Director: Phil Karlson
Writers: Oscar Saul adapting Donald Hamilton’s novels Death of a Citizen and The Silencers
Producer: Irving Allen
Cast: Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Daliah Lavi, James Gregory, Victor Buono, Robert Webber, Arthur O’Connell, Roger C. Carmel, Cyd Charisse, Nancy Kovack, Beverly Adams, Richard Devon, David Bond, Frank Gerstle, Robert Phillips, John Willis, Grant Woods, Patrick Waltz, Inga Neilsen (uncredited)
Retired US secret agent Matt Helm (Dean Martin) is now living the life of a carefree bachelor as a successful girlie photographer. Helm reluctantly returns to ICE, his past espionage organization. ICE wants Helm to stop Big O, an enemy organization intent on launching a missile to destroy an American underground nuclear test site. That explosion will contaminate a large swath of the country with radioactive fallout and could start World War III.
The Flashback Fanatic movie review
Like the Bond films, the Matt Helm films were very loosely adapted from a successful series of novels. Debuting in 1960, Donald Hamilton’s stories concerned a retired American World War II assassin brought back into service for the government. The adventures are narrated with a wry sense of practicality by the brutal Helm who must abandon a happy domestic life when he resumes his former deadly profession. The Helm novels are hardly James Bond rip-offs and are highly recommended. They are often grimmer and less exotic than Ian Fleming’s Bond tales. Matt Helm has no idealism that gets in the way of his missions’ objectives. He knows that he is not a good guy but a killer.
It is rather curious that Matt Helm film producer Irving Allen had a falling out with onetime partner “Cubby” Broccoli about the worthiness of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories as a basis for a film series. When Allen later optioned another fine series of spy fiction to adapt into his own series of films, he dispensed almost entirely with the Matt Helm source material and its tone to create something far less believable than the Ian Fleming stories he earlier dismissed. Allen would also go on to be the executive producer of the 1975 Matt Helm television series starring Anthony Franciosa. That production had even less to do with its prose source material and became a rather generic private detective show.
The Silencers is the first of the four-film Matt Helm series starring Dean Martin. Obviously meant to cash-in on the '60s spy craze launched by the James Bond series, the Helm films were breezy and irreverent. They went well past the occasional tongue-in-cheek hints in the Bond films to become spy spoofs about American establishment male wish fulfillment. Our hero Helm can womanize, drink, smoke, and make a great living shooting pictures of sexy figure models. Then he still one-ups Hugh Hefner by also saving the world without ever losing his sense of humor.
One suspects that the key to enjoying these things at the time was being a Dean Martin fan. If you loved his music and watched his television variety show each week, you probably couldn’t wait to see him joke and kill his way through an action film in the spyhappy '60s.
This first Matt Helm movie is in many ways the best in the series. There are some well-played scenes combining humor, danger, and sexiness. The best sequence would probably be early in the story when Helm is reintroduced to his fellow ICE agent and former lover Tina (Daliah Lavi). She arrives at his home as he is under attack from an assortment of Big O assassins. Lavi and Martin work well together conveying important info to each other and the audience as they trade quips while killing and escaping their enemies. While Dean Martin always makes what he does seem smooth and easy, he has not yet stepped over the line into total farce. This is probably due to a bit more care taken in the script than the later installments.
That is not to say that there is not plenty of humor to be had here and sometimes at Matt Helm’s expense. The world’s most beautiful klutz Gail Hendricks creates most of Helm’s irritation. She is always in the wrong place at the wrong time and becomes the reluctant companion to Helm as he tries to track down Big O to stop Operation Fallout. Stella Stevens’ performance as Gail is funny, sympathetic, and sexy.
Another aspect of humor in The Silencers is the violence. Of course, Sean Connery had already established witticisms tossed off after deadly encounters in the Bond films. Here we have various characters being graphically penetrated by bullets from a reverse-firing gun that play out as sight gags.
Perhaps the most dated aspect in the film’s humor is the drinking and driving scene in Helm’s station wagon that is able to convert to sleeping quarters complete with a portable bar. Despite present day qualms about boozing behind the wheel, Stella Stevens makes it an amusing bit.
The Silencers is little more than a fantasy that asks the question: What would happen if Dean Martin were a secret agent? Answer: A helluva lot more fun than scowling bullies dishing out their macho threats between hyperactive CGI effects. So just kick back, down a drink, and lighten up as the King of Cool saves the world.
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