Dean Martin Ogles the Ladies in "The Wrecking Crew"

I was in the mood for a guilty pleasure recently and up popped The Wrecking Crew (1968) on TCM. Guilty pleasures don't get much guiltier than this fourth entry in Dean Martin's Matt Helm series. With spy movies all the rage in the 1960s, Columbia tried to posture Helm as a poor man's James Bond, Well, sort of. The Helm pictures were actually spoofs--not clever ones like Our Man Flint--but broad tongue-in-cheek efforts. That approach suited Dean Martin, who appeared as the turtle-necked protagonist while still doing his weekly variety TV series on NBC.

The plot resembles Goldfinger with Matt's agency, Intelligence and Counter Espionage (ICE), sending the secret agent to recover $1 billion in stolen gold bullion. Villain Count Contini (Nigel Green) plans to flood the financial markets, thus devaluing the economies of Great Britain and the U.S. Throw in some chases, fisticuffs, and plenty of pulchritude and you have The Wrecking Crew.

Dean sniffs Sharon Tate.

It's a far cry from Donald Hamilton's 1960 novel, the second of 27 Matt Helm spy thrillers. Indeed, the only resemblance is that Helm's cover was as a photographer in both the book and film. Otherwise, Hamilton's tough-minded hero had little in common with the cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking ladies man played by Dean Martin.

Martin's film series kicked off in 1966 with The Silencers, which co-starred Stella Stevens as Matt's klutzy cohort (the poster proclaimed: "Girls, Gags & Gadgets! The best spy thriller of Nineteen Sexty-Sex!"). A follow-up, Murderers Row, appeared later that year. It's probably the best of the four films, simply on the basis of a cast featuring Ann-Margret and an over-the-top Karl Malden as the bad guy. Still, the formula was wearing thin by the time The Ambushers (with Senta Berger) was released a year later.

Elke Sommer's "come hither" look.

What redeems The Wrecking Crew is its cast. Tina Louise and Nancy Kwan have little to do other than look glamorous (or, in Kwan's case, also manage a few karate kicks). However, Elke Sommer and Sharon Tate are perfectly cast. Sommer's European sultriness poses a perfect counterpoint to Martin's lecherous looks. In addition, she has a grand time playing a villain and (spoiler alert!) "dies in perfect beauty" (as she described in her interview with the Cafe). In contrast, Tate mixes kooky charm with buckets of sex appeal as Matt's female sidekick. I'm not sure that Tate would have evolved into a major star, but she shows her potential as an appealing comedienne in The Wrecking Crew.

While the karate fights leave much to be desired, they were still choreographed by a young Bruce Lee (granted, he didn't have much to work with). Also, if you look closely at the henchmen in the House of 7 Joys fight, you may notice Chuck Norris (in his film debut).

Dean takes a look at Sharon.

Although the closing credits of The Wrecking Crew promise a fifth installment to be called The Ravagers, another Matt Helm film was never made. Weak boxoffice receipts doomed the franchise and Martin, tired of the series, wanted out. Sharon Tate's murder, which occurred just a year after The Wrecking Crew, also cast a shadow over the series.

Still, decades later, the spirit of Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies lives on. It's hard to watch Mike Myers in his Austin Powers spy spoofs without concluding that he's channeling a lot of Matt Helm.

31 Days of Halloween: There's No Escape from Polanski and The Fearless Vampire Killers

Many of the characters in Roman Polanski's films are trapped in some way, unable to escape. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965), on a psychological level, is trapped within herself, avoiding most human contact (particularly male). She even seems a prisoner in her own apartment. Likewise, Polanski in The Tenant (1976) rarely leaves his apartment, obsessed with the previous tenant, who committed suicide. Other Polanski films, such as Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Ninth Gate (1999), tell stories of characters who are captives of their desires. It's fitting that the director often exploited the wide-angle lens (which makes space seem smaller by pushing objects together) and had his camera closely follow the subjects. It's as if the characters are incapable even of eluding the audience.

In spite of its humorous approach, Polanski's 1967 movie, The Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (originally titled and released in other countries as Dance of the Vampires), features characters who are ostensibly confined. The film begins with Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his assistant, Alfred (Polanski), traveling through the snow by horse and sleigh. A pack of wild dogs starts chasing the sleigh (Alfred attempts to fight them off with an umbrella), but fortunately, the dogs retreat when the sun begins to rise. The sleigh is traveling on the only path available for transportation. So the men have but one choice for a destination: the direction in which they are already headed. They cannot turn around, lest they be torn to pieces by wild dogs, much like the beasts did with Alfred's feeble weapon of choice.

Once they reach an inn, the professor is near death from the bitter cold. The innkeeper and guests tend to Abronsius and Alfred, and they are given a room. It is soon abundant that the two men have a goal in mind. They are hunting vampires, and the professor is excited to see garlic hanging from the ceilings. But these "vampire killers" cannot even handle the people at the inn. The innkeeper, Shagal, tiptoes to a maidservant's quarters late at night. When his wife goes looking for him, she inadvertently whacks the professor on the head, knocking him out cold. Shagal claims that the men's room is best due to its proximity to the bathroom, but this is immaterial when his daughter, Sarah (Sharon Tate), monopolizes the washtub. Later, Sarah is taken by vampire Count von Krolock. Shagal heroically rushes out to save his daughter and is found dead the subsequent morning. His wife refuses to drive a wooden stake through Shagal's heart, so Abronsius and Alfred wait until night to do it themselves. However, by the time they get to Shagal's corpse, following a practice run with pillows, the former innkeeper has awakened and runs out the door.

Polanski creates a claustrophobic atmosphere at the inn. The professor and Alfred must succumb to everyone else's behavior. When they finally take the initiative and travel to the Count's nearby castle, they are still burdened by obstacles. A hunchback watches over the vampires in repose, and when they manage to reach the vampires' coffins, Alfred's trepidation (he's anything but "fearless") prevents any action resulting in vampire death. These two men are so absorbed with themselves -- the professor and his infatuation with vampires, Alfred with his incompetence and wandering eyes for the ladies -- that they often do not understand one another. At the castle, Alfred is upset, believing that Sarah is dead. Unable to discern Alfred's mutterings, Abronsius questions him: "Sarah's dead?" Alfred mistakes it for confirmation, gasping and exclaiming softly, "Oh my God!" Alfred's perpetual confusion carries over to others as well. At the inn, Sarah stops by his room, complaining about her life. Alfred is so mesmerized by the beautiful woman that when she asks, "Do you mind if I have a quick one?" he stumbles through a response, "I don't mind at all!" She, of course, is simply asking to use the tub in the adjacent room.
The professor and Alfred are on the prowl for bloodsuckers, but they truly are prisoners, unable to accomplish basic tasks and always at the mercy of others, human or otherwise. This makes for many an amusing sequence, as Polanski includes jabs at the vampire legend, with a Jewish vampire (who chuckles when a potential victim tries to protect herself with a cross) and a flamboyantly gay vampire whose got his sights set on poor Alfred. MacGowran is remarkable as the professor, and Polanski proves equally adept in front of the camera, with a charming performance as the bumbling assistant. Tate is quite appealing as Sarah, and her scenes with Polanski are bittersweet.

In the U.S., Polanski's movie was given the ridiculously long title and snipped of almost 20 minutes. Additionally, a silly and ultimately superfluous cartoon was added before the opening credits, all in an attempt to make the film a slapstick comedy. Most copies available today retain the Americanized title but are thankfully uncut. The Fearless Vampire Killers is undeniably funny, but it is also exhilarating and wonderfully made, an exemplary model for the cinema of Roman Polanski.