Our Man Flint (1966)

I first saw this in college, a treat from our tutors at the time. 50 years or more later I still enjoy the silliness and a great way to unwind. It's a movie made in the 60's, I was a teenager then and wanted his lifestyle, hahaha.

A "parody" is a piece of work that sets out to amuse by exaggerating stylistic and other qualities of the original and almost always meant to be amusing. A satire has more edge. That qualifies "Our Man Flint" as a parody of the James Bond series that had begun (to immense success) just a few years earlier. The question is how to parody something that is already a parody of itself? Is it a META-parody?There's no question about the intent, not even in the first five minutes. The pre-credit sequence focuses on a crowded warehouse full of international VIPs trying desperately plying giant computers to figure out how to stop a secret organization from manipulating the weather. Behind the credits there are writhing silhouettes of naked girls. And instead of Bond glimpsed through a gun barrel, there is Flint frozen in an open doorway.I don't think I'll bother with the plot much. The hero, Derek Flint, is an expert at everything from self discipline to self indulgence. He speaks one thousand and forty-four languages fluently. The only reason he doesn't speak still more languages is that there are no more languages. He's a black belt in karate. He rests by stopping his heart for half an hour or so. He has more electronic tricks on his person than your most powerful Krey computer, the one that takes the transcendental constant of π out to a million digits without revealing the climax. One useful piece of information you can draw using π is that the area of a circle is equal to πR². Thus, if you get the diameter of a pizza pie you can find its area easily, and if you divide by the amount you paid, you can get the cost per square inch of the pizza pie.If you think THAT'S silly, you ought to see this movie. It reflect every male fantasy -- of the 1950s. Flint is impossibly rich, and seems to stride around leaving a cloud of pheromones behind him because all of the "girls" in his vicinity have too much make up and throw themselves at his feet. He has to keep saying things like, "Not now, Tondalayo." But these spy movies were very popular at the time of their release, the early 60s, say, and stayed so for the next ten years. They have worn out their welcome. It happens. Some jokes date badly. Our cultural history is littered with obsolete send ups -- "Gulliver's Travels," "A Modest Proposal," "Shamela", "The Master and Margarita." Except for the original "Casino Royale" in 1968. I always get a kick out of that until the last ten minutes.

This isn't the type of film I would normally seek out, but I've been on the lookout for it on the cable channels for a while now. Back in the early Sixties when I was in Scouting, our local troop regularly went to New York City on the Sunday at the beginning of Boy Scout Week. Our Scoutmaster had this thing for a movie and a show at Radio City Music Hall, and this is one of the films I recall from those excursions. (The others included "Days of Wine and Roses" and "Hatari" on separate trips). Amazingly, I was able to recall a few details about the flick before watching it once again today, like the reliance on scientific gizmos and the villainous plot having something to do with weather control. And the girls. You know, in hindsight, I have to wonder what our parent chaperons must have thought about our Scout leader's choice of entertainment, but the subject never came up afterward.Back then, I was too young to realize that the picture was a spoof of the James Bond and spy mystery genre. All you have to do to realize that now is catch the opening of the picture with Lee J. Cobb heading up ZOWIE and you've got it knocked right from the start. But still, this picture had some pretty clever stuff for fifty years ago, like the disappearing building and the roll away vault trap. And how about Flint's heart stop trick used effectively to outwit those Galaxy goons. The best sounding gimmick though was the electro-fragmentizer, man I have got to get me one of those.Anyway, this was my first look at James Coburn, who I hadn't come to appreciate until many years later in a variety of screen roles, mostly those multiple appearances in TV and movie Westerns. He makes for an unusually suave and sophisticated Bond clone, but when the script calls for cheesy, he's pure cheddar, and extra sharp at that.In hindsight, I'm surprised that none of the young ladies cast as part of Flint's entourage were celebrities of the day, including his nemesis Gila Golan. But hey, right there near the top of the credits was one of Charlie Chan's favorite sons, Benson Fong as Doc Schneider. That was another clever bit actually, giving him the name Schneider and calling Peter Brocco 'Wu'.Here's something I thought about during the picture as well - you could really have some fun with this concept as a director today. You substitute the weather control plot with one involving global warming, and you put Al Gore in the Malcolm Rodney role. Then when you have him do battle with the hero, he gets swooped up by a giant pro-American war eagle, who carries him off to the top of an active volcano and drops him in. The world is saved once more.Say here's something to think about - if there's no such thing as a Battle of the Bulge ribbon, how did Flint know what the phony award was supposed to represent?

OUR MAN FLINT is, I guess, 20th Century-Fox's American answer to James Bond. FLINT isn't as much of a spoof as AUSTIN POWERS is, but it is without a doubt an imitation of 007. It's a little kookier than a Bond film, but it's not full of gags.Derek Flint (James Coburn) is a secret agent who has his own methods of doing things. A worldly man, he practices martial arts and meditation and lives with four beautiful women in a tricked-out bachelor pad. His fierce independence gets on the nerves of his commander (Lee J. Cobb).When a mysterious agency named Galaxy starts controlling the weather, the entire world is threatened. Galaxy can melt the polar ice caps, set off volcanic eruptions, etc. Founded by idealist scientists, the agency holds the world hostage in hopes of creating a new utopian world. A world with no violence, where there's no extreme weather and beautiful women are brainwashed to pleasure men.The leaders of Z.O.W.I.E. (an international espionage agency) choose Flint as the perfect man to put a stop to Galaxy's scheme. Using his unique skills and incredible knowledge (as well as some useful gadgets), Flint tries to get to the bottom of things.FLINT (the first of two films in the series) is not as good as the Bond movies that inspired it, but it's still a '60s-era spy film. It's not a big joke like CASINO ROYALE (1967) or AUSTIN POWERS. Rather, it's like the studio said, "What if James Bond was a more unconventional spy?"The movie is full of '60s hairdos and styles. There's the obligatory over-the-top enemy base as well as a lot of women running around in bikinis.I first heard of Derek Flint from the AUSTIN POWERS DVD. It was mentioning Mike Myers's various inspirations, listing the early Bond movies but also the Flint movies. I noticed a few things in this film that reminded me of POWERS.FLINT won't knock your socks off, but it's worth checking out if you have the time and you're curious.