The Ambushers (USA, 1967) 102 min color DIR: Henry Levin. SCR: Herbert Baker, based on Donald Hamilton’s book. PROD: Irving Allen. DOP: Edward Colman, Burnett Guffey. MUSIC: Hugo Montenegro. CAST: Dean Martin, Senta Berger, Janice Rule, James Gregory, Albert Salmi. (Columbia Pictures)
This film is BAD!! I loved it! And for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps the creators of the Austin Powers films missed the irony that their vulgar, infantile spoofs of swinging 60s secret agent films were satirizing a genre that was already spoofed in an equally vulgar and infantile manner with the Matt Helm pictures. There is nothing that Mike Myers can muster which matches the crudeness, the shocking sexism and comic-book depth of these way-out pictures in which everyone’s favourite souse, Dean Martin, plays the secret agent who spends more time in compromising positions than saving the world. These four Matt Helm film adaptations (including The Wrecking Crew, The Silencers and Murderers’ Row), it must be said, differ sharply from the no-nonsense tone of Donald Hamilton’s original novels.
Although the youth market was taking over the movie world, remember Hollywood was still being ruled by people a generation or two older. Therefore, a curious hanging-on of dated objectivity still permeated a lot of mainstream pictures. This film is like a 12-year-old telling a dirty joke at their parents’ cocktail party.
Why then, is The Ambushers a must for bad film lovers? Because this picture is an essential reminder of the casual sexism and objectification of women that was accepted years ago. In other words, it remains a pristine example of just how hypocritical the establishment really was, in a picture so jaw-droppingly flagrant in crotch-level sexual innuendo, depicting women as nothing more than pleasure machines. This was Columbia’s attempt at fitting in with the Swinging 60s? It reveals the ugly truths beneath our society, although I’m sure the movie wasn’t intended to make a point about anything.
It is laughable for its infantile sexual politics, and also because I can’t think of a more shoddy-looking motion picture released from a major studio. You need look no further than the exciting chase climax where Matt Helm is on a motorcycle in front of a rear-screen projection unit in pursuit of a top secret flying saucer on a train. Flying saucer, you ask? Oh yes… the “plot”.
Matt Helm is interrupted from his romps in the hay to pursue a top secret flying saucer stolen from the United States, which is believed to be in hiding south of the border. With the help of flying saucer technician Shiela Sommers (played by the lovely and bewildered Janice Rule), Matt gets involved in a series of flimsy misadventures in pursuit of the lost UFO. That “subplot” involving a vat of beer surely took Dino zero time to get into character. The sketchy story is usually just an excuse for Dino to walk around in exotic locations and make frat-boy-level remarks about certain lovely ladies. (The film’s marketing ploy featuring a bunch of scantily clad “Slaygirls” ought to say it all.) Plus, the excuse of a twist featuring amnesia shows just how careless the folks at Columbia really were. More film is wasted in an endless sequence where Matt gets to bluff his way out of a firing squad.
One early scene sums up the mentality of this motion picture. We see the interior of a train car featuring Matt and three others. After a momentary blackout, the lovely young lady among the three is stripped down to her bikini. We learn this was an exercise for “spy school” and Matt had successfully “uncovered” the person who was a secret agent. Ha ha.
I suppose for those inclined to learn more about the material that Austin Powers mined, this movie is also the Swinging 60s at its most typical: full of groovy space age design (love the tent that expands with air and even includes furniture- most importantly a bed), and Hugo Montenegro’s right-on lounge score would delight cocktail crowds of all ages. The Ambushers is universal– it is for the snivelling little six-year-old in all of us.
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #6, “The Second Annual Summer Drive-In Issue”.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.