MODESTY BLAISE (55)

Directed by: Joseph Losey (1966)

Starring: Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde, Harry Andrews

The Pitch: Secret agent Modesty Blaise vs. Gabriel the master criminal. Shagadelic!

Theo Sez: More a toy-box than a movie, stuffed with useless and amusing gewgaws : Bogarde in a ludicrous bleached-silver wig, sipping his drink from a three-foot-tall wine-glass with a goldfish swimming inside (his henchman gets a similarly massive shot-glass, sans fish) ; Vitti in a screaming-pink dress running down an olive-green corridor ; a dungeon in violet-and-black chequered triangles (it looks like a demented chess-board), dominated by a bright-orange spiral staircase ; Mediterranean-lapped vistas of rock and sand ; mucho spoofery of the comic-book genre, as when it proves impossible to divest the heroine of her pneumatically skin-tight cat-suit ("Well, how did you get it on?" asks the exasperated hero) ; breaks for songs, and for the villain to try on a baffling American accent ; vintage cars, organ music and a wide-shot seen through a brandy glass. Plotting, alas, is absolutely dire, making the whole thing a bit of an endurance test - but you can just about glimpse Losey's preoccupation with class in the effete Bogarde character, all self-loathing and misplaced finer feeling, and in the pointed satire of the Men Who Run Britain as a cosy old-boy club of clueless buffers. Otherwise - if comic-book hi-jinks are what you're after, with zany asides and a Keystone Kops climax plus that whole tacky-stylish swinging-60s vibe - HELP! really seems a much safer bet.