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gabknight7829043
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Niente rose per OSS 117 (1968)
Godawful movie (SPOILERS - BE WARNED)
Once again, I shall warn you that this comment contains a lot of spoilers.
When a "serious" adaptation of OSS117 contains less actions, makes less sense than the recent pastiche with Dujardin, there's something really wrong about it.
The first scene of this movie shows good promises though, with the eponymous spy going through a window and escaping while shooting two bystanders an a guard. You think you're in an action movie.
However, the 40 next minutes prove you wrong : the 3 victims proved to be faking, and after letting himself be captured (twice, by the police then by the Organisation he's supposed to infiltrate), he doesn't do much more than hitting on a female doctor, who simply disappears halfway through the movie. A girl also gets infatuated with him after he rescues her from a false attack, but he doesn't seems inclined to tell her the truth.
That sums up the movie : a lot of fraud, a lot of (bad) romance, very little action.
The movie is ridiculous from A to Z :
- The main villain's lieutenant is sent from Europe to middle east to kill the hero, and comes back without even trying to get near him.
- Travels from Europe to Middle East are accomplished in the blink of an eye.
-The main female character sees her father getting shot in the back and left dying, however, when rescued, she shows absolutely no concern over him.
-The hero is poisoned and has to take an antidote before 5 o'clock. He however waits until 4.55 to enter the office it's locked in.
-The hero has to kill a diplomat : he replaces him by another corpse. however, while the diplomat is a tall, thin man with red hair, the hero replaces him with a short, fat guy with black hair. Though he detonates the place, the guy is supposedly identified by its remains...
-when O.S.S. 117 abducts the said diplomat, he's supposed to keep him off the game for a few days. However, he manages to lose him by letting him without surveillance, unrestrained and next to a car with its key on.
-the house of the organization, which is supposed to be the home of dozens of professional killers, has about half a dozen inhabitants at most, with barely one showing while the house is invaded.
Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973)
Co-Direction ?
About the alleged direction by Sergio Leone, according to Valerii, it seems Leone only directed TWO scenes of the movie : the bar scene and the ... ahem... peeing scene, to me, the worst parts of the movie. Still he put his imprint on the whole movie : implying himself in the writing of the scenario and the production of the film.
Don't get me wrong, I love this movie : my favorite scene would be Beauregard waiting for the Wild Bunch with Nobody as witness. For me, it resume the topic of the film : an archaic hero, echoing the characters embodied by Wayne or Stewart, faces a new, violent West impersonated in the Wild Bunch from Peckinpah's movie (the name of the director appears on a tomb earlier). Nobody would symbolize here the birth of a parodic, clown-like Western where the heroes resolve situation with jokes and loud punches instead of gunfights (see the last scene reproducing a trap set in the beginning of the movie : where Fonda used a gun to threaten a false barber, Hill points to the barber's private parts with his fingers forming a gun)