The Assassination Bureau has a lot going for it - beautiful sets and some fun fin de siecle production design, and a dream cast of talented performers rarely given the opportunity to carry a feature. But there are conceptual problems, the most serious being its openly tongue-in-cheek tone.
Diana Rigg's emancipated woman blinks distractedly at various comic lines from her male adversaries, sharing the irony of the moment with us. Cheerful assassin Oliver Reed also plays to the audience, eventually mugging and making asides toward the camera. And Relph and Dearden have designed their show with the "quaint" framing device of showing some scenes in an inset morticed frame, in B&W, as if they were silent movies.
With the advent of The James Bond movies and TV's Batman the media began to talk a lot about the concept of Camp in a new sex-neutral context. Batman was a put-on, you see, a purposely corny show where the creators and actors shared the secret of its silliness with the audience. Michael Relph's screenplay has its tongue "firmly in its cheek," i.e., it not only doesn't take itself seriously, but it winks at us continually as if to say, "Ain't I being clever here." There's a fine line to be drawn while making a comedy like this, and Bureau just doesn't have the smarts of Beat the Devil or The President's Analyst. both of which have wit to spare.
Most spy spoofs are rife with lame in-jokery and many of them are near unwatchable today, not just losers like The Last of the Secret Agents? but big pictures like the Matt Helm series. The Silencers and Murderer's Row have some good aspects, but are intolerably arch and smug about their own stupidity.
As with the intermitently charming The Wrong Box there are some good jokes in The Assassination Bureau, but most of the time we're stuck with dumb one-note characters. Vernon Dobtcheff's dour Russian makes unfunny, predictable remarks about the sadness of the Russian soul, and the brilliant Clive Revill isn't on screen long enough to make an impression. After their delicious verbal sparring in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas don't have any really good scenes together.
When Annabella Incontrera's Borgia-like murderess enters the game we're treated to some interesting scenes, but for every good plot twist there are two dumb ones. The gag of hiding bombs in unlikely objects like a Viennese blutwurst sausage, is quickly driven into the ground. Gags are telegraphed and punchlines ruined, such as when a man plunges into an elevator shaft or a wary banker (Warren Mitchell of The Crawling Eye) pegs an innocent man as his target.
The saddest episode is in a Parisian bawdy house, the kind that has lots of low necklines and red velvet. Everyone in sight behaves as if told to act "naughty" and there is of course a police raid, a weak excuse for a lot of silly PG sight gags. There's no opportunity for anything exotic - the Parisians (even a slumming Phillipe Noiret) speak only English. In Vienna the beer hall song is in English, and in Venice the gondolier sings - in English.
Style and panache can sometimes make the difference. The Assassination Bureau just isn't visually distinguished. Dearden's direction seems to slow down proceedings, and his visuals suffer from an overuse of the zoom lens, predictably pushing in for almost every reaction and "meaningful" moment.
The Zoom is a cinema-killer. Directors think they are getting two setups for one, but they're really putting a mechanical technique between them and their audience. Dearden's use is typical: Rigg sits at a dressing table and then wheels to face herself in the mirror. The camera zooms in to a close up on her eyes in the mirror, and the shot dies because both she and we are waiting for the zoom to be finished before continuing. Neither the wide part of the shot nor the telephoto is an optimized angle and one can easily imagine the dull shot divided into two sharp ones with a dynamic cut as punctuation.
Dearden starts things off snappily enough but settles into a methodical pace. The story lopes from one situation to another until we're way ahead of the game; there's a big Zeppelin special effects finale but the baddies are all disposed of far too predictably.
What keeps The Assassination Bureau watchable are the actors. Bruiser Oliver Reed has an atypical role as a gentleman adventurer and comes off far more genteel than we'd think possible. There is no chemistry whatsoever between him and Rigg, but their professionalism keeps their interaction interesting at a sub-screwball comedy level. The script has the emancipated Miss Winter finally melt for Dragomiroff and take pride in being an attractive woman, a thread that Dearden or the editors mercifully tone down. The film's foolish main argument, that Reed isn't a common criminal because he believes in judging his victims first, is a crock that is wisely left unresolved.
The best scenes are up front as the plot is being established, a later series of clever reversals in the Venetian villa of the treacherous Eleanora and some of the action in the runaway Zeppelin, especially Oliver Reed's clever method of escape. The matte and effects work are technically imperfect but colorful; it looks as though they built a full-scale mockup of the airship as well.
| Quality | Res | Sound | Codec | Name | S. | L. | Size |
| WEBRIP | 1080 | AAC | x265 | The.Assassination.Bureau.1969.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG | 76 | 34 | 1.71 GB |
| WEBRIP | 1080 | AAC | x264 | The.Assassination.Bureau.1969.1080p.WEBRip.x264-RARBG | 78 | 29 | 2.09 GB |
| WEBRIP | SD | AAC | x264 | The.Assassination.Bureau.1969.WEBRip.x264-ION10 | 37 | 8 | 1.05 GB |
| WEBRIP | 1080 | DD+ | x264 | The.Assassination.Bureau.1969.1080p.AMZN.WEBRip.DDP2.0.x264-TEPES | 62 | 49 | 10.36 GB |
Enlaces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assassination_Bureau
https://flashbak.com/pictures-of-diana-rigg-and-oliver-reed-from-assassination-bureau-released-in-1969-22156/
https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1281ass.html
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