Innocent Bystanders Blu-ray Review
Craig. John Craig.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 20, 2013
The James Bond craze was pretty much in remission in the early seventies, with Sean Connery's on-again, off-again
departure as 007 leading to the perceived misfire of George Lazenby starring in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service followed
by Connery's last Broccoli-Salzman production,
Diamonds Are Forever, before Roger Moore took over the role for what quickly became a sillier
franchise. The 007 craze led to a huge glut of knock off properties throughout the sixties (and let's face it, Connery
himself might be accused of a knock off with his return as Bond in 1983's
Never Say Never Again), but things had quieted
down rather dramatically by decade's end. Sandwiched in between Lazenby's sole appearance as Bond and Connery's
last "real" Bond film was the rather odd 1972 British spy thriller
Innocent Bystanders, an overtly flashy entry in
quasi-Bond mania that is almost like a mash up of more serious minded Bond derivative fare like
The Ipcress File
(not so coincidentally co-produced by Harry Salzman) or even
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and the
unabashedly cheeky and frivolous television series
The Avengers. If
Innocent Bystanders was made
with one eye on the Bond franchise, it was probably a miscast gaze, for tonally this film is neither as fun nor as exciting
as any given Bond feature. It's most salient characteristic may well be how
arbitrary it often is, with alliances
shifting virtually on a dime and with a veritable plethora of secrets that various characters are hiding. Almost manically
edited at times, the film also has a rather disturbing amount of violence, a string of bloody killings, beatings and even
sexual improprieties that almost suggest
the influence of someone like Sam Peckinpah lurking somewhere in the background. The film was actually directed by
Peter Collinson, who helmed the original version of
The Italian Job.
There is at least
one salient connection to James Bond here, at least insofar as the iconic character was
portrayed
in the latest Bond outing
Skyfall. In that
film Bond was portrayed as an agent perhaps (maybe not
even perhaps) past his prime, fighting to retain his
cachet in an organization that was filled with upstart youths. Much the same situation is at hand in
Innocent
Bystanders. The main character here is John Craig (Stanley Baker), a high level operative for a shadowy British
intelligence agency (none of the international spy organizations in the film bear names that resemble reality, like MI6 or
the CIA, as they often do in the Bond films). Craig has had a rough go of it, evidently having been tortured by the KGB,
with the result being that his sexual prowess has been severely compromised (this is alluded to rather obliquely but is
made fairly clear nonetheless). Craig is surrounded by a number of younger agents, including the unlikely pair of
Benson
(Sue Lloyd) and Royce (Derren Nesbitt), a duo of karate chopping comic foils who are (at times at least) more than a bit
reminiscent of John Steed and Emma Peel in
The Avengers.
Craig has been consigned to "pencil pushing" at the agency since his misfortune, but he's offered a chance to get "back
in the saddle" by his taciturn (in fact almost zombie-like) superior Loomis (Donald Pleasance). The opening credits
sequence of the film has already shown us a daring prison break from a Soviet Gulag, and one of the escaped
prisoners, an agronomist named Aaron Kaplan (Vladek Sheybal) is wanted by the Russians, British
and the
Americans (the actual reason is never fully explained, but it seems like Kaplan has some sort of genius in being able to
convert deserts into lush oases). Loomis informs Craig that he is to find and capture Kaplan, and that Royce and
Benson will be tagging along as "decoys" for the KGB. (What
actually turns out to be the case is something not
so unexpectedly completely different.)
Craig is briefly captured by the Americans, including a kind of smarmy section head named Blake (Dana Andrews), in one
of the more disturbing if oddly kind of funny scenes in the film. The Americans lead Craig to believe he's about to be
tortured the same way the KGB agents did previously, and despite the fact that there is in fact no torture, Craig reacts
as if there were. He is then injected with a truth serum and spills the beans about his mission to find Kaplan. The
Americans decide that Craig is washed up as an agent, and no threat to
their mission to find Kaplan.
Craig manages to track down Kaplan's brother and to actually prevent a KGB hit squad from executing the man, but he
receives very little gratitude in return, and next to no information about Aaron's whereabouts. When Loomis insists
that Craig get Kaplan come hell or high water, Craig, who has already felt Loomis has betrayed him, decides to take
matters into his own hands. He returns to Kaplan's brother's tony apartment and discovers a comely young woman
there named Miriam Loman (Geraldine Chaplin), who states that she is the ward of Kaplan's brother. Craig simply takes
Miriam hostage and then tracks down Kaplan's brother, informing him that Miriam will be summarily executed by Craig if
Aaron's whereabouts are not divulged.
Enough information is forthcoming (as much from Miriam as from Kaplan's brother) to get Craig and Miriam off to
Turkey, where Aaron can hopefully be found. What ensues is a not very surprising quasi-romance that develops
between Craig and Miriam (talk about your Stockholm Syndrome, even if it is in Turkey), as the two attempt to track
down Aaron while at the same steering clear of just about everyone else in the film, including the Americans, Russians
and the two supposed British underlings. The film kind of lurches uneasily between at times pretty lamely staged action
elements and the more supposedly intimate moments between the burgeoning lovers.
The film is perched rather precariously between a more or less straight ahead espionage feel, a kind of nasty
smarminess (especially when Royce goes after Miriam at one point) and some oddly placed comedic elements. In fact
the film's best moment is actually a very funny interchange between Benson and a clueless policeman after Craig has
taken out his two protégés so that he can continue his own private mission. But the really strange thing about this is
how almost inappropriate the humor feels when placed within the overall context of the film.
Innocent Bystanders does have one other minor way it is intentionally reminiscent of the Bond franchise, namely Johnny Keating's
brass heavy score (replete with the "smears" that frequently mark John Barry's scores to various Bond features). There's a certain disco-
fied element to some of the cues which is distinctly at odds with the Bond outings, as well as a perhaps ill conceived song by Hurricane
Smith, but some of the action cues sound like they could have been lifted whole cloth from some little known Bond film from the mid- to late
sixties.
