Berlin, opération 'Laser'

1965's "Spy in Your Eye" aka "Bang You're Dead" (Berlino = Appuntamento per le Spie) was theatrically issued by AIP on a double bill with Richard Harrison's "Secret Agent Fireball," an entertaining bit of fluff but little more. Brett Halsey's Bert Morris is on the trail of a formula for a powerful laser, his superior, Colonel Lancaster (Dana Andrews), unwittingly aiding the enemy after the surgical insertion of a glass eye that acts as a TV transmitter. Fast moving from one location to another, above average production values yet quite convoluted, the villains are an assorted lot of Russians, Chinese, East Germans, and Arabs, with varied twists and turns and a plethora of promising gadgets that often disappoint (an effigy of Napoleon boasts a fatal gift). The climax must be seen to be believed, an interrogation chamber transformed into an operating room in the blink of an eye before another breathless escape. Alas, once Lancaster learns of his traitorous orb he promptly vanishes for the remainder of the film, luscious Pier Angeli frequently absent for long stretches, though it's a bonus to see her kidnapped from a bubble bath!

I saw this in the theaters on the big screen in brilliant color. Unfortunately all that remains is a red DVD in my collection and a faded one on Y/T. The story moves along at a Bond-like pace with gadgets galore and sets not matched in many other imitation Euro-Spies. During the filming, they used many different European locations including the Baalbek ruins in Lebanon. Pier Angeli is her usual vulnerable self and Brett Halsey is the spy who figures everything out in the end. If you can find a good copy, watch it.

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.

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.

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.