[REVIEW-CAST #6] THE VENETIAN AFFAIR (1967)

More Spy vs. Spy: Watching THE VENETIAN AFFAIR for the first time this year tripped many of my triggers: an IPCRESS-style espionage thriller; set in slicked, sinking Venice; concerned with a plot that employs an almost-occult-level control of other people's minds; with a supporting cast familiar from bunches of other Italian genre films; and featuring a central performance from Robert Vaughn that wholly avoids any sort of U.N.C.L.E. wink or vibe.

[NOTE: This is the sixth in a series of less-rigorous reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRE]: Espionage / Spy Thriller
[VERSION WATCHED]: Warner Archive DVD


No Napoleon Solo in sight. Here, Robert Vaughn plays a dissolute, depressed, drinking-himself-to-death ex-CIA agent who, after getting dumped from the world of espionage on account of the fact that his wife was outed as a Soviet double-agent, has settled into a bottom-feeding job at a generic news wire service. After an American diplomat detonates a bomb in a room full of world leaders who are meeting to discuss nuclear disarmament, Vaughn is unexpectedly sent by his boss to the cover the story where it happened, in Venice.

Through a spy darkly.

 Once there, the reason *why* he was sent becomes terribly clear: Vaughn's ex-wife (played by Bava favorite Elke Sommer) apparently had something to do with the whole "affair". The head CIA agent in Venice—an ice-cold and brutish Ed Asner, who takes no pains to hide his contempt for the weak-willed and self-destructive path that Vaughn has taken since getting booted from the service—is ready to force Vaughn, through any illegal and immoral means necessary, to contact Sommer, capture her, turn her (and what she knows) over to the US.

Elke Sommer enters the plot.

Along the way, Vaughn has to find a way to meet a secretive "freelance" security paymaster in Venice, played by a remarkably effective Boris Karloff (esp. in the final scene, when his mind-control-by-drugs is revealed). And he has to find a way to *survive* meeting the person who seems to really be behind it all, PEEPING TOM's Karlheinz Böhm, a genteel, restrained super-villain who licks his psychosis' lips every time he gets to be, as one character describes him, the one "who buys and sells power" in Venice; this power trade includes Böhm's use of drug-fueled torture to break and control the minds of those he plays as pawns.

Meeting Mr. Böhm. Vaughn's character goes to power-broker Böhm to see what deal can still be had. This first image, with the arrival of Vaughn and the principal characters shot in extreme long shot, seems to be a trend I keep running into in movies lately. The best example, where it becomes almost a kind of proto-tilt photography, is in Alfred Vohrer's standout Krimi SCHOOL OF FEAR.

It is this section of the movie, near the end, that links it to THE IPCRESS FILE. Plus the same kind of fatalistic vibe. Plus the brutal bursts of violence. And a series of canted, cropped closeups that seem lifted directly from Lurie's film:

Böhm is introduced in the film when he approaches the American ambassador, poses as his contact, slips him the bomb, and proceeds to ferry him to the meeting where he will kill a dozen or so people. Böhm and the diplomat are shown walking down a huge arched passageway (waves of birds being disturbed by the men, flitting away, then landing again in their wake). The end of the passageway is the end of land, as it drops off into one of the canals, and a waiting boat that will take the two men to the meeting. After Böhm drops his agent off, he rides back in the boat. Through the camera we see that his glasses actually make him unable to see (we assume he was wearing them to affect his disguise). He pulls the glasses off his head, regards them for a moment, and then dumps them into the water like they no longer exist. He spends the movie disposing of people in exactly this way.

More canted angles, shot through novel frames (this one, from the interior of the cabin on the boat).

The theme of torture is just one way the film feels excessively vicious. We also get a parade of scenes where an unstoppable violence overtakes and destroys one character after another. There is the late-night meeting with Karloff to get his top secret report on what really happened re: the bombing. When Asner and Vaughn show up, they walk through a door and find at eye level the ankles of several men. Hung before they arrived. Murdered en masse to close that hole in the plot. (Asner barking to his agents to get the bodies down also seems to reinforce this mood of coarse indifference when it comes to human life.)

Later, Vaughn goes to visit "his man in Venice," the jovial, rotund, mustachioed Roger C. Carmel. So far he's been a bit of a likable buffoon, whose connections Vaughn has manipulated for his own ends. When Vaughn arrives, not only is Carmel's character shot dead, so is Luciana Paluzzi's, who plays Carmel's secretary-slash-lover. (Paluzzi's presence is one of the many keys to enjoyment for me: She played one of the members of the love quadrangle in the hospital-set Giallo TWO FACES OF FEAR [playing alongside George Hilton and Anita Strindberg], and she is the Italian "guide" for visiting hitmen Henry Silva and Woody Strode in di Leo's THE ITALIAN CONNECTION.)

All in all, it's a downbeat, spiritually bankrupt tale of espionage, where the "gadgets" are weapons of mass destruction, and the opportunity to globe-trot to exotic locales with beautiful women and rugged agents will just as likely result in their death as anything "action-packed".

Added to (and in fact the inspiration for) my Letterboxd list SEE VENICE AND DIE.

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015