THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU LIMITED
Author and critic Kim Newman explores the dark corners of cinema
ONE OF MY pet enthusiasms is that run of overcrowded, overdecorated ripping yarns that came out of a 1960s craze for Victorian-edwardian nostalgia — The First Men In The Moon, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, The Wrong Box, The Charge Of The Light Brigade and The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. These lie between Sgt. Pepper and steampunk, with spirited gals in gorgeous costumes, comic character actors in false whiskers, insanely complicated plots, stalwart yet absurd heroes, and rivet-studded Jules Verne contraptions. However, there’s also a tinge of melancholy, as we are constantly reminded all this ingenuity will lead to 20th century horrors, making it appropriate that the end of the cycle comes in the unjolly Oh! What A Lovely War.
Basil Dearden’s The Assassination Bureau Limited (1969), based on an unfinished novel by Jack London, opens with Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg) trying to break into the male-dominated business of journalism by pitching a story about a shadowy organisation who have perfected the art of murder for profit. Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas) hires her to track Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), chairman of the Bureau, but the evil press baron schemes to take over the Bureau and kick off World War I early so he can profit from arms investments. Deftly, Sonya hires Ivan to eliminate himself, which sends them on a tour of encounters with Europe’s most eccentric murderers — in a Paris brothel, a Viennese beer-hall, a Venetian palazzo and a Zeppelin. The black comic skits begin with farce but end with high adventure: the fight on the Zeppelin is a cracking action scene, with an explosive punchline.
It’s a drag that Rigg’s suffragette reporter is introduced as an equal to Reed’s charismatic, cynical hero but then sidelined as a silly goose constantly being stripped down to her corsets and duped by calculating men. Some of the ‘funny foreigner’ turns (Warren Mitchell, Clive Revill) are a little too broad, but Savalas and Curt Jürgens, warming-up-for-bond villainy, bring proper menace, and the arch-assassins’ vision of the new century as a profitable killing field remains chilling.
The main draw here is charm — the costumes, sets and settings are elaborate and witty, while Ron Grainer’s jaunty score accompanies horrors with delicate, tinkling music hall or oom-pah singalongs. Rigg and Reed are major talents, of course, but this is a rare film built around their presences as glamorous movie stars — their polite, barbed bickering is delightful, and their infectious sense of fun turns a film full of appalling acts of terrorism and violence into a grand entertainment. THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU LIMITED IS OUT NOW ON IMPORT DVD