Culture Shock 06.19.14: 'Deadlier Than the Male' is an underrated classic of the spy craze

Elke Sommer, left, and Sylva Koscina are "Deadlier Than the Male."

When you've seen as many films as I have, the overlooked jewels become increasingly rare. Seams run dry. But still, on occasion, you stumble across a movie that leaves you wondering how you haven't seen it before.

"Deadlier Than the Male" is just such a movie, and I'm kicking myself for only now getting to it.

One of a flood of movies released during the James Bond-inspired spy craze, "Deadlier Than the Male" (1967) gets lost among its better-known contemporaries. Dean Martin's Matt Helm films and James Coburn's "Our Man Flint" receive far more repeat airplay. Sometimes, sadly, even Turner Classic Movies falls down on the job.

Yet unlike those straight-up parodies of Sean Connery's 007 outings, "Deadlier Than the Male" could almost be a Bond film. It opens with an airborne assassination that would easily be ranked among the best pre-credit set pieces of the Bond series.

Hen's Tooth Video released "Deadlier Than the Male" on DVD, but an upgrade on that decade-old pressing is in order. Hen's Tooth's disc is widescreen but non-anamorphic. That said, it's still colorfully vivid on my HDTV, even in zoom mode.

Richard Johnson (1963's "The Haunting") stars as Hugh Drummond — like Bond, a character with literary origins, in this case H.C. McNeile's 1920s gentleman hero "Bulldog" Drummond. Updated for the swinging '60s, Johnson's Drummond is an insurance investigator assigned to look into some very expensive and deadly "accidents."

The trail leads to a scheme to eliminate stubborn businessmen who stand in the way of — well, that would be telling. Let's just say someone has a rather aggressive idea of a "hostile" takeover.

Johnson turned down the role of James Bond, not wanting to commit to a long-term contract. His loss was Connery's gain — and ours. But "Deadlier Than the Male" gives us an idea what kind of 007 Johnson would have made. With his slighter build, less-rugged appearance and greater refinement, Johnson comes across as a Pierce Brosnan-type Bond in a Connery-type Bond movie. The approach works surprisingly well, hinting that the problem with the Brosnan-era 007 movies was never Brosnan.

Yet's Johnson's charming, unflappable Drummond is destined to be overshadowed.

The "deadlier than the male" assassins referenced in the title (and the catchy title tune by the Walker Brothers) take the shapely forms of Irma Eckman, played by Elke Sommer ("A Shot in the Dark") and Sylva Koscina ("Hercules," "Hercules Unchained"). When the two emerge bikini-clad from the Mediterranean to carry out a spear-gun assassination, it's Ursula Andress times two. Calling Dr. Yes.

Sommer's trademark "Teutonic temptress" — really, even her Internet Movie Database bio calls her that — is more than a match for any man, except maybe Bulldog Drummond. But as captivating a screen presence as she is, even she is outdone by Koscina, who would also be her co-star in Mario Bava's ghostly 1972 masterpiece "Lisa and the Devil." Koscina's playfully sadistic Penelope steals the show, especially when she's called upon to torture Drummond's clueless nephew (Steve Carlson) for information, or when she's "borrowing" from Irma's wardrobe. With their banter and bickering, Penelope and Irma are like a couple of mismatched college roommates, which adds humor without quite falling into camp — as befell the Bond series starting with "Diamonds are Forever."

Rounding out the cast is underrated British character actor Nigel Green, perhaps best remembered as Hercules in 1963's "Jason and the Argonauts." Indeed, there's a lot of under-appreciated talent here, in front of and behind the camera. "Deadlier Than the Male" boasts a story by Hammer veteran Jimmy Sangster ("Horror of Dracula"), gorgeous cinematography by Ernest Steward (the "Carry On" films) and a swinging spy-fi score by Malcolm Lockyer (1965's "Dr. Who and the Daleks").

If some company wants to revisit "Deadlier Than the Male" for a much-needed Blu-ray upgrade, throwing in a bonus CD of the score wouldn't make any enemies.

Culture Shock: 01.24.13: 'Dredd' lays down the letter of the law

In the near future, Mega-City One stretches across the Eastern Seaboard. Within its concrete and steel canyons, hundreds of millions of people live, walled off from the war-ravaged wastelands to the west. Outside is desolation. Inside is a vast, crowded, chaotic city-state beset by warring gangs.

The only thing keeping law and order are the judges. Each one is judge, jury and, if the punishment fits the crime, executioner. They are the law. And the most feared judge of all is Judge Dredd.

"Dredd" is the second attempt to bring the long-running British comic-book character to the screen. The first, 1995's "Judge Dredd" starring Sylvester Stallone, set new standards for bad decisions and bad acting. The new "Dredd" (Blu-ray and DVD) is at least respectful of its source material, but it never embraces the comic's black humor and subversive critique of authority. It has less ambitious goals in mind.

Take "The Rookie" starring Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen, cross it with the first "Die Hard," set it in the future, and you pretty much have "Dredd."

After taking down a van full of gang members high on a new drug called "slo-mo," which makes time appear to move in slow motion, Dredd (Karl Urban of the rebooted "Star Trek") is assigned to give a final pass/fail field test to a trainee judge, Anderson, played by Olivia Thirlby of "Juno."

