SPY IN YOUR EYE

Dana Andrews

SPY IN YOUR EYE (aka Berlino appuntamento per le spie/1965). Director: Vittorio Sala.

Colonel Lancaster (Dana Andrews) assigns two of his men --  Bert Morris (Brett Halsey) and Willie (Mario Valdemarin) -- to rescue Paula Krauss (Pier Angeli), the daughter of a deceased scientist who has invented a "super death ray." Both the Russians and Chinese want Paula in the hopes that she knows her father's secret formula. As the woman is shuttled back and forth from spy to spy and country to country, Colonel Lancaster has his missing left eye surgically replaced with a micro-telecamera that looks like a human eye. Lancaster thinks that only he can see out of his mechanical eye and doesn't realize that enemy agents are seeing and hearing everything that he does, and therefore have full knowledge of his agents' plans. 

Brett Halsey

This last aspect of the story is really the only point of interest in the movie, but little is done with it. Because Dana Andrews was still a name, and Brett Halsey a recognizable "B" actor, American filmgoers were fooled by a major ad campaign and saturation bookings into thinking they were seeing some kind of James Bond-type adventure. Instead they got a mediocre eurospy film  Aside from the fake eye, the movie is pretty low-tech, with Bert using special dehydration pills to get two bad guys to talk, and another bad guy employing a supposedly devastating weapon to shoot down a bird. 

Consultation: Halsey and Andrews

There is some mild excitement at the climax, in which the walls of a clinic move back and forth, creating new rooms to fool secret agents, a femme fatale is crushed, and the heroes and villains shoot it out amidst the melee.  The real voices of Halsey [Return of the Fly] and Andrews [Night of the Demon] are used, while the Italian actors are generally dubbed. Both actors had many, many more credits after this film was released, although this was not one of the better films that either performer appeared in. 

Verdict: Better than some eurospy movies but not great. **1/4.