"Oh, my God," indeed.

The Silencers is generally regarded as the best of four the Matt Helm movies – the others were The Ambushers (1968) and The Wrecking Crew (1969). If that's true then woe be the Matt Helm completist. This isn't the worst of the '60s spy films, but it may be the worst to spawn a series. Only hardcore fans of the genre and Dean Martin himself will have the patience to sit through such a limp effort. Movies like Casino Royale (1967) and the two Flint movies with James Coburn (all three are available on DVD) may not be any better, but at least they're colorful to look at. The Silencers isn't even vanilla.

Casting Dean Martin as a secret agent probably seemed like a good idea. The Rat Pack's personae were as close to James Bond as you could get in America. With its hot dames and cool caper action, Oceans Eleven (1960) was nearly a Bond movie before Bond movies even existed. After his break-up with Jerry Lewis, and especially after the disastrous reception to his first solo film, Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), Dean Martin actually took acting seriously for a time. He gave three solid performances in a row (in The Young Lions, Some Came Running, and Rio Bravo), but after finding lasting success with his wildly successful TV variety show, which began airing in 1965, he seemed to stop caring, and was phoning in his performances.

This might not have happened had The Silencers's script had been better, but it's weak in every department. The picture barely has a story, and even it doesn't begin to come together until the film is nearly half over. Basically, a SPECTRE-like group of super-villains called Big-O threaten to redirect a missile to an underground nuclear test site, thus releasing deadly radiation throughout the American southwest. This, according to their leader, Tung-Tze (Victor Buono, whose name is misspelled twice on the DVD's jacket), will trigger a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, thus allowing Big-O to step in and dominate the world. (The plan is similar to SPECTRE's in You Only Live Twice, released the following year.) The Department of Intelligence and Counter Espionage (I.C.E.) calls on semi-retired agent Matt Helm to save the day.

The script unimaginatively grafts Dino's boozy womanizer with Bondian gadgets and hopes for the best. He's basically just doing his variety show shtick within the context of a spy film, but the spy stuff is so weak and Dino, characteristically ambivalent, can't liven it up. Making matters worse, the plot has Helm playing off two women who mostly bicker and fight with the secret agent. The first is an old flame, fellow agent Daliah Lavi (who did both The Spy with a Cold Nose and Casino Royale right after this) while, for most of the picture, Helm is teamed with a klutzy sexpot (Stella Stevens), whom Helm suspects is a Big-O spy. The problem is that even the audience can guess Stevens's innocence from nearly the beginning, so their constant arguing with Dean soon becomes pointless and grating. Who wants to watch a spy movie centered around two people getting on each other's nerves?

Another problem is the movie's cheap look. Big-O's lair, with its papier mache rocks and unconvincing computer consoles, looks rather like something one might find on television's Batman or The Time Tunnel. The suite of one of Big-O's femme fatales looks like it might have been designed by Mike Brady. Absurdly, Dino doesn't even drive a cool car. No Aston Martin here – Matt Helm drives a 1966 Mercury Colony Park Station Wagon, complete with faux wood paneling. Helm himself seems out of step with the times as well. He wears yellow turtlenecks and suede jackets, complete with hand-grenade buttons. "Now I'm finally wearing something that'll knock 'em dead," Dino quips. Yawn.

The film was directed by Phil Karlson, a traffic cop of a director who spent most of his career at lowly Monogram Pictures. Karlson had shown some promise in films like The Phenix City Story (1955), but was basically doing hack work by the 1960s. His '50s films were known for their explosive action, but The Silencers has nothing of the sort, with no sense of pace, and seeming much longer than it actually is. Moreover, no one, certainly not Karlson, seems to have an understanding of the appeal of the best spy films. A gag involving a backwards-firing pistol is squandered through over-playing and lessened by being needlessly bloody. The picture's other technical credits are equally unimpressive, especially the special effects, which are downright lousy.

Stella Stevens, unlike Dean, gives the film her all, gamely taking wild pratfalls other actresses might have used doubles on. She brings to the film her usual innocent sexiness, but it's not enough to save the picture. The rest of the cast, which includes such familiar character players as James Gregory (as Helm's M-like boss), Arthur O'Connell, Robert Webber, and Nancy Kovack, is wasted. Buono, sporting what is possibly worst Asian makeup ever (he looks more like Anton LeVay) is embarrassingly hammy.

The picture's one saving grace is its opening number, a phenomenal piece of kitsch with Las Vegas showgirl types dancing (some of it by a very sexy Cyd Charisse) and stripping over the main titles, set to Elmer Bernstein and Mack David's brassy title tune, sung by Vicki Carr. Sadly, nothing in the rest of the film comes close to the lively camp of this opening.

Video & Audio

First, the good news. The film is in 16:9 anamorphic format, even though the packaging suggests 4 x 3 letterbox (1.85:1). Remastered in High Definition, the image is nonetheless unimpressive, with ugly color and a somewhat soft image. Most of this seems to simply reflect the uninspired cinematography, however. Easy-to-read English and French subtitles are offered, and the Dolby Digital mono sound is fine, though likewise unspectacular.

Extras

The DVD includes three trailers for other Columbia titles, but not for this or any other Matt Helm movie.

Parting Thoughts

The Silencers actually got good reviews when it was new. That its makers were so clueless in their understanding of the appeal of such pictures is almost forgivable because, truth be told, no one did. The Flint films James Coburn made at 20th Century-Fox really weren't any better, but at least those films had lively, enthusiastic performances by Coburn. The Silencers is nothing more than a cheap imitator.