Number One of the Secret Service (1977)

James Bond wasn't the only British super-agent saving the world from an arch villain in 1977.  While Roger Moore was defeating Stromberg's plans to wipe out human life on earth, in favour of his underwater city, by going to Egypt and Sardinia, Nicky Henson's Charles Bind was busy defeating the more modest plans of Arthur Loveday, taking in some rather less glamourous locations in Lindsay Shonteff's Number One of the Secret Service.  This spy-spoof arguably represents peak Shonteff, certainly, he was coming off the back of a terrific run of low-budget movies, including sleazy psycho-thriller Night After Night After Night, gritty private eye flick Clegg, groupie drama Permissive (every bit the equal of Derek Ford's better known Groupie Girl), the two Big Zapper films, ingenious heist film The Fast Kill, and Len Deighton adaptation Spy Story.  Number One is very much in the vein of the two Big Zapper films: lots of sight gags, innuendo and cartoonish, frequently bizarre, violence, (which, to be fair, was also pretty much the formula for the Roger Moore Bond films).  While Bond knock offs were, particularly in the sixties, two-a-penny, Shonteff's efforts stand out because they never over reach themselves, unlike many other such spoofs, especially the Italian ones, he makes no attempt to try and replicate the extravagant sets and art direction of the real Bond pictures, nor the scale of their action set-pieces, opting instead for a far more modest approach.

Consequently, Charles Bind finds himself operating in seventies London, with a brief overseas excursion to glamourous Boulougne and, rather than face a nuclear submarine eating oil tanker, he finds himself having to deal with a cross channel car ferry full of assassins.  Likewise, rather than trying to hold the world to ransom with some super-weapon, villain Arthur Loveday's ambitions are more modest: to assassinate the world's wealthiest men, some because their wealth was gained by nefarious means and now puts them beyond the law, but most because they are the sort of people who refused to give his poverty-stricken father work back in the day.  Loveday himself has become a wealthy man on the back of his own industry and sees his campaign as an extension of his other philanthropic work.  Making sure that he always has a very public alibi when these men are assassinated, normal law enforcement can't touch him, so the Secret Service's Number One agent, Charles Bind, is sent in to try and stop him.  In order to distract Bind, Loveday employs Dudley Sutton's mercenary band KRASH (Killing, Rape, Arson, Slaughter and Hits) to mount multiple assassination attempts on the agent.  Bind is, naturally, assisted by a beautiful female agent, Anna Hudson (played by Aimi MacDonald) who he spends much of the film trying to get into bed with.

The action sequences are, typically for Shonteff, actually pretty well done and quite effectively parody the style of the fight sequences in official Bonds - rather get involved in lengthy fist fights involving all manner of improvised weapons and bizarre venues, Bind simply guns down various villains with his twin .357 Magnums (which he never seems to reload) - usually having out-outmaneuvered them with his trademark back flip.  When confronted with a small army of KRASH operatives, he simply utilises the .50 calibre heavy machine gun which impossibly swings out from underneath his sports car (a ludicrous device which neatly parodies the gadget laden Bond cars), to literally shoot them to pieces.  Bind is such a good shot that he is even able to shoot a rooftop sniper dead with the bullet from one pistol, while stopping the sniper's bullet with the bullet from his other pistol.  The film is full of such such sequences, which effectively take the logic of the real Bon films to their extreme - a personal favourite being the car crash which Bind, quite literally, walks away from, completely unscathed and unruffled, despite the vehicle being crushed against a wall.

When it comes to seducing women, Bind is equally direct.  Not for him any of the charm and smooth talking employed by Roger Moore's Bond - his standard ploy for getting Hudson to take her clothes off is simply to spray her with any handy soda siphon.  While Bind most certainly isn't as suave and smart as he clearly thinks he is, he does get some decent one-liners, ('I abhor violence', he says after massacring the KRASH guys, adding 'I don't have a problem being violent myself, I just don't like people trying to kill me').  Despite his history of B movies, Henson was a somewhat better actor than Roger Moore (he did a stint with the RSC after this film) and pulls off the part well - in lesser hands Bind could have seemed either arrogantly dislikeable or a buffoon, but instead comes over as likeable and charismatic.  Indeed, one of the film's strengths is its casting.  Bind's boss is played veteran character actor Geoffrey Keene, (who was also about to embark upon a long association with the official Bond series, playing Minister of Defence Frederick Grey in sex consecutive films).  Jon Pertwee does a cameo as a clergyman while a gallery of familiar Britsploitation faces, including Dudley Sutton, Milton Reid and Oliver MacGreevy, portray various heavies and villainous sidekicks.

Most impressive is the casting of the main villain, Arthur Loveday.  It is always slightly disconcerting to see one time matinee idol Richard Todd in low budget exploitation films, but by the late sixties and seventies these seemed to be the main work he was getting offered.  His sort of stalwart British officer- class actor had fallen out of fashion by the sixties - it was all a long way from Pegasus Bridge (which he had helped capture for real in 1944 and again on film in 1962 for The Longest Day, his last appearance in a really big mainstream movie).  But, despite his fall in status, Todd remained a pro and he delivers a very good performance in Number One of the Secret Service, making Loveday a very likeable villain - he isn't motivated by self-aggrandisement or personal material gain - who it is impossible not to have some sympathy with.  In contrast with the villains of contemporary Bond films, Loveday is anything but flamboyant, with Todd making him very ordinary-seeming, yet still interesting and intriguing.  His quiet confidence and truly British sense of courtesy provides a neat counterpoint to Henson's brash, would-be flashy, secret agent.  It would have been easy for an actor who had enjoyed the star status Todd once had to have simply phoned in a performance for an exploitation film, so it is very much to his credit (and to Shonteff's as a director), that he actually turns in a very polished performance.

To many nowadays, films like Number One of the Secret Service doubtless look hopelessly dated.  I've seen plenty of online commentators try to dismiss it for its corny humour and bizarre action scenes,  But that's the whole point: it is meant to be corny and cartoonish.  None of it is meant to be taken remotely seriously.  This is the sort of genre parody that Shonteff excelled at.  Most of the tropes of contemporary Bond films are neatly deconstructed and parodied, their sheer ridiculousness exposed and exaggerated.  Within its own limitations it is actually a very well made film (Shonteff was a very professional director), making excellent use of its resources to produce a film that acts as a counterpoint to its inspiration, with the superficial glamour and glossiness of the real Bond films stripped back to expose their own B-movie roots.  Sure, in the final analysis it is corny and it is sexist, but so were the Roger Moore Bond films it was spoofing.  The bottom line is that Number One of the Secret Service remains a lot of fun if you approach it in the right frame of mind.  Oh, and in Simon Bell's 'Givin' it Plenty' it has one of the catchiest theme songs of any Bond knock off. Ever.