Interpol
This brings back thoughts of the good old days
– when men drank martini’s, the British empire ruled over Hong Kong, people
smoked on planes and the U.S. dollar was worth counterfeiting. The 1960’s
were also the decade of the great spy films – James Bond, Harry Palmer,
Matt Helms, Derek Flint – and Hong Kong jumped on this fad as well with
a flurry of spy films filled with gadgets and outrageous villains. Some
of these Hong Kong copycat films are quite fun and very colorful with definite
60’s pop sensibilities. ‘Interpol” (1967) is unfortunately not really one
of them.
This film is lacking in the combustible retro
energy that some of the Shaw’s other spy films had by the bucket load with
its fairly mundane plot, lackluster hero and uninteresting bad guys. Most
egregious though is the paucity of bountiful babes. What is a spy film
without them? The film does have the catlike Margaret Tu Chuan and Shen
Yi but they don’t get a lot of screen time and are not allowed to be particularly
seductive. One might especially expect that with a real life nickname of
“Wild Girl” for her off-screen activities that Margaret would have been
a little less cool and would have been as sexy as she was in “The Black
Falcon” where she was delicious as the purring villain. The film was directed
by another Japanese import, Koh Nakahara, who directed three other Shaw
pictures – “Diary of a Lady Killer” being one. One tends to expect the
films from the Japanese directors to sizzle with style – especially those
coming out of the Nikkatsu studio as Koh did – but I have seen little evidence
of it either in this film or in “Diary”.
Two men have washed ashore with bullet holes decorating
their suits and Interpol is called in to investigate. They turn to their
best man, Agent 009 (Lily Ho had the same number in “Angel with the Iron
Fists” – a lucky number in China) who reluctantly leaves behind two women
on the beach to fly to Hong Kong. On the plane he meets and flirts with
a pair of women – Margaret and Shen Yi – who co-incidentally or not turn
out to be part of the gang responsible for the two murdered men. 009 tries
to pass himself off as a gambler and takes on the assistance of a pickpocket
(Li Kun) to get to the bottom of this affair. Getting to the bottom of
course entails visits to swank nightclubs and bedding beautiful women.
The bad guys are counterfeiting U.S. dollars that they smuggle out in old
automobiles and anyone who gets in their way ends up in the morgue with
a tag on their toe. 009 isn’t supplied with a lot of parlor tricks – a
lighter that doubles as a smoke bomb and chewing gum that turns into metal
when sprayed with a perfume – are about it. As is generally the case in
all spy movies, he gets captured and tied up behind locked doors with a
ticking bomb right next to him and Margaret cackles that the bomb will
explode in two hours. Two hours? That’s enough time to watch another movie
and still escape. Look for the cameos from Tina Chi-fei as a singer and
in the best moment of the film one from Lily Ho.
Much of the blah feeling that comes from this
film can be attributed to the actor playing 007, Tang Ching, who the Shaw’s
seemed intent on making into a debonair leading man. They co-starred him
with Lily in both of the Angel films and he made little impact in those
films either, but with Lily around who cared. It is odd because at one
time he was called “Taiwan’s number one actor” and received the Golden
Horse Best Actor award in 1963 for the film “Before Night”. After that
film he joined up with Cathay for a few years before the Shaw Brothers
recruited him. Within a few years he primarily became a character actor
often playing the bad guy that he seems more suited for.
My rating for this film: 5.5
