Director: Jess Franco
Year:
1966
Country:
France
Rating:
7.0
Aka - Cartes Sur Table
Dubbed in English (though pretty sure that
is Constantine)
Though this is often tossed into the James
Bond bucket, it is actually closer to say it is a Lemmie Caution film. Lemmie
Caution was an FBI agent in a series of novels that Peter Cheyney wrote beginning
in the 1930s. American actor Eddie Constantine practically made a career
out of playing Caution in French films beginning in the 1953 film Poison
Ivy. The year previous to this, he had played Caution in the Jean-Luc
Godard film, Alphaville. At the same time, Jess Franco had signed a
deal to direct two films - one was The Diabolical Dr. Z and this was the
other. It seems this company did not want to pay for the rights for Lemmie
Caution or perhaps they were not available - but they hired Constantine and
told Franco to make him an Interpol agent. In other words, Lemmie Caution.
His boss at one point when asked where Al Pereira (Constantine) is, he replies
between a blonde and a bottle of Scotch. That is Lemmie and Constantine makes
no effort to make this character any different - not that he ever showed
much acting range. With Constantine, you knew what you had.
This was still fairly early in Franco's
career and for the most part it is quite conventional - echoes of the Krimi
films - and well before he moved into the exploitation stage in his career.
In other words, this is PG. And quite coherent and well shot with a good
script that is quite fun. Assassins are killing VIPs in broad daylight all
over the world. Simply stepping up to them no matter the circumstances and
shooting them. They all are wearing thick-horn-rimmed glasses and have a
dark pallor. When one is killed by the police, he turns white. The dead killer
also has a rare blood type and their supercomputer spits out in minutes that
a number of people with this blood type have gone missing.
Interpol wants an agent with this blood
type to go on a mission to track them down. The only one available is Pereira,
but he has just retired - to a casino where he is actually surrounded by
a brunette - in Macao, I think. He is kidnapped by the Chinese, taken to
an ornate opium den and asked to join them and go to Alicante, Spain where
they think this criminal organization is headquartered. He goes but not for
them - for Interpol. He quickly runs into the lovely Sophie Hardy who does
the floor show as well as has a room next to his. With a see-through mirror.
In one very nice bedroom farce scene - both the Chinese and the killers enter
his room to kill him and end up fighting each other and then Pereira has
to hide the bodies.
This organization has turned people with
the blood type into robotic killers and they are after Caution - I mean Periera.
Fernando Rey is the head and his number two is Françoise Brio. Enjoyable
film that fits in well with the Euro Spy films at the time. Maybe the best
Caution film in fact. But it isn't Caution. The scriptwriter is Jean-Claude
Carrière, who had also written the script for The Diabolical Dr. Z,
but he went on to write scripts for some very well-known films - The Obscure
Object of Desire, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Unbearable Lightness
of Being, The Return of Martin Guerre and The Tin Drum among many others.
