1946’s O.S.S. makes a strong case for Alan Ladd as the first James Bond, sort of, ish, in prototype. A new sort of spy thriller about a new sort of spy agency – the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner to the CIA and had only been set up four years before – it was rush-released by Paramount, who knew that other studios were hot on their heels with similar movies.
It’s written by Richard Maibaum, who’d go on to work on almost all the James Bond movies from the first, Dr No, to his death in 1991, aged 81. With that knowledge frontloaded, the experience of watching O.S.S. is indeed like watching a prototype Bond movie and you can play a highly satisfying game of “spot the meme” if you want to – there’s M, there’s Q, there’s Moneypenny and so on – in tandem with watching the film itself. Meanwhile, the fact that Ian Fleming wouldn’t get round to writing his first 007 novel until 1952 invites all sorts of questions about his franchise’s inspirations.
In common with Bond films it has pretty much no deliberate subtext. This is a case of “what you see is what you get”, which puts the emphasis on thrills. Ladd is the cynical wiseguy who we meet as a rookie trying and failing to steal some secret hi-tech information. The failure is expected by his superiors at the agency and is all part of putting the greenhorn through his paces with fellow recruits (cue montage training sequence) before he is parachuted him into occupied France alongside tough female operative Ellen Rogers (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Being an old-school chauvinist, Philip Masson (Ladd) objects, but he’ll come to realise that Rogers, going by the name of Elaine Dupree, has the right stuff, which of course only makes her more formidably attractive.
Behind enemy lines Masson’s task is to pass undetected by the Nazis until he and the rest of his group can achieve their mission, the blowing up of a strategically important train tunnel, using plastic explosives. Not all of his compadres will make it.
Fitzgerald gets much more of Maibaum’s attention than his Bond girls of the future did, and is the notable dissimilarity with the Bond movies. Even so, there’s a familiarity to the whole thing. With a few more exotic locations plus more sex and irony, this would be a Bond movie, right down to a cultured villain – John Hoyt as a psychopathic Nazi who loves his art – the emphasis on gadgets, some good stunt set pieces and a tendency to wander off into vamping about halfway through.
For all that, a kind of dirty realism is what the film is selling. There are ten military consultants listed in the opening credits and director Irving Pichel gives it the noirish Hollywood treatment, with Lionel Lindon’s striking cinematography (he did the original The Manchurian Candidate) adding stark heroic images to go with the urgent mood.
Throughout, Ladd is just right – lean and hungry, with his baritone voice hitting the sweet spot of the era’s lo-fi microphones so we can hear every nuance of what he says.
The film was a hit and went on at least partly to inspire a series of OSS movies based on the OSS 117 books by French writer Jean Bruce, who also beat Ian Fleming to the finish post – the first of the 88-novel series was published in 1949, four years before Ian Fleming got going with his secret agent with a strikingly similar code name.
Can you watch it with the Bond blinkers off? Certainly. Is it any good watched clean? Yes. On its own terms, and in its own way it’s a good spy thriller and, if you can ignore its tendency to wander off midway, a lean and dynamic one as well as the first part of a very significant jigsaw.
O.S.S. – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
