BY HANK REINEKE
Blue Underground’s double-feature Blu Ray issue of Code 7… Victim 5 and Mozambique is a generous release considering
the company chose to simultaneously issue both films as standalone DVDs. Both films are among the earliest big screen
efforts of notorious exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers. Both were adapted from Tower’s own
semi-original scenarios (under his usual pseudonym of “Peter Welbeck”) and both
were penned by the Australian screenwriter Peter Yeldham with British director Robert
Lynn at the helm.
Both men had been working in television and, like Towers,
were now gingerly testing the waters of the international movie business. The films, modest thrillers financed by
Tower’s UK Company “Towers of London,” nonetheless share a continental roster
of technicians and actors. The films are
serviceably entertaining as thrillers, but are most ambitious in conveying a
jet-setting ‘60s ambiance. The fact that
Towers brought his international crew to southern Africa to film is the most
notable feature of both efforts.
“Africa is changing,” the ruthless drug smuggler Da Silva
sighs to a shady Arabian client in Mozambique
(1964). “The best days are
gone.” Indeed they were… or soon would
be. Just as location shooting was being
completed on this fictional thriller set in the tiny, East African province of
Mozambique, a coalition of real-life indigenous anti-colonialists and communist
guerilla fighters were combining to upset centuries-long Portuguese rule. As a decade-long bloody civil war would soon
follow in the wake of the filming of this Technicolor/Technoscope drama, it’s unlikely
that any subsequent team of filmmakers from British or continental Europe would
be warmly welcomed in the years going forward.
The South African locations of this disc’s companion film
Code 7… Victim 5 are cosmopolitan and
glittering in presentation; conversely the photography of the plaintive Mozambique
countryside captures a far more sober and undeveloped region. Aside from breathless images capturing
beautiful oceanside views - sightlines unblemished by tourist constructions -
the countryside of Mozambique circa
1963 is revealed as poor and agricultural.
The two films offered on this disc do share similarities
aside from their exotic African settings. Not the least of these is that both films open with very public
assassinations of characters mostly tangential to the film’s plotlines. Code 7
opens with the daylight murder – by a team of menacing clown-faced assassins –
during Capetown’s New Year’s Eve Carnival parade. Mozambique
opens similarly with a mysterious assassination atop the winding, ancient stone
stairwells of old Lisbon.
In Mozambique,
American actor Steve Cochran plays Brad Webster, a down-on-his-luck Cessna
pilot. We first encounter Webster as he
trawls about Lisbon’s bleak waterfront in search of employment. His blacklisting as a pilot-for-hire is
understandable as his previous assignment didn’t go all that well. Both of his passengers were killed in a crash
of his piloted small craft, leaving Webster the lone survivor.
For better or worse, his fortunes change following a
desperate, alcohol fueled fight in a waterfront saloon. Faced with a probable sixty day jail sentence
for vagrancy and public fisticuffs, Lisbon authorities mysteriously offer Webster
an alternative. A certain Colonel Valdez
residing in Mozambique is looking to hire a small-craft pilot on the down
low. The police offer Webster one-way airfare
from Lisbon to their colonial territory should he choose to accept the deal.
He does. Once aboard
his Lufthansa flight to Mozambique,
the sweating heavily, PTSD-afflicted Webster meets the comely blond Christina
(Vivi Bach). Christina too,
coincidentally, was also sent a one-way ticket at the behest of the mysterious
Colonel Valdez. So begins an improbable
romance between this middle-aged and craggy American and a beautiful young
woman in her twenties. In truth, actor
Cochran is perhaps a bit too long-in-the-tooth to pull off this charade as a
dashing hero and paramour.
Upon their arrival in Mozambique, the pair are picked up
at the airport by a carload of shady characters and brought to the Hotel
Valdez, a posh hotel and nightclub. Webster is immediately separated from Christina and introduced to both the
Colonel’s wife (Hildegard Knef) and Da Silva, the Colonel’s grim, scowling
right-hand-man. Da Silva’s face will be a
familiar one to moviegoers. The
character is played by Martin Benson, the ill-fated gangster “Mr. Solo” of
“pressing engagement” Goldfinger fame. We soon learn that the Colonel is – or
perhaps was – a rich man. He has
holdings of some six million Swiss francs, the better portion of the fortune garnered
from both drug smuggling operations and his running of a high-end prostitution
ring servicing the hotel’s wealthy clientele.
Peter Yeldham’s screenplay is of similar construction to Code 7, the scenario purposely peopled
with sketchy characters and numerous red herrings. That said, this is not a terribly exciting
film, and we could have done without the pace-killing musical cabaret
performances (in English and German), the moderate Go-Go dancing scene and even
the obligatory indigenous tribal drum and dance revue. The latter sequence is plainly included to merely
burnish the film’s ninety-minute running time and remind cinemagoers that the
film is set in exotic Africa.
The climax of Mozambique
is not set in that country at all, but instead in their neighbor to the north,
Zambia. Our hero and revealed protagonist
will ultimately spar before the magnificent vista and visual glory that is
Victoria Falls. Sadly, even this
backdrop is not used to best advantage, as the real showdown takes place during
an elongated and somewhat anti-climactic finale on the steel girders of the nearby
Victoria Falls Bridge that spans the Zambeli River.
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I imagine that aficionados of ‘60s spy cinema will likely
find Code 7… Victim 5 (1964) to be the
more engaging of this two film package. Lex Barker plays Steve Martin, a handsome jet setting private
investigator of the James Bond mold. As
with 007, Martin is irresistible-on-sight to an assortment of busty ingénues,
and he delivers Bond-like wry quips following a series of narrow escapes and
dangerous situations. This is, as far as
I know, the only James Bond pastiche where the hero escapes harm from an
ostrich stampede. Martin is brought to
apartheid-era South Africa at the behest of Wexler (Walter Rilla) who lives in
lavish style behind the secured gates of a guarded palatial estate. Wexler, a former
German national with a compromised past, has made his fortune in South Africa
by taking control of a large swathe of the nation’s copper mining industry. He suspects he’s soon to be the target of an
assassination plot. His fear is not
unreasonable. We learn that it was his
trusted servant who was murdered by the white-face clowns in the film’s opening
sequence.
There are a number of potential string-pullers working in
the shadowy background. Potential suspects even include his smiling step-daughter
Gina (Veronique Vendell). Though this
film falls fall short of classic status, the mystery elements woven into the action-sequence
dotted screenplay do keep one guessing. The most memorable feature of Code
7… Victim 5 is Director of
Photography Nicholas Roeg’s sun-drenched camerawork, as it captures stunning
visuals of picturesque bluffs, mountainside hamlets, and shimmering
coastlines. There’s also an almost
endless parade of bikini-clad lovelies, displaying their very own, um,
all-natural attributes to great effect. There’s also a modest hint of pre-Thunderball
excitement, with 2nd Unit Director and underwater photographer Egil
S. Woxholt handling a sequence featuring a bit of spear gun and shark
excitement.
It must be said that Code
7… Victim 5 was photographed in and around Capetown during the tenure of
South African Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd, a far-right political figure,
racial separatist and architect of apartheid. Ironically, and with the help of fictional private investigator Steve
Martin, paranoid German industrialist Wexler will survive his assassination
attempt. In real life, Prime Minister
Verwoerd would not. He was stabbed to
death by an assassin in 1966 two years following the completion of this film.
Original trailers for both movies are included.
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