The Late-Late-Late Show Project, yet another vain attempt to extrapolate meaning, correlations, and unsure and precarious connections from the trailers of painfully obscure European genre films from the 50s and 60s as collected in Something Weird's Late-Late-Late Show VHS compilation, as referenced here. (1) (2) (3)
No.4 Agent of Doom, original French title Un Soir... par Hasard, which roughly translates as One Evening... by Chance. One Belgian site sketches a very brief synopsis, here translated (via Google):
Aside from French online merchants like alapage, there's not much to go on concerning this curious film. From what I can gather from the trailer, Florence (played by the ravishing Annette Stroyberg, who also happened to be married to Roger Vadim at the time --and indeed, she is best known nowadays as Vadim's woman between his trysts with Bardot and Deneuve) is either a woman who enjoys eternal youth, or some sort of automaton. She's surrounded by two creepy old men (played by French film stalwarts Jean Servais and Pierre Brasseur), who may be her servants, or former lovers who suffer being her servants merely to be in the glow of her incredible youth and beauty. The young scientist (Michel Le Royer), convalescing in her mansion after a motorcycle accident (a colleague warns him before his excursion: "A motorcycle is a dangerous toy", to which our hero replies, "I'm not about to get killed. I like life too much."), finds himself falling in love with the mysterious Florence. He also finds that he may enjoy eternal youth as well. As arch harpsichord music plays, she tells him: "We'll never grow old, Andre. We'll never be apart." Then we see a jetliner's engine blow and toss young Andre across a runway like an autumn leaf. And the trailer ends.
If this description of the trailer seems remarkably vague, it is because the trailer to Agent of Doom is remarkably vague. Is it a romance, a fantasy story, a spy tale, or some sort of melange of all of them put together? One suspects that the American marketers who put together this trailer were unsure themselves. I imagine their prime directive was to show as much of Annette Stroyberg's bare back as possible.
One interesting sidebar to this film is the story of the man who wrote the novel on which this film is based, L'Aventure Commence ce Soir, or The Adventure Begins This Evening. His name was Robert Collard, but he is best known by his pseudonym R. Lortac, one of France's first animators. Inspired by Winsor McCay's films while on a trip to the United States, he began making animated films in the late teens. Some of these were distributed as 9.5mm films meant for the home market in the early '20s (by Pathé Baby, the first manufacturers of home movie equipment, and who also sold ready to view movies for their system such as Lortac's films, and also Chaplin shorts and different chapters of Abel Gance's Napoleon), and it's in this small format that what's left of Lortac's early work survives. He also started making advertising cartoons in the early '20s, which could be considered the first commercials. In 1922, he began his "Canard en cine" series, which were satirical cartoons shown along with newsreels.
With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s and the advent of World War II, Lortac sold his animation studio and turned to a less taxing way to make a living, writing comic books and popular genre fiction. One of his comic book creations was Bibi Fricotin, a sort of Tintin in space. Another was a series published in Meteor Magazine, Les Conquérants de l'Espace (The Conquerers of Space), featuring the adventures of the space pilot Spade and his smart-talking mechanic Texas. He also started writing novels as Robert Collard, such as Les Bagnards du Ciel (Convicts of the Heavens), and the aforementioned L'Aventure Commence ce Soir. Little did people realize that this genre journeyman was also one of the pioneers of the animated film.
Yet more marginalia. The director of Un Soir... par Hasard, Yvan Govar, has been credited (accused?) by some genre fans as the director of the lost (never completed, or perhaps never even made) Paul Naschy werewolf feature Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Wolfman). The story surrounding this non-film is fairly interesting, but best left for another time.