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Released by: Olive Films
Released on: April 8th, 2014.
Director: Don Sharp
Cast: Tony Randall, Senta Berger, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski, Wilfrid Hyde-White
Year: 1966
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The Movie:
When 1966's Bang! Bang You're Dead! (known in other territories as Our Man In Marrakesh) starts off, we learn that one of a half dozen travelers arriving from abroad at the Marrakesh International Airport will be carrying on his or her person two million dollars' worth of bonds. This courier is to present the bonds to a spy known only as Mr. Casimir (Herbert Lom) who will in turn hand over a series of top secret papers that will likely have a drastic effect on the outcome of a United Nations vote set to take place over China.
Enter Andrew Jessel (Tony Jessel), an American architect who passes himself off as a big time oil company executive. While travelling to his hotel he meets a gorgeous woman named Kyra Stanovy (Senta Berger) who passes herself off as a travelling journalist but who is in fact a CIA.
Andrew quickly falls for Kyra, even going so far as to help her unload a corpse that Casimir's men stash in his room that she claims was meant for her - she tells him the body is her fiancé. Once he offers her his help, Andrew soon finds himself up to his neck in trouble and after paying a visit to Casimir to talk things over, he accidently leaves with the documents. This, of course, winds up with Casimir calling for their heads and both Andrew and Kyra wind up being chased across the city by a group of killers lead by Casimir's favorite assassin, Jonquil (Klaus Kinski). But the cops are after them two… there is the small matter of the body from the hotel to deal with after all.
Borrowing pretty heavily from The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest, Bang! Bang You're Dead! moves at a good pace and features some excellent camerawork that shows off the colorful and exotic locations rather well. Written by Harry Alan Towers the script is more than a little derivative but still manages to pack in enough twists and turns to keep things fun. The bulk of the movie is made up of our two leads being chased across the city, so that helps to keep the pace quick and the snappy dialogue is humorous and often times pretty clever.
The cast are what make this one, however. Tony Randall is really enjoyable to watch here. He plays the flustered fish out of water very well, you can feel his stress and his trepidation in certain scenes. On the flip side Senta Berger is more confident and obviously quite skilled in the art of deception. She's got plenty of sex appeal here and it's easy to see why Randall's character would fall for her the way he does. Throw in a fantastic supporting effort from Herbert Lom as the main bad guy and the always amazing Klaus Kinki well cast as the chief assassin in the film and you can quickly see why this would be as entertaining as it is. Margaret Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White also appear in smaller supporting roles to nice effect. Ultimately, this is a considerably lighter take on the material than those provided to us by Hitchcock but it's entertaining stuff, a nice mix of humor, adventure and exotic scenery.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Bang! Bang You're Dead! debuts on Blu-ray from Olive Films in a 1.85.1 widescreen transfer presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. For the most part, the image quality on this transfer is pretty strong. As most will know by this point, Olive Films doesn't really do much in the way of restoration so it would seem to be a safe bet then that they had access to some okay, though not perfect, elements for this release. It's not quite pristine, there are some white specks here and there visible throughout the movie, but outside of that there isn't really any major print damage. Grain is present as it should be and there's no evidence of noise reduction or edge enhancement. Color reproduction is a bit inconsistent, however, with some shots looking quite bold and natural and others looking a bit faded and flat. Flesh tones look a little colder than maybe they should because of this. While some scenes are definitely on the soft side, it would seem that they were shot this way. All in all, however, this is more than watchable and generally pretty decent.
The English language DTS-HD Mono Audio track on the disc isn't going to stand up as home theater demo material but for an older single channel mix it holds up pretty well. There's a little bit of background noise in a couple of scenes if you listen for it, but if you don't, you're not likely to even notice it. The levels are nicely balanced and the score has a surprising amount of depth and range as presented here. Dialogue is always easy to understand as well, which is good as there are no subtitle or closed captioning options here (nor are there any alternate language dubs).
Outside of a static menu and chapter selection, there are no extra features on this disc.
The Final Word:
Bang! Bang You're Dead! isn't deep but it doesn't go for deep - this is an enjoyable hour and a half of pure entertainment that makes good use of a great cast and some admittedly very impressive locations. Olive Films' Blu-ray looks okay and sounds pretty good and even if it's unfortunately devoid of extras, the movie is a whole lot of fun.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
