In Like Sexists

Slowly but surely, films that haven't had TV screenings for what seems like decades are being exhumed by Sony from their vaults to provide content for their three free-to-air film channels.  Last Sunday it was the turn of In Like Flint, the 1967 sequel to the previous year's hit James Bond spoof, Our Man Flint, starring James Coburn.  While still superior in just about every department to the woeful contemporaneous Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin, In Like Flint is still the lesser of the two Flint films.  (I know there was a TV movie in the seventies - a failed pilot starring Ray Danton, entitled Dead on Target - but, as beyond the lead character's name, it has just about no connection with the sixties films, I don't count it as part of the series).  The budget is clearly lower and the scope of the action far more limited and it just isn't quite as much fun as the first one.  It is also incredibly sexist. Yes, I know that it belongs to a genre which traditionally traded on sexism - these spy movies are essentially male fantasies tailored to a predominantly male audience - and I am well aware of the rampant sexism of the genre's progenitors, the Bond movies, but nonetheless, even by the standards of the genre, I found the level of sexism in In Like Flint quite startling.

On the surface, In Like Flint actually seems as if it is going to eschew the usual sexism for a story line that has more to do with showing women as being empowered.  Basically, the plot concerns an all-female global organisation attempting to supplant the world's patriarchal leadership in favour of female leadership.  Interestingly, unlike other films featuring similar plots, In Like Flint doesn't characterise these women a bunch of vicious man-hating bitches.  Instead, the organisation's leadership is comprised of women who have pursued successful careers in male-dominated fields.  Moreover, their methods are predominantly non-violent: they recruit new female members by means of subliminal messaging, helping them realise that they they are being oppressed by traditional male dominated social and economic structures.  They also remove male opponents through kidnapping rather than assassination.  The worst they do to their enemies is put them into cryogenic storage.  Their ends are benign: creating a better, less violent society,  But it all unravels toward the end - Flint expresses utter incredulity at the idea that women could run anything, let alone the world, (an opinion we perhaps shouldn't be surprised at - the man has a personal harem of compliant sex objects, for God's sake).  This, despite the fact that for the entire film, he's been outwitted and harried by this all-female organisation.  Then a male ally of the organisation, a US general, takes over the whole scheme for his own nuclear blackmail plan and all the women are suddenly helpless again in the face of his soldiers' guns and, naturally, turn to that epitome of masculinity, Flint, for salvation.

Perhaps I'm missing the point, perhaps it was all intended satirically, with Flint's entrenched chauvinism being the real target.  But somehow, I doubt it.  That would simply be too sophisticated for a studio spy spoof made in 1967.  Indeed, in a way the film reflected the era it was made in - the so called 'Summer of Love' and the supposedly 'permissive society', a time when young people finally challenged establishment conventions.  Except that that wasn't really what happened.  For one thing, all those hippies and the like had little to do with female emancipation: 'Free Love' was mainly a pretext for blokes who otherwise wouldn't get any to get their ends away.  Moreover, hippies and other sixties radicals were predominantly middle class themselves - their lifestyles financed by private means and/or their establishment families.   Working class youth were too busy having to work for a living to spend much time rebelling.  So, it seems apt that In Like Flint's veneer of female empowerment should ultimately be revealed as a cover for rampant chauvinism.  Or perhaps I'm reading too much into an inconsequential sixties spy spoof.