Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966)

I've lately been watching the Dean Martin Matt Helm films (Sony Movies Classics have been showing them) and being appalled anew at just how cheap and threadbare they look.  The only one with any overseas shooting is the second, Murderer's Row, and that was shot by a second unit using a double for Dean Martin.  Otherwise, they are all shot on over familiar California locations, pretending variously to be Mexico or Sweden, or over familiar studio back lots.  Anyway, watching them, I was reminded of a contemporaneous Bond knock off which is far less well remembered, despite having far better production values and location filming: Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966).  Interestingly, this US-Italian co-production shares a US distributor (Columbia) and a director (Henry Levin) with the Matt Helm series. 

Kiss the Girls is pretty typical of the Eurospy genre which was in vogue during the mid-sixties, imitating the Bond movies' globe-trotting style, but with even more extreme gadgets and more exaggerated humour.  They were often as much parodies of the Bond phenomenon as they were rip offs. This film is no exception, featuring wealthy super-villain Raf Vallone plotting to use a satellite to sterilise the human race and repopulate the earth the the beautiful women he has kidnapped and has in suspended animation.  He is opposed by CIA agent Micheal Conners (who would subsequently shorten his name and star as Mannix in the long running private eye series), and MI6 agent Dorothy Provine.  The latter's character seems to have been inspired by the Lady Penelope character in Thunderbirds, being aristocratic and driven around in a gadget filed Rolls Royce by a Parker-like chauffer, played by Terry-Thomas.

The film has generally been dismissed by critics, although most of their criticisms of it could equally be applied to the Matt Helm films, which remain more favoured.  Perhaps Kiss the Girls' biggest problem is that it doesn't feature an A-list performer in the lead, although Dean Martin simply played his usual screen persona, rather than attempting any kind of characterisation in the role of Matt Helm.  Whatever the reason, while the Matt Helm films continue to be screened on TV, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die is now largely forgotten, despite, on the basis of this trailer, looking to be a far better produced film than any of the Dean Martin series.