THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1969)

Two men assault a trash truck driver, knock him unconscious, and send his truck into reverse to crash into a nightclub, killing a crime boss named Grinaldi and his bodyguard (discovered later to have been a CIA agent). Grinaldi's mistress, Revel Drue, had been sitting with him just moments earlier when she went to chat with Johnny Cain, the club owner and a former lover. Cain, who lives on a yacht, is generally known as a playboy adventurer and the day after the crash, he is called to a nighttime meeting in the offices of a department store. Grinaldi had belonged to a small group of supposedly respectable businessmen who are secretly involved in criminal activities. The men, whose group is codenamed West (for the Western United States, I presume), aren't unhappy that Grinaldi is dead, but they are worried about the motivation of the killer so they hire Cain, under threat of death, and give him 72 hours to find those responsible. A starting point: Grinaldi was in the process of smuggling a priceless Tibetan statue called Yama. Cain gets some help from Crawford, a police lieutenant who may not like Cain but is sympathetic to him. Later, the CIA, who are looking into the smuggling, strongly encourage Cain to share what he learns with them—some months ago, a Caribbean CIA outpost was blown up, with all but one agent killed, and the Yama statue may be linked to that incident. Along the way, Cain meets: Grinaldi’s widow, an amateur actress who seems pretty numbed out by booze and drugs; a tired old man named Hash who served as Grinaldi's accountant; an art history professor who works a side gig as a stripper; studly pilot Race Rockwell; and engineer Ah Ling, whose name Rockwell helpfully identifies as "oriental." We're never quite sure who can be trusted, especially the somewhat mysterious Revel. The specter of Communism becomes a MacGuffin, just like the Yama statue, so ultimately, there doesn't seem to be much at stake for the audience to care about.

This is a deliriously fun bad movie that MST3K or Rifftrax should get their hands on. The main reason for watching is Adam West who stars as Cain. West's claim to fame until the day he died was playing Batman on TV in the mid-1960s. His handsome face and oddly deadpan demeanor were perfect for this role, but he never got very far putting Batman behind him, and to his credit, he eventually embraced the stereotyping and wound up with a very long career (with almost 200 credits on IMDb), often playing himself. This was his first movie role after Batman and he's actually OK, coming off as nice-looking and almost hunky but a little dim—he frequently has sort of a dead-eyed look that works with this character, and I'm a little sorry he never got to repeat the role. Online critic Ian Jane says of West here that he’s "kinda charming in his seemingly oblivious way," and that's a great description of what I see as one of the movie's pluses. 

The real problem here is, well, everything else. Though in terms of visuals, it looks good (the Blu-ray print is spectacular), it's clearly a B-movie affair with an incredibly slapdash script that feels like it was written as they filmed, and the narrative goes off the tracks by the halfway point. Nancy Kwan (pictured above right with West) was one of the first Asian actresses to gain Hollywood stardom with her first two movies, The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song, but she was soon relegated to lesser roles and movies; as Revel (great name!) she’s good here but is basically a less tarted-up Bond girl. Very busy character actor Nehemiah Persoff keeps his dignity as the cop. But no one else comes off very well, including Robert Alda and Mark Roberts as two of the West group, and Frank Baxter in the two-line role of Race Rockwell (again, great name!). Patricia Smith overacts every moment she's on screen as the zoned-out widow. Lisa Todd, as Sugar Sweet, the art history professor, can barely say her lines, let alone give them any feeling. Buddy Greco, a legit pop singer, plays Lucky, the club performer; he handles what little acting he has to do OK, but all three of the songs he sings are just awful, with lyrics like, "I’m alive to the memory of at least a dozen mistakes, freakish little nothings" and "Abreast of the times, way out in the spaces of your mind." The fistfights are well staged; one is pictured at left. There's a great scene of a dead body slowly coming down an escalator. If I'd seen this in a grungy panned-and-scanned print, I would not have stuck with it, but in crisp, clean widescreen, it was worth hanging around until the end, even if I had to shut my mind off. [Blu-ray]