Lightning Bolt (1966)

 

Italian title: Operazione Goldman

English title: Lightning Bolt
German title: Gemini 13 - Todesstrahlen auf Kap Canaveral (Death Rays on Cape Canaveral)
Director: Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti)
Writers: Alfonso Balcázar ( as Alfred Balcazar) & José Antonio de la Loma
Music: Riz Ortolani
Production companies: Seven Film (Rome)/ B.G.A./ Producciones Cinematograficas Balcázar
An Italy/ Spain co-production

Something fishy is taking place off the coast of Florida. Every NASA rocket test is mysteriously exploding shortly after lift off, and suspicion falls on some signals which seem to be interfering with the rockets, causing these repeated failings. Having cost the government millions of dollars, Professor Rooney (Francisco Sanz) is sent out in a dinghy to investigate, but disappears. It is time to bring in an expert agent: Captain Patricia Flanagan (Diana Lorys). She has a reputation for taking men down, and seems to the the ideal woman for the job. When she walks in to the film she is introduced by her legs. The camera, and the eyes of the men in the scene, follow her legs for quite some time before we finally get to see her face. However, despite the objectification, not helped by the fact that she is also known as Agent 36-22-36, she is tough and is treated with relative respect as she is given her task: head down to Florida, track Professor Rooney and solve the mystery before the next scheduled rocket test. She pulls out a cigarette and is eagerly presented with three lighters. The camera pushes in close as she smiles and then reveals that she prefers to light her own.

Flanagan (Diana Lorys) in a visually suggestive menage-a-quattro

This opening scene would lead one to assume that she will be the hero of this film, and that perhaps Lightning Bolt is going to be like Modesty Blaise (1966, Joseph Losey). This assumption is reinforced when we meet Captain Flanaghan's right-hand man, Lieutenant Harry Sennet (Anthony Eisley). First impressions suggest that he will be the Wille Garvin to her Modesty Blaise, providing muscle and backup whilst she cracks the case. Even the main poster for English-language version of this film (see top) suggests that the main character in this film is a catsuit-wearing female action agent, throwing men around Emma Peel-style.

They head off for Florida, with Harry given unlimited funds enabling him to go undercover as a louche playboy. How this will help solve the mystery is never made exactly clear, but he's happy with his instructions and proceeds to strike up friendships with every babe in a bathing costume, whilst Flanagan does some of her own detective work. 

The pair of them quickly team up to investigate some suspicious characters in the resort. Demonstrating the playful yet chaste nature of their relationship, Flanagan surprises Harry by being in his shower, something which we have seen in a dozen Bond films. As the publicity still below reveals, she never showers completely naked.

Following a lead, they end up in what looks like a grain silo, but the door slams shut and it begins to fill with water. As the level rises Flanagan becomes a damsel-in-distress rather than the super agent we have been lead to believe, and Harry springs into action to save her. At this point in the narrative the focus of the film switches entirely to Harry, and she more or less drops out of the film, only popping up much later on behind a desk. It is almost as if the script was being changed during production to take into account something that had not been planned for, like Diana Lorys was suddenly taken ill. So Harry is thrust into the fore, and this film becomes more like a standard Eurospy film after all. Still, it's a good one, so we mustn't grumble. 

So it falls upon Harry to crack the case, which involves a beer-brewing megalomaniac called Mr Rehte (Folco Lulli) who lives in an underwater lair off the Florida coast, filled with henchmen dressed as Diabolik. He is determined to ruin every single NASA rocket launch, which he achieves using a laser beam, in order to prevent NASA from discovering his own plans to build a giant laser on the moon so that he can destroy any target on Earth he chooses. This is a full-blown James Bond villain, right down to the fun detail that he emits the laser beams from his own beer company trucks parked near Cape Canaveral. 

