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 They welcome you to the "mod, mod world of sexy stylish intrigue as British comic strip character Modesty Blaise comes to life in this outrageous spy spoof." Modesty is trying to prevent a diamond heist and gets help from Terence Stamp. 1966, 119 minutes, Widescreen DVD
One has to wonder after enduring two hours of this mess whether its audience of 1966 was in on the joke or whether it was only the movie that thought all its mod design, dreadfully long scenes that went nowhere and dialogue that rarely made any sense made it the pinnacle of mid-sixties cool. For the first hour I had only the vaguest notion of what was happening (something about some diamonds and the British government using Modesty Blaise as a decoy of some type) and kept waiting for all these characters with thick British accents to sort themselves out. Finally in the last forty minutes or so, things degenerate into the typical "bad guy captures good guy and good guy has to escape formula," but I could get that much more professionally in the James Bond movies this film apparently seeks to send up to some extent.
Based on the comic strip no one has ever read, Modesty Blaise is a thief of exceptional talent who is recruited by the British government to find out who is trying to steal some diamonds that are being sent to some fictional Arabian nation. When the movie first began, I thought I was watching that awful Avengers movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman because some dude that looked like John Steed was bee-bopping through London passing notes to mimes and generally behaving like we all believed those secret agents of the era did. Once he got blown up though, any resemblance this movie had to those secret agent movies ended. I'm still not sure what this movie was trying to be (comedy, parody, live action comic strip?), but I am quite sure that whatever it was, it did a pathetic job at it.
Despite selecting Modesty for the job, the government has its reservations and so fails to tell her the real location of the diamonds, instead giving her some snow job about them being transported by plane when in fact they are going by boat. They do this in spite of the fact that she was a world class thief (she had to come out of retirement from her palatial home to do this one last job) and has told them that they have to be straight up with her or she will steal the diamonds for herself. But would she have really? In one of many scenes that goes on too long and isn't remotely amusing, it turns out that she and the Sheik of the country the diamonds are going to are such old pals that he refers to her as his son. That's freaking hilarious because she's a woman! And sons are usually boys! They also show the Sheik's relatives and compatriots in his London headquarters enamored with all the products of western culture, surrounding themselves with boxes of stuff including pinball machines, cameras, and scooters. That's funny because Arabs are a primitive people that are easily impressed with white man who can make fire!
I was momentarily excited when Modesty declared that in order for her to do the job, she would require the assistance of her old pal Willie Garvin. Willie was played by General Zod himself, Terence Stamp, and the chance to see General Zod in a lighter role than that of intergalactic supervillain was too good to pass up. When we first meet Zod, he is blonde (ouch!) and his gimmick as womanizer and expert knife thrower are rapidly established. He signs on to the mission, but then we don't see him much in the next hour and by the time we do see him, he rarely does anything worth mentioning. Though he does get involved in some stuff not worth mentioning like when he and Modesty take time out from the action to sing some rather off-key songs about how the two of them never got it on. Either do it or don't. Just stop warbling like a cat trying to pass a kidney stone already.
Our first stop on the Modesty Blaise Insanely Self-Indulgent World Tour is Amsterdam. The diamonds are supposed to be leaving by plane from there, but as Modesty takes a scenic tour of the canals by water transport, she catches on that the diamonds will in fact be aboard the cargo ship, Tyboria. Meanwhile, someone has planted a mine in the water in an attempt to blow her up as she passes by. General Zod is there with his trusty knife to knock the mine out of the way and she and Zod acknowledge one another as she passes safely by. The rest of her time in Amsterdam passes like a bad case of the DTs, with various characters appearing and milling around at various apartments and bars. Zod in particular doesn't seem to know what he's doing as he's hanging out at magic shows in an effort to collect information about something.
Somewhere during all this we are finally introduced to the only character who is even momentarily entertaining. He is as he refers to himself later in the film, "the villain of the piece" and his name is Gabriel. He appears to be another world class thief who inhabits an island hideaway and silly silver wig (Modesty herself changes hair colors unexpectedly during a great portion of the film and so to a lesser extent does General Zod). Dirk Bogarde plays Gabriel as someone who takes only a mild interest in what's transpiring and instead spends much of his time sitting around a table sipping drinks while his financial adviser complains incessantly about how much some criminal scheme is costing them.
