Movie Review | Operation Kid Brother (De Martino, 1967)
I assume that the James Bond franchise was big enough that there were a number of obvious cash-ins alongside the Eurospy genre that it no doubt inspired. I'm not familiar with those to make any broad sweeping statements, but my guess is that none of them fall into as neat a proto-Bruceploitation template as this one. A lead actor who resembles the real deal? Check. A bunch of peripheral actors from the actual movies? Check. Discount versions of the same thrills? Check. Crazier and sometimes more fun? Sadly no.
But instead of Bruce (Lee), the guy we're ripping off here is Connery, and to this movie's credit, it does have a real Connery. Neil Connery, brother of Sean. What's interesting is that it doesn't try to pass him off as the original, but as the brother of the more famous secret agent, who in the universe of the movie, would be going by his real last name. (Although one must point out that Bond does as well, making him a pretty lousy secret agent in most respects.) Neil plays a plastic surgeon who also can read lips and has the power of hypnosis. Apparently he was a plasterer in real life, and I assume the screenwriters got confused and wrote in the plastic surgeon job in an attempt to make him feel more at ease onscreen. I also assume the hypnosis angle, which bears limited fruit in the pursuit of the mission, was an excuse to give the star a bunch of dramatic closeups in an effort to wring a better performance out of him. Neither is successful. If anything, the movie demonstrates the classic Bruceploitation lesson that you can't fake star power, no matter how much your actor looks like the real deal.
The movie is also not remotely thrilling, and this is an area where it compares unfavourably to Bruceploitation. It's still possible to do entertaining martial arts sequences on the cheap, but the more elaborate set pieces of the Bond movies are harder to replicate when you're pinching pennies. To be fair, the movie doesn't look impoverished, and we do bounce around different locations, although whatever travelogue qualities the movie might have attempted were not done justice by the awful transfer I watched on YouTube. But making up for that is a pretty nice Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai score, including a theme song replete with lush instrumentation and sometimes breathy, sometimes soaring vocals, as well as the actual Bond actors in the cast. (I assume there was nothing in their contract stopping them from acting in rip-offs.) We get Adolfo Celi and Bernard Lee doing more boring versions of their actual roles. But the ladies fare better, with Daniela Bianchi wearing any number of red or orange outfits that proved retina-scorching in the copy I watched, and Lois Maxwell, who is normally stuck behind a desk in the Bond movies, actually getting to go out into the field and get in car chases and shootouts. Now if we had a Moneypenny-centric rip-off, we'd be on to something.
