Lebanon flourished for a very brief moment in time as a movie (and movie-star) mecca. Egypt was the center of gravity for cinema in the region starting in the 30's, but in an unforced error, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to Nationalize the Cinemas in 1963, resulting in a large amount of talented filmmakers decamping to Lebanon. At the same time, Lebanon started offering itself as a Tax Haven for moviemaking. The boom was on, but suffered a huge hit at the end of 1966 with the complete collapse of the Intra Bank, the largest bank in Lebanon. This financial disaster kneecapped the entire enterprise, but it limped along as fallout from the collapse created the conditions that inexorably drove Lebanon into Civil War, by 1975.
What remains is about twenty movies, many of them international co-productions, usually concerning secret agents and beautiful women with Beirut providing both a luxurious background in the Phoenician Hotel, Casino Du Liban, and other jet set destinations, paired with the dangerous and mysterious "orient" just outside the door, of ancient ruins and souks and seedy nightclubs. Perfectly timed to take advantage of the spy boom in the wake of James Bond, but over all too soon.
The various Indian film industries only rarely fully adopted the Bond movie template but were strongly influenced, nonetheless. Their agents were usually not "secret agents" but instead, supercops from the Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D. As opposed to the lone spy with nothing to lose, they were often enmeshed in a family network, and pursuing serious romance not just casual flings. The villains, though, are easily recognizable, with their quirky character traits, army of henchmen, secret lairs, and elaborate killing devices.
A provisional list that will be added to or subtracted from as I watch or re-watch more of the films that may fit the topic. From 1967 and the first Bollywood spy film "Farz", with a somewhat arbitrary cutoff point of Mr. Bond, from 1992.
Japanese cinema had its own, much more serious strains of spy films running at the time Bond became popular. On the one hand there were the "Nakano Spy School" films depicting the misery of being a secret agent during wartime. And on the other, Corporate, not National, espionage was the order of the day with the "Black" series and it's best known entry, "Black Test Car." And in any case, Japan already had its own traditional flavor of spy shenanigans with special gadgets: ninja movies! With all of these competing threads the Bond archetypes barely got a look in, but they did, starting with 1963's International Secret Police series. Actresses Mie Hama and Akiko Watanabe, who both featured in You Only Live Twice, would become the cornerstones of the Japanese Bond film.
Hong Kong had both primarily Cantonese and Mandarin language film production companies, and both, whether big budget or small, drew inspiration from James Bond films and the various subgenres that grew up around it in the sixties (heist pictures, superheroes, debonair thieves, etc). On the Cantonese language side of things, the low budget black-and-white films featured female protagonists, whether "Lady Bond" or "The Black Rose." Meanwhile, Shaw Brothers tried to imitate the more masculine form with a series of the most masculine actors they could find.
The Bond movie cycle ended with the sixties, but that didn't stop Golden Harvest from contracting an actual Bond - George Lazenby - to star in a series of films. He turned down continuing in the Bond franchise thinking his next movie was going to be with Bruce Lee, who suddenly died, and Lazenby's career along with him. By the eighties, nothing was left but to parody the spy movies, with the Hui Brothers (with Richard Kiel!) and Stephen Chow.
If there was a center to the Bondsploitation maelstrom, Italy was it, cranking out more Eurospy movies faster than anyone else. This collection is an attempt to carve out a chunk of the movies to make them more easily approachable and consumable by focusing in on five of the top stars, each of whom appeared in at least six films, all from 1965-1967. They all begin as Bond knock-offs, then the heist genre blends in, and finally they get rougher, less suave spies and more desperate men. In alphabetical order:
1 - 6: Ardisson, George. An Italian actor who started in sword & sandal movies before being cast as "Agent 3S3" on account of his "American" looks. Like most of the actors in this list, afterwards he moved on to whatever genre was popular, westerns first, then the sex comedies and Euro Crime movies of the seventies. I'll always remember him as the bongo crazed sex maniac of Challenge of the Devil, though.
7 - 13: Browne, Roger. An American Physical Therapist who came to Rome for a client and ended up getting into movies, primarily in the peplum genre before moving on to his spy movies. Afterwards, he did a few jungle movies then faded out. Best known as Argoman, here are seven of his more strait laced Eurospy films.
14 - 19: Clark, Ken. An American actor whose career included movies and television got cast to fill in as the titular agent in one of the long-running French Coplan series, which led to an Italian trilogy of his own, which would end up being his career peak.
20 - 25: Danton, Ray. An American star. Danton was more like Lex Barker or Stewart Granger, a successful actor in Hollywood heading to Europe for new opportunities when the well started to run a little dry. Italian movies, hungry for handsome American stars, couldn't get enough. In the seventies he turned to directing his own batshit insane movies.
26 - 31: Harrison, Richard. An American actor with a long, prolific, and successful career that nobody remembers because Godfrey Ho made him a fucking Ninja Legend. But that was the eighties. Before that, he was a super spy, and a master thief in these six Italian co-productions.
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