The Spy Catcher (1960) User Reviews

Cramped, but has some style

[vjetorix · 11 November 2002]

Spy films are typically known for their exotic locations but the bulk of this film's short running time is spent inside a house. A cramped house. This (obviously) low budget entry does have a couple of things going for it however. The lone bright spot in the acting department is this early role for Michel Lemoine, he of the glowing eyes you would most probably recognize from Antonio Margheriti's Wild, Wild Planet (65).

Other than Lemoine's limited role, there are two main reasons for sticking with the film. One is the score; a mixture of experimental free jazz and traditional jazz that is fun and interesting entertainment for the ears while there isn't much for the eyes to feast upon. The other is the last fifteen minutes that contain a car chase through the Parisian night and subway fisticuffs. Photographed in the film noir tradition, these sequences take on an almost expressionistic look while the free jazz adds another level of tension to the goings on.

A French Cold War Spy Thriller

[zardoz-13 · 7/10 · 1 July 2023]

Director Christian de Saint-Maurice helmed only one feature-length film during his ephemeral career, a pre-James Bond espionage epic entitled "Spy Catcher," with Catherine Candida, Gil Delamare, and Colette Duvala. This slow-burn, low-key but atmospheric thriller about an atomic scientist gone missing while the villains search relentlessly for his invaluable papers. Talk about a generic title! Jean-Daniel Daninos of "A Martian in Paris" and Jean Lara of "Farewell, Friend" co-wrote the screenplay with Saint-Maurice. "Spy Catcher" qualifies as a pre-007 because our hero doesn't rely on sophisticated gadgets to get him into and out of tense spots. Our hero is a down t0 earth fellow. He relies on his instincts to get out of the worst plight. In one taunt scene, he is cornered in a back room by an armed dame and threatened with death if he doesn't cooperate. Living strictly by his wits, he gets himself out from behind the eight ball when he must think fast before he gets shot. Stripped of his firearm and facing the possibility of getting killed, the hero launches himself head first through a window in the door to escape from a room of armed adversaries intent on killing him. Meantime, it seems French authorities have grown understandably anxious about an atomic scientist, Dr. Seiler and a satchel stuffed with top-secret papers about his hush-hush experiments. Matters aren't helped because the scientist vanishes while on board a commercial jetliner that blows up under mysterious circumstances while in flight.

The chief of the French Secret Service (André Luguet of "Jewel Robbery") hired a Parisian private eye a month before the incident to keep his tabs on the scientist. Miraculously, our unflappable hero (Gil Delamare of "Fantomas") survived the explosion and recovered his wits in the wreckage of the airliner. No sooner has our hero gotten to his feet than a stranger shows up and strikes him unconscious with a black jack. Unfortunately, although the villains snatch the satchel, they discover it is empty. The strategy of our hero's antagonists is rather warped. They destroyed an entire jetliner along with all the innocent souls aboard it to get their grimy fingers on an empty satchel. The hero returns to the atomic scientist's house where Dr. Sellier's wife Claire and some relatives are living. The hired help are a suspicious lot. Everybody is after those secret papers, and the scientist reportedly locked a copy of his formulas up in a safe at his home.

Clocking in at 82 minutes, "Suspense au deuxième bureau" (1960) confines itself to the city after our hero emerges from the wreckage of the crash. The last ten minutes ratchet up the suspense and action. "Agent of Doom" lenser Pierre Levent puts his camera in all the right places to capture the allure as well as the wickedness of this tart tale. Many later spy thrillers would use the standard-issue plot of the Communists kidnapping scientists during the 1960s, such as Sidney J. Furie's "The Ipcress File."

Great boredom!

[RodrigAndrisan · 1/10 · 2 March 2021]

Gil Delamare was a famous stuntman who died young, at only 41 years old, I've read a book written by him, "My job is risk", long time ago, when I was a teenager. Here in this "The Spy Catcher" he's the actor in the lead role, a kind of idiot James Bond. The film starts promisingly, but after only a few minutes, the "action" moves inside a house and stays there for about an hour. Nothing happens anymore and you want it to end as soon as possible. Finally, we have a chase through the tunnels of the Paris Metro, which, if it hadn't been so slow, would have been interesting.

An Odd Low-Budget EuroSpy Film

[Uriah43 · 3/10 · 1 August 2021]

This film essentially begins with a noted French professor boarding an airplane which then crashes under mysterious conditions. As it so happens, a French secret agent by the name of "Lieutenant Bordy" (Gil Delamare) was also on this plane and, even though the professor is killed, Lieutenant Bordy manages to survive. Since the professor was carrying documents related to a top-secret invention with him when the plane crashed-which have subsequently disappeared-Lieutenant Bordy is then given instructions to impersonate the professor with the hope of smoking out the enemy agents responsible for the airplane disaster and recovering whatever plans they may have on their possession. The problem is that once he arrives at the professor's home the people who live and work there begin to act quite suspiciously and he soon realizes that he has nobody there that he can really trust. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a rather odd EuroSpy film which, judging by the film quality and the poor editing, was obviously made with an extremely low-budget which clearly had a negative impact on the final product. It does, however, manage to capture the Cold War era to a certain degree-but even then that one attribute cannot alter the fact that this was not a good film and for that reason I have rated it accordingly.