Testing a miniature version of the laser beam (actually red string)

In his base, Mr Rehte keeps enemies, people of interest, or just employees that have annoyed him, frozen in suspended animation. Kary (Wanda Guida), the blonde bombshell who initially seems to be working for Rehte, emotionally reveals to Harry that her only reason is that her father is one of these popsicle people, and Rehte has threatened to defrost him - TO DEATH - should she displease him. Rehte is a fickle evil genius and does this anyway, reducing her father to a soggy skeleton in a manner of seconds. Kary turns and helps Harry to defeat Rehte, stop the rocket from launching to the moon, and in the process destroy the undersea base. As you can see from the above still she is dressed entirely in black, yet it is evidently supposed to be Kary on the posters. She is handy in a fight, but sadly never actually changes into the red catsuit.

Lightning Bolt is a great film, despite the confusing hero-switch a third of the way through. It delivers everything you expect from a Eurospy film: girls, guns, underwater lairs and an indestructible hero. Margheriti makes excellent use of library footage of real rocket launches, and there is some very impressive miniature work, as one would expect. Most notably, Harry races to Cape Canaveral to stop the latest launch but arrives too late, and is almost killed in the massive explosion, which like Monthly Film Bulletin stated (see below), would surely have burned most of Florida. The film was clearly a hit in Germany as well, as most of the available imagery online is from the German publicity materials. This seems a little odd given that this was not a German co-production, but they obviously loved some Eurospy action. Evidently it was also released on VHS there in the mid-1960s.

Lightning Bolt was distributed in the US in 1967 by the Woolner Brothers, the same company responsible for distributing other Margheriti films including Castle of Blood. Variety wrote that Anthony Eisley made "A more than adequate hero, fighting and womanizing in the accepted post-Bond manner." ("Lightning Bolt (Operazione Goldman) Italo - Spanish - Technicolor - Techniscope) Variety, 31 May 1967, p.18) Anthony Eisley was imported from America, where he was mostly familiar to audiences from TV shows like Hawaiian Eye and Perry Mason, but will be recognised by cult film fans for his role in The Wasp Woman (1959, Roger Corman). According to his interview with Tom Weaver for the book Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup (2006, McFarland), Margheriti thought Eisley looked too Italian and made him dye his hair blond. It came out slightly red instead and they just went with that instead. Eisley said that his time in Rome making this film was one of the most fun experiences he ever had. 

Variety went on to describe the film as being "professional and rapid, if still standard and uninspired fare." (ibid.)

Monthly Film Bulletin however published a highly favourable review on it's late UK release in March 1968, at the tail-end of the Eurospy boom, where it received an 'A' certificate from the BBFC without cuts:

"The principal attraction here is the quality of the dubbed dialogue - taut, witty, even idiomatic - which raises Operazione Goldman above the general level of Italian science fiction films, while also serving to camouflage what were obviously rather wooden performances from the principle players. Anyone with a taste for fire and brimstone will be well satisfied by the inevitable apocalyptic finale with its torrents of bubbling colored liquids and by the mammoth conflagration at the Cape Kennedy launching pad (which would have actually left little of Florida unsinged). the sets for the underwater city - built in a kind of Martian art nouveau - are particularly attractive. And like the James Bond villains from whom he is freely derived, Rethe is principally photographed from the wrist down: for most of the film we see of him only a hand in sinister juxtaposition to a beer glass."("OPERAZIONE GOLDMAN (Lighting Bolt), Italy/ Spain, 1965" Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1968, p.42)

In the International Spy Film Guide Richard Rhys Davies descibes Lightning Bolt as  "Classic Eurospy rubbish that delights. Great sets, bad SFX, great costumes, tongue-in-cheek performances and a megalomaniac with frozen women and rockets in his giant lair." In Kim Newman's three part "Thirty Years in Another Town: the History of Italian Exploitation" for Monthly Film Bulletin in 1986 he singles out Lightning Bolt as "fast, witty and absurd enough to pass muster." Given that there is no evidence of a home video release in the 1980s, one must assume that Newman was basing this on memories of his own viewing in the late 1960s.

Lightning Bolt, or Operazione Goldman in Italy, was one of the films made during Margheriti's incredible burst of activity around 1966, where he was also working on his Gamma One quadrilogy and still found time to make another Eurospy film, Killers Are Challenged. It is testament to his skills as a director that despite his prolific couple of years the quality did not dip, and this film is one of the most highly-rated and fondly-remembered Eurospy films of the period.