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.

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.

And very ingenious for 1965, a real competition for the original James Bond series, although made on a low budget. Original gadget the radio and knife hidden in a human hump, obviously fake. Some Chinese spies, dressed in black suits, black hats, tie, not even blinking, American spies, Russian spies (Comrade Kommissar), transplanted camera-eye, dehydrating pills, pistol-camera, smart lines, a cool babe (Tania Béryl), action in Berlin, Paris, Amman, Portofino, and a secret formula that everyone wants, tattooed on the scalp of the heroine played by Pier Angeli (it would have been much more interesting if it was tattooed in the groin area). Dana Andrews is cool and credible as the head of American spies, Gastone Moschin is funny as the villainous boss Boris, and Luciano Pigozzi, the Italian equivalent of Peter Lorre, present in many films of the same genre in the '60s, is credible as an assistant villain. Nice music by Riz Ortolani. Worth 8 stars!

Of eight movies Dana Andrews appeared in from 1965, the unknown SPY IN YOUR EYE aka BANG YOU'RE DEAD has the lowest budget, seeming as if filmed on 16MM as Dana's an eye-patched operative provided a glass eye in its place and, unbeknownst to him there's a camera inside care of villainous surgeon Gastone Moschin, who'd later become the most formidable, deserving-to-die baddie The Black Hand in THE GODFATHER 2...

But like most situations when big (or once big) veteran actors get star treatment, there's a young buried lead here in Brett Halsey, whose mission, including taking a train aided by an intrepid cohort with a hunchback that's actually a knife, is to... well...

He travels around a lot and winds up in Arabic countries (supposedly) with intriguing blonde ingenue Pier Angeli, holding back a few mysteries and countered by a brunette femme fatale in Tania Béryl, whose actually more vulnerable than wicked since Gastone, her boss, is as bad as they get.

Meanwhile, an expository Andrews merely bookends the adventure, leaving the action sequences... which actually flow pretty well... to Halsey in a curio too obscure for a cult following but that's, overall, surprisingly satisfying, fitting neatly into Dana's other 1965 low-budgets BRAINSTORM, TOWN TAMER and CRACK IN THE WORLD.

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.