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Sick Product of a Sick System

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

That seems to be the moto of "Man On The Spying Trapeze". The plot (which begins with the discovery of a body in the Coliseum) makes less sense with each passing minute, but the fights keep a-coming. Some of them are good, but neither those nor Piero Umiliani's dynamic score can save the incomprehensible mishmash of a plot. I got the fact that everybody is looking for a microfilm, as well as the person who's behind it all, but that's about it. Wade Preston makes for a pretty smarmy spy lead until the final moments when he shows unexpected class, while the female roles are all underwritten. "Man On The Spying Trapeze" is strictly for Eurospy completists. *1/2 out of 4.

Sandwiched between the sword-and-sandal epics inspired by "Hercules" and the spaghetti westerns inspired by "A Fistful of Dollars" came a spate of 1960s secret-agent movies riding on the coattails of James Bond. Most of these movies fell into the "forgettable" category but, like this one, they offered an entertaining blend of action, pretty girls, snatches of arch dialog, glamorous locales, and a debonair leading man.The leading man in this case is 37-year-old Wayde Preston, best known for his "Colt .45" series which premiered on American TV in 1959. Preston was sort of a Lee Horsley type with a touch of Howard Keel and our first glimpse of him here comes when all 6 feet 4 inches of him steps out of a hotel room's bath wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. He goes to a window, giving us a view of his broad shoulders and bare back, opens the curtains, then turns, putting his tanned, hairy chest on display. Though a few years past his prime, Preston's chest still looks mighty good and as if to emphasize its appeal, Preston casually runs his hands down it, thus pointing out its suitability for both loving caresses and torturous assaults.It isn't long before a torturous assault occurs. Jumped by a bevy of bad guys, Preston is forced to strip down to a pair of white boxer-shorts whose fly, in true Hollywood fashion, never seems to gape open. He's then strapped into what looks like a barber chair and his head is positioned between a pair of metal rods which proceed to press in on the sides of his skull. (All of which vaguely anticipates "The Salamander" in which Franco Nero i bound to a torture-chair wearing nothing but a jockstrap.) As movie tortures go, this one's unusual quality fails to make up for its lack of visual effect. A later torture scene, done without the benefit of a bare chest, has the bad guys holding lighted matches to Preston's fingertips. Painful, yes, but one could think of another appendage on the male anatomy which might more effectively be subjected to an open flame.Though "Man on the Spying Trapeze," (an amusing title), could easily have evolved into a series, such was not the case and so it's fallen into the often-neglected pool of Euro-spy movies from the 1960s. Fans of the genre, however, will find it worth a second look.

American Wayde Preston is better known as a star of spaghetti westerns but like many of his Euro-comrades he had to try his hand at the spy game. This would be his only foray into the genre but based on the results he could have made a career of it. Preston's easy going personality works well towards defining the unruffled spy archetype. Preston is agent Jerry Land who travels from Madrid to Rome to New York to Beirut and back again several times in his quest to bed as many women as possible and, oh yes, to solve the case.You know you're in for a good time when a film opens with a car chase, especially when a Piero Umiliani soundtrack wails on as a car goes over a cliff and explodes. The camera surveys the wreckage, then zooms in on some false teeth uppers, the grisly but humorous detritus of death. Turns out those teeth house a hidden camera! Cool.The film has its share of violence and torture too. The fights are choreographed well and feature lots of judo and karate-type action. Preston gets the best of the multiple (and recognizable) henchmen he frequently takes on. Throw in some good location shooting in Beirut and that cookin' Umiliani soundtrack and you have an above average actioner worth investigating.