The Spy Who Loved Flowers (1966)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Fresh and Exciting

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Superseven's second movie-and substantially better than the first . The screenplay remains naive and of comic strip quality but it includes several interesting developments and even unexpected twists .It must be Yoko Tani,French actor Roland Lesaffre's wife ,who is different from the bimbos who fall for Martin in both episodes .The character is a bit more complex than the others .Unlike Pussy Galore in "Goldfinger",her volt-face is not only explained by the hero's charm:"in my country,we are taught no to behave like you (westerners)"In the first (and poorer) episode ,there was a good scene : to hide a dead body ,Superseven makes it out to be a waxwork;in this one,Lenzi does a good job,transforming a florist shop into an antique dealer place ;Egypt's landscapes were poorly used in the first effort;here the director takes advantage of Greek landscapes (particularly the Parthénon)even if he introduces the Sirtaki ,a dance which was very trendy in those days in the Wake of "Zorba The Greek"And now we know why there was the Northeast blackout in 1965 . believe it or not.The last scene is -relatively-smart.

I don't know what the circumstances were under which Lenzi took the helm of this movie but the fact that he didn't use his own name says something. I'm guessing he did this at the last moment for cash and had no say in the script and even then I'm not sure why he bothered. Yoko Tani is the best thing in this and she has a couple of weak cat fights. That I give this boring so called spy tale anything is down to the way it looked and that we glimpsed several cities and there was the glimpse of a wonderful red convertible at one point. Uncharismatic lead, maybe he thought if he was to appear British, he should appear as bland as possible, who knows? Who even cares and why am I writing about this 90 minutes of wasted time? Just in the remote chance that someone can find and apply that poster!

After retrieving an electronic device that can shut off the power of entire cities, a secret agent is assigned to eliminate the only 3 remaining persons who have knowledge of the device. His first two missions (in Paris and Geneva) are accomplished easily enough, but the third (in Athens, where the rest of the film is set) turns out to be more complicated. His target seems to be aware of his every move, and it is likely that there is a traitor within the agency...."The Spy Who Loved Flowers" is a great title; the movie is not as colorful as all that, but it is enlivened by the attractive locations, some smart plot twists, and, above all, 2 great catfights between Emma Danieli (as a photographer who gets mixed up in all of this by accident) and Yoko Tani (as a baddie). These girls look like they love to throw down! **1/2 out of 4.