The Late-Late-Late Show Project, the third in a breath-taking series of attempts to dig through European genre cinema one trailer at a time in the order of their appearance on Something Weird's The Late-Late-Late Show tape, as referenced here. (1) (2)
No.3 To Catch a Spy, original French title Action Immediate, which translates as, well, Immediate Action. One can consider this movie as a proto-Bond film, at least in the sense of having a debonair, womanizing secret agent as a hero, kooky gadgets like secret telephones hidden in tree trunks, car chases and some heavy duty violence (a woman gets punched pretty damn hard --in fact it looks pretty damn real). It's very much like a Bond film, except To Catch a Spy actually seems to have intrigue and cloak and dagger stuff, which normally shows up in spy stories, but which the Bond series hasn't touched since 1963. Then again, Ian Fleming wasn't Eric Ambler.
Action Immediate was produced in 1957, which predated James Bond's first film appearance by 5 years. Interestingly, the spy novel series on which this movie was based, the Coplan FX-18 series by Paul Kenny (a pseudonym of the writing team of Jean Libert and Gaston Van den Panhuyse, who also wrote science-fiction novels under the name of Jean-Gaston Vandel introduced the sly Francis Coplan, agent FX-18 of the French secret services, in 1953 with the novel Sans Issue, one year after Ian Fleming introduced James Bond 007 in Casino Royale. Casino Royale caused a minor sensation in Britain, but did very little elsewhere. It's doubtful the first Bond novel made any impression on the two collaborators except as a footnote as to what was popular in England at the time. Maybe that was enough. Or maybe it was one of those pop cultural synchronicities that happen more than you think. In any case, the series proved popular enough to spawn 100s of novels, comic books, TV shows and movies. The series outlived its authors (who gave up their well-received SF novels to devote full time to Coplan). The series was finally discontinued in 1996.
Action Immediate was the first of the Coplan film adaptations, based on a 1955 novel. The trailer seems to exhibit a certain breezy insouciance. Its hero, the agent Coplan played by Henri Vidal, is the nonchalant man of action, who laughs, smokes, drinks, seduces his way through danger. But as the announcer intones: "It isn't a pretty story. Everyone involved is in danger at every moment. No one can be trusted. No one knows who is an enemy or who can become one. And speed is vital. Lives may be cheap, but minutes can be priceless...To Catch a Spy, before it's too late!" The intrigue is thick and suffocating --something we don't see in spy thrillers post-Bond. We witness a lot of the trappings of pre-technological spy fiction: the mysterious men in fezzes, briefcases changing hands, magnifying glasses, sultry and duplicitous women. It feels old-fashioned, quaint even.
It's interesting to speculate how Action Immediate could have been a model for a Bond style spy thriller if they were made in the 50s instead of the 60s. Henri Vidal plays a sturdy, charming enough hero, but exhibits none of the decadence and amorality Connery projected in his portrayal of government agent as satyr. It's also interesting that another Coplan film was not produced until 1964 (Coplan, Agent Secret FX 18), just when international Bondmania was just taking off. Then a spate of Coplan films followed, all of them looking like the Bond knock-offs European studios churned out without discretion throughout the 1960s. But Action Immediate was the first. It's difficult to say whether Action Immediate was a one shot, or the presumed first in a series. Maybe the box office wasn't so hot and the idea for a series was shelved. Maybe the premature death of leading man Henri Vidal in 1959 put a nix on the idea. In any case, it gives us a glimpse into an alternate history of genre cinema: the spy thriller without the hegemonic weight of the Bond series.