Film Rolls Season 2, Round 05: Rage and The Assassination Bureau

This round's discs are coincidentally from the same boutique house, as it turns out, though that's about all they've got in common. I'd love to order some more of these Imprint Blu-rays, even if they often get domestic versions pretty quick as if to taunt me (you're welcome). Real shame about shipping and tariffs going nuts over the past few years (out maybe the cheap shipping was just unsustainable).

Anyway, Dale rolled a 4 and landed on Rage, although, full discourse, that was her second roll. Her first had her hit The Stewardess 3D, and while I'm not above that, the active shutter glasses weren't charged. Maybe another day!

Centipede, then, rolled a 14 and reached The Assassination Bureau. Our, shall we say, The Assassination Bureau Limited, which a number of the film's special features remind us is the full title. Somehow I missed it being based on an incomplete novel by Jack London in the opening credits, which is probably not that strange, although one does really think of London as being defined by a specific group of his work. It also took me a little while to figure that it was set in London's time rather than the late 1960s when it was made. I figured it was just stylish.

The last round ended in a tie; how about this one?

Rage

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the disc at Amazon

Rage is kind of a weird film: It looks like the sort of grimy little movie that makes one grudgingly appreciate its nastiness, but its parts seem mismatched and its heart is a bit too close to the right place. I suspect that being removed from its original context hurts it a bit: Folks who are never truly out of communication range maybe don't understand just how screwed one can be between point A and point B, on the one hand; on the other, not only did Sorcerer come out ten years later, but the audience for this has probably had more chances to see The Wages of Fear as well. You know there's a better movie that involves driving trucks over dangerous bridges out there.

Which is not exactly what this movie is about; it starts by introducing the audience to Reuben (Glenn Ford), an alcoholic American doctor working in a Mexican mining company town who is just functional enough to know his limits, and Perla (Stella Stevens), one of a number of "entertainers" brought into town who decides he looks pretty good and stays to stake her claim when the rest leave. One of Dr. Reuben's patients is a pregnant woman (Maura Monti) who will likely need a Cesarian, which Reuben feels is beyond his current capacities, though her husband Antonio (Armando Silvestre) trusts him. As it turns out, he'll need Dr. Reuben to come to their house, but the thing is, another miner (David Reynoso) has contracted rabies and quickly passed the point of no return - and Reuben's dog has bitten him. The injection he needs within 48 hours is in the opposite direction of Antonio's house, but Antonio insists…

There's the outline of a nifty little thriller in there, but there's just one problem: It doesn't really need Perla, and the filmmakers not only spend a lot of the film's first half on her flirting and teasing after deciding she likes Reuben, but have to make a concerted effort to get her in the jeep with him and Antonio as they try to make it to the city where rabies medication can be found in time. There's maybe room for a third person in that vehicle, especially if she's going to realize that Reuben is more or less of a man than she previously thought, but this group doesn't result in any sort of three-way tension. All the dangers are external, and a lot of the time spent with Perla feels low-stakes compared to Reuben and Antonio.

Still, you can see where this would be pretty great with the right characters - the self-loathing Ford brings forth for Reuben casts the right sort of shadow but isn't so overwhelming that Perla looks like a fool, and Stevens lets herself be the worn kind of brassy despite still being in her bombshell era. Armando Silvestre's Antonio is being foolish but he hits a nice note here, dancing around being unreasonable but not quite looking the fool; there's a fair amount implied about he's less stupid than in over his head and ready to value his trust in Reuben over how another doctor might treat the wife of a poor mine worker.

The setting and suspense pieces are nice as well: The mining town feels cheap and temporary but functional, and the little details like characters' pets and the banter of the girls tend to ring true. Bits like driving a truck over a tiny bridge or crossing the desert through punishing heat have a good sense of desperation. The last bit - an attempted hijacking of a school bus - is trying for this but seems a step too far, an attempt to force imminent danger and how panicked the characters are of the need to beat the clock. It's not the right finale for this movie, highlighting how it's got the right bones but maybe not the right flesh.

The Assassination Bureau

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the Arrow disc at Amazon

Jaws and Star Wars are often talked about as the beginning of the blockbuster era, and that's so from a release-patter and business sense, but the form seems to owe as much to James Bond as anything else, and The Assassination Bureau feels a bit like a crucial evolutionary step between them: It's got the same vibe as the Bond movies, but also the grandiose production values of the widescreen epics that preceded them. It's grand but has no belief that it's important, winking at the audience and finishing on a kind of bloated set-piece, the sort of fancy but lightweight thing that has taken the movies over fifty years later to many critics' chagrin.

It opens with Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg), a single woman of the early Twentieth Century who would be an investigative reporter were that avenue open to her in England. She has, however, discovered what she believes to be a shadowy organization behind a number of high-profile killings, pitching the story to Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas) and continuing to research it. When she finds this Assassination Bureau headed by Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), she hires it to eliminate him, and he accepts, figuring that this will be a way for him to clean house, as his family founded it as targeting those whom the world would be better without as opposed to the purely mercenary agency it has become. Sonya continues to report on the story by trailing him, not realizing that Bostwick is part of the Bureau's board and eager to remove the too-idealistic Ivan.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, really, but it doesn't have to; the fact that London's version of the novel was little more than a sketch finished by Robert Fish means that the filmmakers have a lot of room to play, sending the pair on a merry chase through pre-World War I Europe full of colorful costumes, elaborate sets, and deadpan black humor. It's never very serious but never looks down on its own premise by treating it entirely as a joke, and the filmmakers find many ways to have a good time, whether it's killers and marks bouncing around a busy bordello full of scantily-clad women, Ivan trying to get his murder done outside of Sonya's disapproving eye, or a funeral where you know someone is going to escape from the coffin but the shell game and delight at letting the audience watch is on full display.

And, of course, there's Rigg & Reed as a perfectly complementary couple: Sonya starts out fussy and prudish despite her appetite for adventure and intrigue, while Ivan is rakish and amoral by Sonya's lights but has joie de vivre and a personal code without it being overbearing. They are of course going to fall in love and Sonya will probably loosen up more than Ivan becomes serious, but in the meantime they're going to banter and poke at each other and look great doing it. It works in large part because while these are both broadly-sketched characters, the actors are very earnest and relatable, and that makes a fine contrast to Savalas's sophisticated but smug villain. The cast is filled out by people playing often-silly caricatures that don't really have time to wear out their welcome because of the movie's episodic structure.

It climaxes with Reed's Ivan fighting a whole bunch of German goons on a zeppelin, and for better or worse, it's a surprisingly Marvel-feeling sequence for 1969, a crazy aerial environment with a larger than life hero slugging it out against mostly anonymous jobbers (whom the hero often tosses to their death a little more casually that one might like), the effects pretty good for their time but looking dated not long after. It's fun, make no mistake, but it's a little too big and chaotic in the way that more recent films of this sort often are.

I'm fine with this - more than fine, really, because I do take a sort of strange delight in finding that the things that people describe as "the problem with 21st Century Hollywood movies" have been present all along or everywhere. I think that it also makes The Assassination Bureau kind of ripe for rediscovery as a big adventure of a familiar sort with a pair of stars that people might mainly know from later works (Gladiator and Game of Thrones) at their peaks.


So where do these two discs from Australia leave us?

Dale Evans: 22½ stars
Centipede: 23 stars

Still very close, with lots more game to play!