1981 comedy, dir. Charles Jarrott, Michael Crawford, Barbara Carrera:
IMDb. A bumbling comics writer
is drawn into the shadowy world of espionage.
I missed this when it was released, but there's a style about it,
this kind of live-action family-safe Disney film that was a staple of
their output around this time, that looks instantly familiar. And it's
not because they stinted on the production: Colin Chilvers who'd
worked on the first two Superman films was brought in for the flying
sequences, and Rémy Julienne (car wrangler for The Italian Job and a
bunch of James Bond films) did the car chase. But there's a cosy,
nothing too scary is going to happen, ambience about the thing which
is frankly not a great match for a James Bond parody. (In the real
world, James Bond was parodying itself at this point, with the release
in the same year as this of For Your Eyes Only and the start of what
I think one can fairly describe as the "late Roger Moore" era.)
I saw some of the Herbie films when I was young. This has the same
feel to it.
This was loosely inspired (not enough to require an actual payment, of
course) by a Robert Sheckley novel, The Game of X, in which an
unwitting bumbler comes to the attention of the Other Side as a
super-agent, and somehow muddles through. To be fair, it doesn't stick
close to the book.
Michael Crawford was already known for playing a hopeless incompetent
in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (1973-1978), which perhaps fortunately I
have never seen; I have a very low tolerance for comedy that relies on
the trope of "look at the silly man who doesn't know he's being
silly", and if I'd seen that I suspect I'd have got no pleasure from
this at all. But here he plays a character that I can only really see
as a kind of holy fool, the innocent who cannot believe that any real harm
will come to him and so it doesn't… which is fine, but (a) it means he
has basically no character growth over the source of the story, and
(b) it sits very oddly with the notion of him as a romantic hero.
Particularly as he's paired with Barbara Carrera, who's probably
better known in the Anglophone world for Never Say Never Again
(1983), the "unofficial" James Bond film that came out of the very
strange rights situation surrounding Thunderball. Here, under the
direction of the Disney System, she has dialled down her sexiness as
low as it will go. She is still by far the sexiest person here and
possibly in all of Disney's live-action output.
But this film won me over with an early scene in which our bumbling
hero is attacked in a restaurant, and manages to fight off the bad
guys by what I would characterise as "incompetence-fu", the sort of
active bumbling that leads to him ducking at just the right moment as
enemy A charges at him and so goes on to strike enemy B. Even when I
started to lose immersion, I could fall back on how truly impressive
the small-scale stunt work was to make this look good on film.
I love Oliver Reed's work, but my goodness he's wasted here. His only
job is to be petulant that his toy has been taken away, and to give
instructions to the remorseless killer working for him. (All right,
Disney couldn't show anything more adult than that Barbara is
effectively his toy, but that was Disney; other films of the day had
less excuse.)
There's a fine car chase, and one tries to forget how utterly useless
sports cars are for anything except going very fast on well-kept
roads. The right thing to do if you're attacked by sports cars when
you're in a truck is to slam on the brakes so that they crash into you
and break.
(The Condormobile is a modified Nova kit car (branded as Sterling in
the US), very stylish but it's basically a VW Beetle underneath.)
But things go on, and it's all quite fun, and there's a final battle
on the water… at which point I realise why I'm getting the impression
that there's no heart to it all. The bad guys have many boats with
rocket rails, the good guys have a laser machine gun and a convenient
helicopter, but none of this is tied to the people. There's no
moment at which our hero is an actual hero, having to do something
for himself: his gadgeteers were better than the Soviets' gadgeteers,
and it's not really his fight at all.
This film definitely has its moments, and I do find the rocket rails a
pleasing quiet nod to the Katyusha rocket artillery of WWII, but I
can see why this was something of a box office failure, and indeed one
of the reasons why Disney pivoted back to animation in the 1980s.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.