Analysis and review of: THE SILENCERS (1966)
Copyright 1998 Afterburner Email me at: aburner@erols.com
Rating (out of 10): N/A. See review for further details.
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A great many of us will be familiar with the image of Hugh Hefner (Founder and Publisher of Playboy magazine) at one of his famous parties. We can picture in our mind's eye Hef walking around Playboy Mansion in his robe and pajamas, cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other. (Actually, Hef usually smoked a pipe. But for the sake of argument, we'll say it was a cigarette.) He's smiling. He's mingling. He's making small talk, with amusing bon mots and double entendres.
Now imagine that, instead of a robe and pajamas, Hef is decked out in attire that would have been fashionably casual for an affluent male in the 1960s. And while keeping everything else the same (the cigarette, the cocktail, the utterly casual attitude), imagine Hef in the underground lair of an evil Arch-Villain ready to visit death and destruction across the globe. Oh, and make Hef a James Bond-esque spy.
You now have the basic feel for the four Matt Helm movies, of which "The Silencers" (1966) was the first.
The Matt Helm movies were made as star vehicles for Dean Martin. By the mid-60s, Dino had cemented his reputation as a boozing playboy, and the Matt Helm role was written with this in mind. In the movies, Matt Helm is a super-secret, super-competent spy for the Intelligence Counter Espionage (ICE) organization. His cover in all four movies is that he's also a world-famous photographer of gorgeous women, and he works for "Slaymate" magazine (which fits in nicely with the Hugh Hefner analogy...). And in all four movies, he casually wanders his way through whatever the bad guys have to throw at him.
The plot of "The Silencers" involves an attempt by the evil "Big O" organization to start World War III. This involves taking control of a missile launch via computer and forcing the missile to impact a spot near Alamagordo, New Mexico. The catch is that, at precisely the same time, the U.S. will be conducting underground nuclear testing at the same spot. When the missile impacts, the U.S. Southwest will be covered by a glowing cloud, the U.S. will assume it's the Russians, and will retaliate.
It's never fully explained how this will benefit the "Big O" organization. Presumably they plan on stepping into the power void left behind when the two superpowers wipe each other out. No one seemed to stop and think about the consequences of being the most powerful organization in a world ravaged by nuclear destruction. But no matter. One doesn't watch Matt Helm movies in order to enjoy finely crafted plots.
So what would you watch these movies for? Cheese. Camp. Corn. These movies are all that, and more. The evil mastermind behind the "Big O" organization is a Chinese man named Tung-Tze. Of course, he's played by the very American Victor Buono. In one scene, for no real reason I can determine, we see him opening a can of "Low calorie chop suey."
Like any super-secret spy, Helm has the gruff boss (played by James Gregory, whom folks may remember as Inspector Luger on the "Barney Miller" TV show), the gorgeous babes, and the nifty gadgets. Among the gorgeous babes are his secretary, Lovey Kravezit (pronounced "Craves it"), who takes dictation while covered in suds and sharing a swimming-pool-sized bathtub, his exotic, vampish partner Tina, and the accident-prone Gail Hendricks, who may or may or may not be an agent of "Big O." And among his many gadgets are a gun which fires backwards toward the person pulling the trigger, a sports coat with exploding buttons (which make whistling sounds like a falling bomb, for no reason that can be adequately explained), and a circular bed that, at the push of a button, will whisk the occupants of the bed to another room and dump them into the previously mentioned swimming-pool-sized bathtub.
Star Trek fans will also be pleased to note that, along the way, Helm is menaced by an evil assassin played by Roger C. Carmel ("Harry Mudd," from the original Star Trek series).
By no stretch of the imagination is "The Silencers" a quality movie. The effects were lame even for the time the movie was made. The acting is wooden. The dialogue consists largely of Martin tossing off one-liners in response to various other lines and situations. The fight scenes are some of the worst ever to be committed to celluloid. And no matter how dire his situation, Martin ambles through the movie as though he's looking for the nearest bar.
But as I alluded to earlier, the folks who will enjoy this movie will like it *because* of the above flaws, not despite them. If you want to see a completely cheezy, corny spy flick, filled with exaggerated versions of the typical spy trappings (and which inspired a lot of the riffs in "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery"), check out "The Silencers" (and indeed the rest of the Matt Helm series). You won't be disappointed.
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