Modesty Blaise *** (1966, Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde) – Classic Movie Review 2267

The normally very serious-minded Joseph Losey reunites in 1966 with Dirk Bogarde, his star from The Servant and King and Country, for an engaging, kitsch, tongue-in-cheek Avengers-style Swinging Sixties comic spy spoof based on the Peter O’Donnell newspaper comic strip. Clever people are at work, but they are clever people who don’t have much of a sense of humour and are working outside their comfort zone.

Alas, this piece of fluff is all bit arch and knowing, so the humour is strained and the effort to have fun is showing. But nevertheless Losey’s movie is always very smart and chic and it is a visual treat as an eye-boggling style object, as well as now a monument to 1960s pop art fashion. And there’s always enough daft action and humour unspooling on the Italian Mediterranean to keep up the lively, campy entertainment level.

Sixties iconic beautiful people Monica Vitti, as comic book heroine Modesty Blaise, and Terence Stamp, as her sidekick Willie Garvin, are effective and amusing. But they are outshone by outrageously camp scene-stealing turns from creepy white-wigged villain Bogarde and Clive Revill as a comic Scotsman called McWhirter and an Arab sheikh, Abu Tahir. These are two shameless performances but, never mind, they work. In Evan Jones’s screenplay, there is also a modest sort of plot too about secret agent Blaise and sidekick Garvin trying to stopping vicious criminal mastermind Gabriel (Bogarde) getting his clutches on the sheikh’s hoard of diamonds.

It’s not a great movie by any means but it is quite fun and time has been kind to it as an oddball Sixties relic or talisman.

It also stars Harry Andrews as Sir Gerald Tarrant, Michael Craig as Paul Hagan and Alexander Knox as Minister and Rossella Falk as Mrs Fothergill. Also in the cast are Scilla Gabel, Joe Melia, Tina Marquand, Michael Chow, Saro Urzi, Oliver MacGreevy and Jon Bluming.

O’Donnell wrote a novelisation of his first draft of the film’s screenplay and the book was successful critically and commercially, leading him to write a series of Modesty Blaise novels alongside the comic-strips that continued 30 years. Harold Pinter was another uncredited screenwriter.

Losey and Bogarde went on to make one more film together, Accident in 1967.

Looking back in 2015, Stamp complains that Joseph Losey had no sense of humour.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2267

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