Director: Bruno Paolinelli
Year: 1965
Country: Italy
Rating: 4.0
Aka Operation Lotus Flower
Aka - Tonnerre Sur Pekin
Italian with English subs
This Italian spy flick is as dull as a stick
of butter. Nothing much really happens for long stretches of the film and
when they do, they are ludicrously badly shot. Unlike many of the Euro-Spy
films of the 1960s, it has no exotic location shooting, no snazzy spy gadgets
and no high end villains. What it does share with other films in the genre
is it has lovely women, a nightclub performance and a script that is as leaky
as the Titanic. The plot makes little sense and gives us an ending that must
have made the audience all go, huh? Perhaps its greatest fault though is
all the spies are astonishingly incompetent. Especially those on our side.
They needed to read Spies for Dummies.
A Chinese nuclear scientist wants to defect
and America is right there to help him. He should have contacted the British.
They get him aboard a plane and fly him to an American air base in Pakistan
and then on to Madrid. But those darn Chinese manage to shoot the plane down
over Italy. What the hell. The Chinese shot down a plane over Italy. A NATO
country? They parachute down but the scientist is hurt. Turns out lots
of people are after him - the Nazis, the Chinese and the Formosans. Remember
when Taiwan was called Formosa?
The American spies keep going back to their
supposedly secret headquarters but everyone knows it and are waiting to kill
them. The CIA sends their best agent, Robert (Sandro Moretti) who like all
good spies is in bed with a beautiful woman when he gets the call. At the
airport in Rome, he makes mistake number 1. He takes the first taxi. Come
on man! Have you not watched any movies. The driver of course tries to kill
him. He gets to his hotel where he may as well hang out a sign. Spy in Residence.
He finds his dead comrades and does the next logical thing; beds the first
woman he sees. He gets laid a lot. Two pluses in the film; Yoko Tani as the
merciless leader of the Formosans who whips her subordinates. And then she
has her car run over the head of one of the female Nazi agents. Done quite
well. The rest was not. Directed by Bruno Paolinelli.
