Come Spy With Me
Dean Brierly dons his Nehru jacket and straps on his
Walther PPK as he explores the diabolically swinging espionage world of Dick Malloy,
Agent 077.
The 1960s gave the world a new kind of cinematic hero, one
who redefined conceptions of morality through his indulgence in casual violence
and unrepressed carnality. He operated in a fantasy world of spy vs.
counterspy, had a license to kill and carried out supercharged adventures in
such Technicolor playgrounds as London, Paris, Rome and Istanbul. His adversaries
were ingenious, formidable and frequently megalomaniac; his playmates were
numerous, voluptuous and frequently duplicitous. He was known by many names.
Among the most familiar and enduring were Bond, Solo, Drake, Palmer, Flint.
In addition to these celluloid titans, there was a vast
contingent of second-tier spies, overlooked and unheralded by critics, but
cheered on by audiences the world over who couldn’t get enough kiss kiss, bang
bang. Literally hundreds of cheap but potent European spy films were churned
out in the mid-to-late sixties to feed the demand. Like the contemporaneous
spaghetti western genre, the Eurospy misses outweighed the hits, but not by as
great a margin as is generally assumed. Unfortunately, many of these gems have
yet to be rescued from the Siberia of cinema
history.
A wave of the Beretta, therefore, to Dorado Films, which
recently brought to DVD one of the most notable figures of the Eurospy genre,
CIA agent Dick Malloy. Also known as Agent 077, he was played by cult film icon
Ken Clark, whose screen persona was at once rugged and graceful, heroic and
hedonistic. If Roger Moore and Peter Graves had somehow trumped the laws of
nature and produced a love child, it probably would have looked a lot like Clark. Tall and muscular, he radiated manly mojo and
looked like he could have kicked Sean Connery’s ass if the occasion ever arose.
Even his chest hair looked tough. The athletic actor performed all of his
often-dangerous stunts with rare enthusiasm and total commitment. Perhaps more
important, Clark was the undisputed master of
the action man stance. Nobody, but nobody, posed with such intensely stylish
affect. With feet planted shoulder-width apart and torso angled slightly
forward, his entire body radiated lethal prowess as he dispensed brutal punches
and stylish karate chops. Clark looked equally
convincing handling a wide variety of firearms and females, projected an
engaging cockiness and, topping it off, looked pretty damn suave in a tuxedo.