'THAT MAN IN ISTANBUL'........HORST CASE SCENARIO.....

That Man In Istanbul (1965)  The BQ, as you dear visitors must know, has carried on a life long love affair with cheesy Eurospy movies, cheapjack James Bond imitations that flourished in the mid 1960's.....and a genre, we might add, that's criminally under-represented on video.....take note, suppliers...)

            Here's one of our favorites, a French-Italian-Spanish concoction with the oddest choice of dashing hero, that diminutive, beady-eyed little fellow, the young punk member of "The Magnificent Seven" himself,  Horst Bucholz.....

            First you have to swallow the idea that Horst, as Turkish gangster-playboy-man-about-town Tony Macenas, is on a first name basis with every voluptuous young girl in Istanbul....("Ciao, Tony" they all purr when encountering him).....

            Fortunately , the movie won't give you time to dwell on such a casting anomaly. Bucholz, saddled with a CIA babe who thinks he's mixed up in the kidnapping-ransom of a nuclear scientist, races around every picturesque sight in Istanbul.......dodging bullets, knives, cars and a metal-hooked thug who's out to toss him off the top of a minaret.

           You simply have to applaud the plucky Bucholz, breaking the fourth wall and snarking directly into the camera, "What, me worry?"  while four or five cars make a concerted effort to simultaneously run him down from different directions.....(you can guess how well that goes...)

          Endless amounts of stuff we'll never get enough of.......the eternally stunning Sylva Koscina as the CIA hottie...(hilariously, the entire American CIA contingent here speaks in worse dubbed-in English than a Godzilla movie)......Bucholz mixing it up with those unmistakable, iconic international oddballs, Mario Adorf and Klaus Kinski.....(leading Kinksi to hiss the movie's best line at Bucholz, who's identified himself with a phony secret agent number..."Whatever your number is....it's up!").

          Even better, all of this non stop nonsense is backed up by Georges Garvarentz's jazzy, brassy typically Eurospy music.....(a few years later, Garvarentz and this film's director Antonio Isasi, will team up for the gloriously Euro-trashy heist caper, "They Came To Rob Las Vegas"....see our previous post on that one, another BQ fave....)

           We could go on and on about the many guilty pleasures of watching this movie......especially the signature lame special effect employed in all these low budget Bond imitators......the hastily sketched in, animated explosions.....(when planes and boats blow up in this movie, it looks exactly like the Acme Dynamite that detonates in Wiley Coyote's face during the Road Runner cartoons....)......It's a wonderful prime example of a long lost genre whose films we used to gobble up like barbecue potato chips at a summer picnic.

           By all means, take a Horst-drawn carriage to "That Man In Istanbul"......the BQ stamps our cheeseball movie passport with 4 stars (****)....and pay no attention to whatever Secret Agent number Horst claims as his.....