TV Cream

Films: S is for...

Second-best Secret Agent In The World, The

If there had to be an acknowledged king of the cut-price Bond knock-off, self-financing string-and-sealing-wax auteur Lindsay Shonteff would be your man. Here he casts Tom Adams, latterly famous as the grey-haired stiff in a long-running DFS ad campaign, as shop-soiled Endsleigh League Bond Charles Vine, drafted in to guard an anti-gravity device from the Russkies. Comparisons with Bond proper are played for cheap laughs, Adams exhibits an un-Bond-like amoral streak by shooting folk in the back, and Sammy Davis Jr warbles the Bondesque theme. Adams/Vine returned for two sequels, Where The Bullets Fly (1966, featuring Sid James and Wilfrid Brambell) and the ultra-threadbare, Spanish-produced OK Yevtushenko (1968, featuring nobody), but by then the wayward Shonteff had moved onto other things…

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