SYNOPSICS
Danger Route (1967) is a English,French movie. Seth Holt has directed this movie. Richard Johnson,Carol Lynley,Barbara Bouchet,Sylvia Syms are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1967. Danger Route (1967) is considered one of the best Action,Drama,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
Jonas Wilde, a British secret service agent licensed to kill, returns from a successful mission determined to resign. Canning, his London superior, agrees to forward his resignation if Wilde eliminates a Czechoslovakian scientist defector now being held by the Americans. With the help of a housekeeper, Rhoda Gooderich, Wilde kills the scientist but is himself captured and interrogated by CIA agent Lucinda. After Lucinda tells Wilde that someone in his organization is causing fellow British agents to be killed by mistake, Wilde escapes to look for Canning, who mysteriously has disappeared. Accompanied by Canning's wife, Barbara, Wilde heads for the leader's base in the Channel Islands and learns from Stern, a fellow agent, that still another member of their unit, Peter Ravenspur, has been murdered.
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Danger Route (1967) Reviews
A real gem for lovers of serious spy flicks
Based on the novel `The Eliminator' by Andrew York, this deeply cynical look at the spy game is one of the unsung gems of the genre. It would be the only spy feature film in director Seth Holt's short career although he had worked on the `Danger Man' and `Espionage' television series previously. Holt would start one more film, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (71) but he wouldn't finish it. This is one of those movies where everyone's motives are suspect and should be for good reasons. Hardly anyone is who they seem to be and if indeed they are genuine, they end up as dead as the straw men in the end. There are many levels to Danger Route, all working to subvert our expectations as well as those of Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson), the agent caught in the middle of the power plays going on around him. Understandably, Wilde would like to escape the game and even hands in his resignation during the course of the film. Naturally we know this is impossible. Even Whitehall is not above using a little blackmail to get their way. The freeze-frame of Wilde at the end of the film tells us that his predicament is as unchanging as that of the Cold War politics surrounding him.
Forgotten British B-pic...
. But worth noting for its star Richard Johnson and director Seth Holt. A former Royal Shakespeare Company actor, Johnson was Bond director Terence Young's original choice to play 007 and might have proved much closer to author Ian Fleming's concept of him. Indeed, Johnson was briefly groomed by the Rank Organisation in the late Sixties as their answer to Sean Connery, hoping to ride the Bond slipstream (but the two films Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do were too cynically packaged to work as either imitation or spoof). Johnson's brand of worried suavity found a better vehicle here. A minor addition to the murkier side of the genre, it remains most notable for Holt. A former editor, Holt's deft cutting room skills had made two suspense films he directed for Hammer (Taste of Fear and The Nanny) unusually seamless and subtle. Alas, in Danger Route, even his assured touch failed to enliven an intractable plot about Cross-Channel espionage. But an exceptionally strong support cast - Harry Andrews, Diana Dors and Gordon Jackson - and a certain casual ruthlessness, lift this film above the totally routine. And Carol Lynley and Barbara Bouchet are truly gorgeous. Trite cynicisms and a trashy title-song date Danger Route unsympathetically. But Holt's admirers will discern enough in its minor virtues to compensate.
Worth the watch. Better than Bond in many ways.
The title song for this movie reminds one of the middle James Bond films--a catchy title woven into an incomprehensible song. Happily, things improve quickly. Jonas Wilde, the licensed killer, is dour and taciturn, but I was empathizing with him before too long. Jonas uses no outrageous stunts, no silly gadgets, and the movie was almost over when I was struck by the realization that there was not a single chase scene. Jonas does not even use a weapon, killing rather with a sharp blow to the neck (I would call it a Judo Chop, except I know nothing of Judo) This film was written so as to leave the way open for sequels; it is a loss none were made.
A nice, tight, secret-agent film
To compare this film to 007 Bond films would to be lead readers astray. Bond films don't have tight plots - this film is far closer to the films and series based on John Le Carré's works. The film is never boring and seems to finish too soon - one would have liked more time for the denouement. And that is a sign of a good tight plot - when the viewer feels that the film has ended too soon. The film shows how without any gadgets and spectacular action a good plot can still hold the viewers' attention. There is action - fights and murders - but they are not spectacular - nor are they intended to be. They are cold, quick and quiet. It is an enjoyable secret service film from the 1960's - a predecessor for the excellent Le Carré films and series. Enjoy it!
DANGER ROUTE (Seth Holt, 1967) ***
Some years back, I had recorded this (on VHS) off the MGM cable channel but the reception had been so poor I did not make it through the film; eventually, I upgraded to a decent copy – albeit also sourced from MGM and, thus, panned-and-scanned! Anyway, I decided to check this out now (and the two remaining unwatched films from this promising but short-lived director) as a follow-up to star Richard Johnson's recently-viewed appearances – in the same mould – as Bulldog Drummond but also in anticipation of two upcoming Holt revisits in my ongoing tribute to the late Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster. Still, unlike those two lightweight spy films, this is anything but campy or glossy; in fact, typical of most Cold War espionage yarns of its era (equating realism with glumness), the plot is fairly obscure, so that the result proves oddly unmemorable despite careful work all around! It is therefore up to an impressive cast (in uniformly fine form) to deliver the goods and keep one watching: Johnson, Carol Lynley (as his two-timing girlfriend who tries to poison him at the end – but her fish get it instead! – and whom he fells with a karate chop!), Barbara Bouchet (as an initially suspicious addition to the spy ring but who ultimately emerges a heroic trooper and even loses her life to the 'cause'), Harry Andrews (as Johnson's suave superior), Gordon Jackson (as the hero's seemingly laid-back skipper-partner but who turns out to be opportunistic, duplicitous and sadistic), Sylvia Syms (as Andrews' nagging wife who gets abducted on a train by Johnson), Diana Dors (as a housekeeper to a defecting scientist seduced by Johnson in the guise of a salesman), Sam Wanamaker (as the C.I.A.'s top man dubbed "Lucinda" and Bouchet's boss) and Maurice Denham (as Johnson's elderly team-mate whose murder starts the ball rolling). The film opens in a movie theater where one is given to understand that Johnson will himself be eliminated by his own side once he completes his next mission, but this does not happen (having discovered the mole in their organization) but is nonetheless kept on a leash by the umbrella-carrying Andrews in the freeze-frame finale (incidentally, Holt's start as an editor at Ealing Studios is much in evidence here as the film's pacing is very tight, with scenes hardly being allowed to finish off or permitted to start gradually)! Apparently, Johnson was Terence Young's first choice to play James Bond but, as I said earlier, his world-weary 'eliminator' (the title of the original source novel) here is closer to the austerity of Harry Palmer. Johnson and Bouchet were once a romantic item and, as it happens, they probably both owe their popularity in cult movie circles today to Italian film-maker Lucio Fulci via, respectively, ZOMBIE (1979) and DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972)! Interestingly enough, Holt (who worked for Hammer 3 times) is here employed by their main rivals, Amicus; for the record, he had already dabbled in the spy world by directing episodes of TV's DANGER MAN (1960-61) and ESPIONAGE (1964). The film under review – which the director apparently dismissed as "dreadful" and claimed he only made it because he "needed the bread"! – is Holt's final completed work (in the U.S. it was unceremoniously released as a double-feature, incongruously paired with Paul Wendkos' second-rate war movie ATTACK ON THE IRON COAST {1968}!), since alcoholism got the better of him dying at the young age of 47 two-thirds of the way through shooting Hammer's superior BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1971)!; even so, Johnson later named him one of the best taskmasters he ever worked for.