent? Or is it something else?

I love Eurospy films from the 60s. So it really pains me to discover a new one that doesn't click for me. Spy in Your Eye includes a lot of the things I look for in a Eurospy film, so it should have worked. The movie features some fantastic European locations, a cool jazzy/loungey spy score, a nice cast (Brett Halsey, Pier Angell, and the incredible Gastone Moschine), a cool secret lair with lots of moving parts, and a fantastical plot device - the bionic eye. However, even though all the ingredients are here, it never really works as well as it should. The reason - I blame the mess of a plot. There are ideas and threads going in all different directions, but none of it ever feels like a coherent story. About half way through, I forgot all about the woman with the nuclear secrets. I couldn't remember what Halsey and Co were trying to do. I just seemed like everyone was doing the most random things. Like the Chinese spy shooting the parade float with the camera-gun. Why? And the ending felt awfully rushed. The movie just ends without much in the way of a resolution. What happened to Dana Andrew's eye? How did Halsey and Angell suddenly end up together? What happened to the rest of the Russian operatives? Where did the Chinese spies go? What happened to the crazy Napoleon statue? There are too many unanswered questions.

Another thing that bothered me about Spy in Your Eye was how underutilized the titular eye was. I would have thought the screenplay would have included a more elaborate use of the spy-eye to trick or set a trap for the baddies. The eye is just sort of forgotten about.

"Colonel Lancaster" (Dana Andrews) is the director for a team of American spies during the Cold War who just happens to be scheduled to receive an eye implant so that he can regain his sight in one eye. What he doesn't know is that the Russians have invented an ingenious device which will not only give eyesight back to Colonel Lancaster--but will also transmit everything he says or does back to them which gives them invaluable information. One specific case involves a scientist who has invented a new weapon which the Russians, Americans and Chinese all want to get their hands on. Unfortunately, the scientist is killed trying to escape to the West and as a result his daughter, "Paula Krauss" (Pier Angeli) now becomes their main target because they think she has the vital information they all want. Now, rather than reveal any more of this movie and risk spoiling it I will just say that this was a decent spy movie for the most part. One noticeable flaw, however, was the lack of character development which caused some confusion here and there. But other than that I suppose it was okay for the time spent and I rate it as about average.

Starting in the mid-1950s and continuing through the 1970s, Italian filmmakers would recruit American actors to star in many of their films. The logic was that by having an American in the lead, the films would have increased marketability internationally. This notion is most associated with the so-called 'Spaghetti Westerns' in which leading men, such as Clint Eastwood, would star with a cast that was mostly Italians. The films were then dubbed into various languages and these films were very successful. However, they didn't just do this sort of thing for Italian westerns...Fellini did this, there were tons of strong man films (such as Hercules or Machiste) as well as some crime films with American leading men. In the case of "Spy in the Eye", however, they used Dana Andrews to star in an espionage picture...not exactly the typical Italian- American hybrid.

Andrews plays Colonel Lancaster, a spy who works for the East AND the West at the same time. How could this be? Is he a double- agent? Well, not exactly. It seems that unbeknownst to Lancaster, the Soviets have placed a camera within the bionic eye he's just received. And using it, they can see and photograph EVERYTHING Lancaster sees--including work on a top secret death ray! While this idea might seem crazy, it does create an interesting spin on the "Six Million Dollar Man" story...and does it almost a decade earlier.

So is it any good? Well, it certainly is creative and unusual. However, I was surprised that the film was actually as dull as it was in spite of the location shoots. It mostly just seemed to consist of folks stabbing each other and never really lived up to the bionic eye gimmick. Not terrible but surprisingly ordinary at best.

I found this film on YouTube. The big plus is that I doubt if I could have found it any other way...the negative is that the print is completely yellowed and it's hard to tell that this was once a full color picture.