SECRET AGENT FX 18 (1964)

I suspect that this French/Italian production was among the earliest to ride the big coattails of James Bond. Coming in the first wave of imitators, it's not aiming for parody or comedy (like Our Man Flint or the Matt Helm movies), but seems to be trying to establish its main character as a franchise. There were four more movies with the character Francis Coplan (who was based on the lead in a series of novels and comic books) but each had a different leading man and none made a splash in the States. There are lots of problems with this movie, though if you stick with it to the halfway point, it moves fast enough that you can just go with the flow. The first problem is the poor dubbing. The second problem is the character's name; in print and in the IMDb credits, it’s Francis Coplan, but throughout the film, he is called something that sounds like Cavty or Crabtree. And then there's the incoherent plot, which eventually gets easier to follow.  The summary that follows involves some guesswork on my part.

A man loads a poisoned dart into a cigarette and uses it to kill an artist who apparently has a microfilm copy of some secret American rocket plans. The good guys (La Vieux and his associate whom we mostly see sitting at desks and on the phone) send a young operative named Murphy out to investigate. But the bad guys (led by Noreau and Barter) kill him, throw his body in a barrel, fill it with cement, and send him to the bottom of the sea. La Vieux manages to pull his best man, Coplan, FX-18 (though I don’t think I ever heard him called that in the movie), away from what looks like a getaway with a sex kitten, to sort things out. He's accompanied by Morvil and Alphonso, two cheery, beefy guys who function largely as mild comic relief or as rescuers when Coplan gets in too deep. They’re off to Majorca where Noreau and his baddie buddies are on a yacht, sending spy information to the Russians via a satellite link-up. A beautiful blonde is also on the yacht, and Morvil and Alphonso play up to her to get invited on the yacht. At some point, the microfilm shows up. So does a dark-haired woman. And Coplan is hanging out with Patricia, a spy posing as his wife. Eventually the plotholes recede when the action heats up: asses are kicked, people are killed, a busty woman is tortured, a yacht is blown up, and Coplan races on foot and catches up with a prop plane filled with baddies. The good guys win, of course, though I'm not sure what the prize is.

I admit the reason I sought this out in the first place was the presence of the hunky Ken Clark, who was busy in B-movies throughout the 60s (including 12 TO THE MOON and DESERT COMMANDOS, but whose big moment in the sun may have been as Stewpot, a tall, hairy, shirtless sailor in SOUTH PACIFIC. He's perfectly fine here, with a blond Marlboro Man look and an athletic build, and the two sidekicks (Jean-Pierre Laverne and Lorenzo Robledo) are fun. Everyone else is forgettable and/or interchangeable. The men (good and bad) all look like nondescript European guys in business suits; the women have different hair color but similar curvaceous bodies. Names like Mazzerac and Rodriguez are thrown around but I was never sure who they were. Clark is introduced (shirtless) briefly at the beginning, but then he vanishes from the film for half an hour, and it isn't until then that the movie finally picks up. Early on, there’s a fist fight set to a honky-tonk piano soundtrack, and someone refers to white wine as "workingman's whisky." If you choose to accept this mission, the print on YouTube (a dub of a Something Weird video) is the way to go over the Amazon Prime version. It was filmed in widescreen and the YouTube film is presented pan-and-scan, but the Prime film is stretched artificially to seem letterboxed, and it's atrocious. Of course, unless you're a fan of Ken Clark or Euro B-films of the 60s, you should probably not worry about it at all. The top picture of Ken Clark is from the movie; I don't know if the second picture is, but who cares. [YouTube]