Gabriel is the sort of guy who dictates a letter to the financial adviser saying that a traitor needs to be executed by Pacco (whomever that is) but talks mostly about a "general shedding the same tears as widows. No make that orphans and widows. Now, I've lost the train! What was I talking about? Oh yes, send a cable to Pacco that if she is still alive by tomorrow, he won't be." There are moments with Gabriel where he manages to be quite good at playing off the Bondian stereotype of the melodramatic villain and provides the movie's only fleeting smiles, but so often they overdo it and we're left with Gabriel merely looking like he's straining to be weird. Bits involving him refusing to eat an egg that he believes to have been fertilized and one involving lobsters are just two moments that stick out that could have easily found their way to the editing room floor without trouble.
After shooting down the plane purportedly with the diamonds (beating himself up over the deaths of the pilots until he finds out the parachuted to safety) it turns out that Gabriel knows the diamonds are on the Tyboria and is pleased that everyone will think he'll be searching the plane's wreckage for them. He also notices that Modesty and Zod (having finally escaped the needless sequences in Amsterdam) are scouting out the boat as well. Modesty and Zod wonder why Gabriel hasn't attacked them yet, but are attacked by the minions of the British government before escaping by letting loose brightly colored gas in the cars they were being held in. In checking the movie's credits, I noted that it had four credited writers and one film editor. I think that sums things up pretty well, don't you old chap?
Gabriel finally comes calling and invites Modesty over for lunch which she accepts. He promptly takes her prisoner and also manages to get General Zod as well. I guess that being a world class thief like Modesty doesn't necessarily require a world class brain. Gabriel finally explains his big plan to steal the diamonds. He is going to make Zod go on the mission and it will involve some underwater gizmo that will cut a hole in the bottom of the boat and Zod will slip into the ship's cargo area, steal the diamonds and slip back out. And he'll do all this because Modesty will be held prisoner the whole time. From what I saw of this plan, I couldn't see why Gabriel needed to mess with either one of these two. Anyone could've done what Zod did. It didn't take any special skill, so what was the point of involving Modesty and him? Maybe the superfluous flourishes to his scheme was all a part of the mocking of the normal villain. Or maybe it makes perfect sense in a movie where the good guys are captured after having lunch with the bad guys.
Well, the diamonds get stolen by Zod and then he and Modesty are taken away to separate cells, but Gabriel being the self-referential freak that he is, provides a key to aid Modesty's escape. It comes on a key chain with the word "perhaps" written on - a response to her earlier question to Gabriel after he says that because he's the bad guy he has to condemn them to death and she asks something like,"but I'm the heroine so don't I escape?" And then it turns out that the escape hatch at the top of her cell leads to Gabriel's room and he's sitting there waiting for her, but she goes back down the hatch and kills some guy and escapes out the front door to her cell. Though my hair wasn't constantly changing color like most of the movie's characters, it was being pulled out by my gnarled fists.
General Zod and Modesty take forever to escape and get pinned down by enemy gunfire so they break out into another ill-advised song until the cavalry arrives. The cavalry in this case would be the Sheik and his army, having been summoned by a radio transmitter that Zod and Modesty set up out of the various secret weapons they had at their disposal which included an inflatable sea gull. A long, drawn-out clash between the Sheik's forces and Gabriel' doesn't even put an end to this fiasco, because once that's done, we have to go back to the Sheik's kingdom to see Zod and Modesty enjoying their victory and to see Gabriel getting rescued by his financial advisor.
Just an awful exercise in excess, this bloated pile of failed jokes and concepts doesn't even get the whole "it dates badly" pass that some movies of the period might rate, mainly because it's hard to believe that audiences living through the times actually found it entertaining. Aside from the horrid story and the lazy way the film was put together, Monica Vitti brings virtually nothing to the character of Modesty Blaise. Sure, she karate chops a few guys, but the character doesn't do anything except get into trouble through her own stupidity and out of it with help from all her male friends (like Zod and the Sheik). She also doesn't have much of presence in the movie either. Sure, she made some arty films with Michelangelo Antonioni, but comic strip movies like Modesty Blaise require a larger than life persona that can take over a scene (see Jane Fonda in Barbarella), not the studied intensity of a smaller, more real life oriented movie. The fact we didn't see another Modesty Blaise film until a failed pilot in 1982 goes to show that the old gal probably needs to stay a retired world class thief and quit stealing my time and money.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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