OPERATION ATLANTIS (1965)

This goofy chunk of 1960's Eurospy adventure begins in Rome with George Steel, our handsome American James Bond stand-in, having his Japanese vacation derailed by agreeing to work with the RIU, an international uranium research group. Somewhere in North Africa there is a plot of land rich in uranium and an evil mastermind named Ben Ullah has plunked himself and his cohorts (including a kidnapped research scientist) down on the land and surrounded it with a radioactive forcefield. Descendants of the mythic land of Atlantis also live there and possess some futuristic devices like a gun that encases people instantly in ice and then disintegrates them. Steel is supposed to defeat the baddies and get the land for the RIU. That is pretty much it for the plotpoints I was able to follow. As usual, I took fairly copious notes as I was watching but I realized halfway through the movie that my notes were incoherent so I stopped. (I think, but I’m not sure, that the Atlanteans were just a Communist Chinese scam.) Still, I got some enjoyment out of this mess. For starters, there's John Ericson (pictured) as Steel; he's handsome and moderately hunky, and he looks like he actually knows what's going on throughout the story. There are at least three sexy women whose roles in the adventure remained ambiguous to me, and whose names I couldn’t quite figure out. The first is a busty blonde stewardess whom we see at the beginning and the end (and I think a little bit in the early middle). The second is a woman possibly named Fatima (Maria Granada) who is with Steel the most and who seems to switch from good to bad and back. There's a Queen of Atlantis figure (maybe played by Erika Blanc?). 

There's a thug who kills people with a gigantic metal claw device—nifty but a bit unwieldy to cart around. There's a previously unknown element called Rubidium, native to the asteroid belt, that can make people temporarily insensitive to pain and heal wounds instantly and is used as a torture device. People, including two of our hero's women, get packed into trunks and flown in the baggage hold of passenger planes. Clunky spacesuits are worn by the good guys to get past the forcefield, which itself is sometimes deadly and sometimes not. Steel has a radio transmission device implanted in his elbow. There's a mild catfight scene which Steel watches with a bemused and possibly aroused look on his face. I think this happens twice. Steel gets spritzed, in public at a nightclub, with a knockout drug and carried out, raising  no one's suspicions—I think this is when he gets packed in a trunk. There's an OK car chase. Near the end, there's even the destruction of Atlantis, ineffectively presented, followed by a concluding scene. The print on YouTube, in faded color, has no subtitles and the dialogue is occasionally murky which is why I was unclear about some of the names. I almost gave up on this a couple of times but John Ericson pulled me through. Your mileage will differ. BTW, IMDb spells the hero’s name as Steele, but in the movie, he spells it out as S-T-E-E-L, so that’s what I went with. [YouTube]