The film that killed the great director Anthony Mann, A Dandy in Aspic didn’t get killer reviews when it debuted in 1968. “Completely devoid of suspense” and “bland,” said the New York Times. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide declared it “wooden”.
Mann died of a heart attack towards the end of shooting and the movie’s star, Laurence Harvey, took over directing, which isn’t the reason the film bombed. Harvey actually takes some pains to ape the claustrophobic, slick style of Mann. There just isn’t a whole lot going on in Derek Marlowe’s original story (which he adapted for the screen). But what looked like a failure back then looks more like a calculation all these decades later. A Dandy in Aspic can’t honestly be described as exciting, and it’s centred on a character who doesn’t do very much at all, but it is dense and dank and full of Cold War atmosphere.
It’s an anti-James Bond spy thriller along the lines of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and Harvey, aloof to the point of alienation his default, is ideally cast as a British agent who’s tasked with finding and killing a Russian mole. The mole is, of course, himself.
Harvey is also possibly also using the movie as an audition for the 007 job, which was vacant at the time, Sean Connery having announced his intention to quit the franchise after five movies and George Lazenby having not yet been hired for the sixth. As the secret agent who is as deadly with a withering put-down as he is with any weapon, Harvey takes the James Bond quip and loads it with extra sarcasm.
London was no longer officiall swinging in 1968 but it was still a happening city, and Mann and co nod to that in the early scenes when Harvey’s spy Eberlin too easily picks up groovy photographer Caroline (Mia Farrow), beneath whose English dolly-bird wide-eyes and Pierre Cardin tailoring might lurk something very different.y
Eberlin needs to know what Caroline is all about and why she’s interested in him but doesn’t deploy usual spy methods – he’s not trying to bed her; in fact she’s more trying to bed him. Is he “sexless” as Caroline’s mother describes him? Or just cool to the point of frigidity?
Eberlin is also described as a “snob” (Caroline’s mother again). He dresses impeccably and smokes using a cigarette holder. He never runs when he can glide, and when he actually gets round to spying work he moves through the usual spy situations affectlessly. A dead letter drop in an abandoned church. A meeting with a contact down by the river where London’s docks stand largely idle. If there’s a conversations it’s invariably desultory. Plans are never really hatched. Eberlin floats about, stuck in London when he’d rather be back in the USSR (to borrow a line from a song of the time).
It’s a good cast. Harvey has form as a “double” having starred in The Manchurian Candidate. Farrow was famous on account of her starring role in the TV show Peyton Place, though this was her first movie. Tom Courtenay is excellent in a piss-and-vinegar role as Gatiss, a fellow spy who does not like Eberlin at all and possibly suspects who and what he is. The mostly British cast of light entertainment names (Peter Cook, John Bird, Barbara Murray, Geoffrey Bayldon) is bulked out by the occasional American, like Lionel Stander, trying and failing to hide his Bronx accent in his portrayal of Soviet spymaster Sobakevich.
Quincy Jones’s score is spare and mysterious and full of off-kilter grooviness. The director of photography is Christopher Challis, a Powell and Pressburger stalwart, who is similarly restrained, tamped down. He is shooting in Technicolor though you’d never guess.
It is one of those strange hybrids that flourished at the end of the 1960s – British settings, American money and director (see also 1967’s The Deadly Affair for another good example). So it has a tourist’s eye – the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge – but that doesn’t mean it’s sunny. Overcast is this strange movie’s dominant mood. Glum, even. Anyone for glum?
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
