Fathom *** (1967, Raquel Welch, Tony Franciosa, Richard Briers, Clive Revill, Ronald Fraser) – Classic Movie Review 6215

Raquel Welch and Richard Briers pair up together for the engagingly daft 1967 British spy caper film Fathom.

Probably you never expected to see a movie with Raquel Welch and Richard Briers paired up together, but this is it in director Leslie H Martinson’s engagingly daft 1967 British spy caper film Fathom. There’s a place for air-headed fun, and this is it.

Welch stars as Fathom Harvill, an itsy-bitsy bikinied bobby-dazzler undercover agent, who skydives into Southern Spain to recover a a vital lost atomic mega-bomb’s explosive device that has fallen into the sea and is missing in the Mediterranean. Martinson’s ripping spy spoof boasts a lively cast and an even livelier plot about a bunch of villains after what turns out to be a stolen figurine.

American skydiver Fathom is in Spain with a US parachute team when she takes a lift from Timothy Webb (Richard Briers) and is taken to see Scottish Colonel Douglas Campbell (Ronald Fraser), who wants her to help him find the nuclear weapon’s triggering device, hidden inside an ancient Chinese figurine known as the Fire Dragon. 

Tony [Anthony] Franciosa plays Peter Merriwether, either a Chinese agent or a private investigator, after the figurine and soon also after Raquel Welch’s Fathom. Go fathom! 

They meet spectacularly when Fathom skydives into Merriwether’s villa, as Campbell orders. But then Fathom soon finds a dead body and Merriwether accuses her of murder. Later, he tells her that the nuclear weapon story was a ruse and the Fire Dragon was stolen from a Far East museum by a Korean War deserter, who is Campbell.

Lorenzo Semple Jr’s far-from-semple screenplay, based on Larry Forrester’s novel, is enjoyably unfathomable but Martinson (who also made the 1966 Batman: The Movie with writer Semple Jr) keeps the light-as-air fun bubbling along at a fast pace. Briers agreed, saying he found the plot hard to fathom. It is based on Forrester’s second Fathom novel Fathom Heavensent, then in draft form at the time of filming, but never published. Forrester’s first Fathom novel, A Girl Called Fathom, was published in 1967.

Lorenzo Semple agreed too, saying: ‘It could have been very good. It’s so confused. I watched it a couple of times, and I really didn’t know what was gonna happen! I didn’t know who done it or what they’d done.’

But it is enjoyably unfathomable. The film looks good too thanks to Raquel Welch, the Spanish location filming, and Douglas Slocombe’s sleek widescreen cinematography. But of course it was the very kind of film that Welch became desperate to live down later. She recalled; ‘I played a blown up Barbie doll.’

Also in the cast are Clive Revill as Serapkin, Ronald Fraser as the Scottish Colonel Campbell, Chief of HADES, Greta Chi as Major Jo-May Soon of the Chinese Secret Service, Tom Adams, Reg Lye, Ann Lancaster, Tutte Lemkow and Élisabeth Ercy.

It is produced by John Kohn and scored by Johnny Dankworth.

Fathom’s name is formed from the first letters of the names of the character’s uncles – Freddie, Arthur, Tom, Harry, Oscar and Milton.

HADES stands for Headquarters Allied Defences, Espionage and Security.

Roger Ebert didn’t see the joke and gave it a rare Zero Stars rating.

It was shot from September 1966 in Cártama, Mijas, Málaga, Torremolinos, Nerja, in Andalucía, Spain; and at Shepperton Studios, Surrey, England.

Allegedly, Welch and Martinson fell out on the first day of filming and did not speak to each other for the rest of the shoot.

It was released in the US on 9 August 1967 and on 1 October 1967 in the UK. where it was cut for a U rating by the British Board of Film Classification.

The budget was $2,225,000, so it needed to earn $3,875,000 to break even but it made a loss, taking $3,295,000,and the intended series was cancelled. The 20th Century Fox studio intended to cash in on the upcoming Modesty Blaise, but that flopped on release, so Fox lost interest in their Fathom production.

National Bikini Day is July 5, celebrating Parisian engineer Louis Réard’s 1946 invention in France, naming it after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear bomb testing. Forties modesty kept the bikini largely out of sight until Sixties icons Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch made it popular.

In 1960, ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini’ (written by Vance and Pockriss) was a number one hit in the US for the 16-year-old Brian Hyland, selling over two million records and sending bikini sales booming.

And of course itsy-bitsy bikinied bobby-dazzler Andress emerged from the water in the James Bond film Dr No in 1962. In 1964, AIP released Bikini Beach, the third of its Beach Party movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, with How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965), Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) to follow.

Brian Hyland: bikini man.

Teen idol Brian Hyland had a major hit in 1962 with the melancholic, haunting ballad ‘Sealed with a Kiss’.

The cast

The cast are Raquel Welch as Fathom Harvill, Anthony Franciosa as Peter Merriwether, Richard Briers as Flight Lt. Timothy Webb, Clive Revill as Serapkin, Ronald Fraser as the Scottish Colonel Douglas Campbell, Chief of HADES, Greta Chi as Major Jo-May Soon of the Chinese Secret Service, Tom Adams as Mike, the owner of Casa Miguel, Reg Lye as Mr. Trivers, Ann Lancaster as Mrs. Trivers, Tutte Lemkow as Serapkin’s servant Mehmed, and Élisabeth Ercy as Ulla.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6215

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