Anderson is a borderline case who shouldn't even have made it to the field-test stage, but she has a quality that makes giving her a final shot worthwhile: She is a mutant with psychic abilities, the result of her having grown up near the wall separating Mega-City One from the radioactive wastes.

But because this is a movie, it's not going to be a typical training exercise.

Investigating a triple-homicide call leads to Dredd and Anderson becoming trapped in Peach Trees, a 200-story skyscraper slum ruled by Ma-Ma (Lena Headey of "Game of Thrones"), a former prostitute who has built a criminal empire, including control of Mega-City One's slo-mo trade.

With limited ammunition and no backup, Dredd and Anderson must blast their way up and out of Ma-Ma's locked-down fortress, with her army on their heels and hundreds of civilians in the crossfire.

Headey is very good in her stereotypically male role as the ruthless, disfigured villain, and Thirlby gets the movie's best set piece when she goes inside the mind of Ma-Ma's top lieutenant. But most of the credit goes to Urban, who stays true to his character by never removing his helmet, even though it means he can act only with his chin. Urban's enigmatic Dredd, keeping his thoughts and expressions to himself, is a marked improvement on Stallone's screaming buffoon.

Director Pete Travis and his team, with a relatively modest budget, deliver a convincing post-apocalyptic setting and a few first-rate action scenes. In the end, "Dredd" is a perfectly competent and enjoyable action film.

The only problem is it could have been much more, and at no extra cost.

Since its inception in 1977, the "Judge Dredd" comic, appearing in the British magazine 2000 A.D., has been filled with political and social satire. It has attracted some of the British comics industry's top talent, and it helped inspire the politically aware comic books that took America by storm in the 1980s, from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' "Watchmen" and Howard Chaykin's "American Flagg" to Mike Baron and Steve Rude's "Nexus" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns." But you'd never get that impression from the movie "Dredd," which plays the absurd, madcap universe Dredd inhabits almost totally straight.

"Judge Dredd" co-creator Carlos Ezquerra says that when he created Dredd's costume, with its hints of fascist iconography, he intended it to be futuristic, but now some police actually dress the same way.

So, maybe "Dredd" the movie doesn't bother with satire because it's beside the point?

Culture Shock 12.06.12: Congratulations, royal watchers, it's a Windsor!

The announcement of a royal pregnancy in the House of Windsor comes at an auspicious time for a realm in the grip of fiscal austerity.

This is not exactly the way it happened.

However indulgent British "austerity" may be — government spending cuts have been trivial while taxes have been hiked, repeating the fairytale of virtually every nation enacting "austerity" measures — austerity is largely a state of mind. And what can lift the spirits of Her Royal Majesty's subjects more than the prospect of a new heir?

Yes, the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, and her husband Prince William are expecting. This is particularly good news for British tourism. The royal family and its royal residences are among Great Britain's major tourist attractions, to the princely sum of more than $800 million a year, while the cost of running the royal household last year was a mere pittance by comparison, roughly $52 million, according to figures from The Telegraph and Monday's exchange rate.

Tourism is big business in the U.K., so this is all very important. And as anyone who has ever run a tourist attraction knows, you have to keep the attraction fresh to keep the visitors and their gift-shop purchases rolling in. Those souvenir replicas of Big Ben and Union Jack T-shirts don't sell themselves.

A British royal baby is the equivalent of Six Flags adding a new roller coaster. You have to install new attractions to keep the tourists coming.

And most of the English-speaking world is entranced. First a royal wedding complete with ridiculous hats out of a rejected Monty Python sketch, now a baby! It's almost enough to make up for Kate's revealing run-in with the paparazzi just a few months ago. The way large numbers of us latch onto celebrity — any celebrity — it's clearly part of human nature. And say what you will about Elizabeth II and her sprawling family, at least they do typically display some measure of class, that heir-do-well Prince Harry excepted. Yet even his tawdry tabloid trysts are to be preferred to the antics of the houses of Hilton, Lohan and Kardashian.

Poor Harry. Baby makes third in line for the throne, pushing him to fourth, for which there is no payout. (This also applies to the other game of thrones, the queue for the royal washroom.)

Now I understand many of you are fed up with your fellow Americans' obsession with royal watching. You're thinking, "Didn't we have a revolution so we wouldn't have royalty?"

Simply put, no. We had a revolution over taxes that were less than what Englishmen in England were paying at the time to subsidize our defense. The real financial burden of empire is always born by the imperial power, not the colonies, as economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has observed.

Besides, constitutional monarchy has its advantages. Chiefly, under constitutional monarchy the offices of head of state and head of government are separate. You have a head of state, the monarch, in whom you can invest your national sense of worth, then you have a head of government, a president or prime minister who runs the place, if not all that well. That allows you to freely ridicule your head of government when he deserves it — which is pretty much all the time — while not running down the personage who is the face of the nation.

In America, our head of state and head of government are combined in one office, the presidency. So no matter how much the president might deserve to be tarred and feathered, we're always told we must "show respect for the office." This, I submit, is unhealthy for democracy.

Certainly I've never heard anyone from Britain say we must show respect for the office of prime minister. And who'd take it seriously if they did? Tony Blair held the post, for Pete's sake.

So, welcome Britain's new blue-blooded baby. One day he or she will help the British people take their minds off the clown occupying Number 10. It is an honorable fate.