Dean Martin plays Matt Helm (or vice versa) for the fourth and final time in The Wrecking Crew, the most lackadaisical of the series, yet mojo-charging all the same. Sixties spy spoofs are the true chicken soup for the 21st-century battered soul.
In Denmark, a billion bucks of American gold bars get poached from a train headed for London. It’s all the doing of Count Contini (Nigel Green, The Skull), whose name sounds like a brand of low-cost marinara, whose head resembles a salt-and-peppered Will Ferrell, and whose voice pronounces “schedule” as “shed-ule” a lot, so you know he’s a pompous ass. So that news of the heist doesn’t spread and send the world’s financial markets into a friggin’ death spiral, the United States’ Intelligence Counter Espionage agency (ICE for short) makes the bullion’s retrieval a one-man job. The man is Helm, natch, and he’s given only 48 hours to complete the task.
Pulled away from a sex picnic with his harem of “Slaymates,” Helm immediately is briefed and jetted to Copenhagen, but he’s not deployed without mission-aiding mechanisms. In fact, he’s given three: a camera that shoots a flume of knockout gas, handkerchiefs that explode upon impact when thrown and, deadliest of all, Sharon Tate! The Valley of the Dolls doll exhibits considerable comic flair as ICE-assigned assistant Freya, although director Phil Karlson’s gambit to shield her beauty from audiences is laughable, for reasons not involving pratfalls and one-liners. Carlson (absent from the series since, um, helming the first one, 1966’s The Silencers) even pulls the ol’ trick of equating glasses and hair buns with frumpiness, thereby asking us to believe Tate is beautiful and/or sexy only when she Rapunzels her hair, and shakes and shimmies her rear in extreme close-up.
Giving Tate a run for her moneymaker are a never-more-hourglassy Elke Sommer (House of Exorcism) as Contini’s partner in crime, Tina Louise (SST: Death Flight) in a largely wordless appearance and Nancy Kwan (Wonder Women) as — hold your horses — Yu Rang.
A running gag has Helm croon parodic ditties in his head upon meeting each lovely. (A sample: “If your sweetheart puts a pistol in her bed / You’ll do better sleeping with your Uncle Fred.”) Another running gag has Helm being unable to do the deed with any of them, but certainly not for a lack of trying. Nearly every line of dialogue Martin utters to the fairer sex is not just dripping in innuendo, but also rolled in crushed Rohypnol; in today’s climate, any one of them would earn him a write-up from ICE’s HR department, which would have put the brakes on the secret agent’s career. In real life, the 007-a-go-go Helm movies were put out to pasture after The Wrecking Crew’s release. The closing credits promise Matt Helm would return in The Ravagers. He did not. —Rod Lott