The Wrecking Crew

Rating:

on Our Glorious Five-Star Scale

by Chris Baker

Dean Martin is asleep for his first scene in The Wrecking Crew. This is as it should be--the man was 52 and looked much older. This afternoon nap is a lot easier to swallow than the high concept fantasy of Martin as aworld famous erotic photographer-slash-superspy Matt Helm.

Dean Martin/Matt Helm's last act before passing out was characteristic--he's assembled a gaggle of models, and arrayed them in impossibly ridiculous outfits, some of which include telephones and flaming silver cones. The beauties surround Martin/Helm's inert form, and they giggle and coo over him.

Cut to an extreme close up on prone Martin/Helm, replete with Tang-orange makeup, turtleneck, and a gleaming coif. He leers in his sleep, and on the other half of a split screen we see what he is dreaming...

For a while, his dream is simply a montage of him smooching the very models he couldn't stay awake to photograph. But then, the dream takes a disturbingly Freudian turn. Martin abandons his pin up girls and shuffles over to a nearby cow. He sloooooooowly eases his aged frame down onto a milking stool and proceeds to knead her teats.

As this is going on, we hear Dino's disembodied voice, crooning to the tune of "Sunny Side of the Street":
grab your coat and get your pail
lemme take you in the barn, dear--
just sit back and watch
cause I found a cow who gives scotch

I give The Wrecking Crew five stars. I could just as easily give it zero stars, or twenty stars. Experiences like this exist outside the confines of any mere rating system, even Our Glorious Five Star Scale. If it fails in every respect as a movie, it consistently excels as a window into another universe--a universe in which bad guys hijack a train full of gold that was on its way from Denmark to [pre-Chunnel] England.

Mike Meyers has become rich tapping into this incredibly potent material--but he's always gone for the easy targets; the brazen chauvinism, the campiness, the nauseous costume and set design, the fact that every locale from Siberia to Pago Pago looks exactly like Southern California.

But those of us who've tasted the annihilating purity of the original Matt Helm films know that Meyers just scratches the tip of the ICEberg.

In the Austin Powers movies, where's the running gag of Dean Martin singing in voiceover, resurrecting archaic Tin Pan Alley chestnuts and changing the lyrics to comment on whatever pathetic plot contrivance is presently occurring in the film?

Where's the cloddish banter?

Where's the excruciating theme music? (The chorus in The Wrecking Crew: "Ah So, Ah So, Velly Velly Nice")

Where's the palsied camera zooms, the contempt for plot continuity, the ill-thought out gadgets? (A gun that fires on ten second delay? A GUN THAT FIRES ON TEN SECOND DELAY?!)

Where, for that matter, is the once-likable pop singer who'd actually proven that he could act in films like Rio Bravo and Some Came Running, but had long since devolved [literally] into a salacious, paunchy, wrinkled, smug, torpid, oleaginous, drink-ravaged old simpleton who radiates self-satisfaction as he lumbers lethargically through whatever astonishingly terrible project he happens to be trapped in at the moment?

Connoisseurs should be aware that this film isn't as consistently otherworldly as the two middle films of the Matt Helm series, The Ambushers and Murderer's Row. Debit this to the return of director Phil Karlson. (a.k.a. "The poor man's Don Seigel", a.k.a. "The drunk man's Edgar G. Ulmer", "a.k.a. The homeless man's Allen Dwan", a.k.a. "The psychotic man's Robert Aldrich")

Karlson muddies the zenlike Ur-crumminess with action choreography by Bruce Lee, though the presence of Chuck Norris as one of the heavies does even things down a bit. Martin's stuntman actually gets in some pretty good chops and kicks; Dino himself always moves like he's underwater.

The makers of the Matt Helm films always found a way to make the prospect of a swingin' tryst with delicious starlets like Ann Margaret or Stella Stevens seem profoundly distasteful. This movie is no exception, even though they've hit the girlie jackpot--The Wrecking Crew features Tina Louise [Ginger from Gilligan's Island!] as a Mediterranean go-go dancer, gorgeous Nancy Kwan as inscrutably exotic agent Wen Yu-Rang har de har, Elke Sommer and her cleavage [watch for an early scene in which she saunters right into the camera, which is aimed squarely at her crotch], and, in her final film role, poor Sharon Tate--who demonstrates the same flair for comedy here that she showed in Fearless Vampire Killers, and which the makers of this film have less than no idea how to utilize.

Tate effortlessly steals the movie--her staggering beauty coupled with her endearingly awkward klutz persona foretell a great career cut tragically short.

In The Wrecking Crew, her fussily accident-prone sidekick character gives Dean Martin someone to play off of and disdain affectionately, in a manner that's very reminiscent of Martin's earliest films. She is a bangable Jerry Lewis.

The last line in the credits promises: COMING UP NEXT: THE RAVAGERS, a planned sequel that never congealed.