FURY ON THE BOSPHORUS (1965)
(a.k.a. AGENT 077: FROM THE ORIENT WITH FURY /
VOLLMACHT FUR JACK CLIFTON)
Article #935 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-6-2003
Posting Date: 3-4-2004
Directed by Sergio Grieco
Featuring Ken Clark, Margaret Lee, Philippe Hersent

Secret agent 077 investigates the kidnapping of a scientist capable of creating a death ray gun.

The DS Movie of the Day would like to take this opportunity to present an edition of “Adventures in Movie-hunting: The trials and tribulations of trying to find genre movies”.

When this movie popped up on my hunt list, the book listed the title as FURY ON THE BOSPHORUS. When a simple hunt on IMDB failed to provide me with that title, I had to try several searches by cast names until I stumbled across a movie with a French title of FUREUR SUR LE BOSPHORE; since the other information synced up with this entry, I assumed I had found the right title. It’s title in IMDB was AGENTE 077 DALL’ORIENTE CON FURORE, and was known in English by either of the titles AGENT 077 FURY IN THE ORIENT or AGENT 077 OPERATION ISTANBUL. Was I able to find the movie under these titles? No. However, I was able to find a movie called AGENTE 077: FROM THE ORIENT WITH FURY, which was a literal translation of the Italian title, so I ordered that one. When it arrived in the mail, I was surprised to see that the title on the movie was VOLLMACHT FUR JACK CLIFTON, an incident that had me scrambling back to IMDB to try to confirm that I had the correct movie; after all, IMDB listed the main character as being named Dick Maloy, not Jack Clifton. After fumbling around for about ten minutes, I discovered that VOLLMACHT FUR JACK CLIFTON was indeed the German title for AGENTE 077 DALL’ORIENTE CON FURORE. Whew! The moral of this story? Hunting down obscure genre movies is not a task for the faint of heart.

The country of origin of this movie is listed as Italy/Spain/France on IMDB, so what language do you think was on the actual film I got? It was German, which you might have guessed seeing how I had acquired the print with the German title. Oddly enough, the only parts that weren’t in German were the lyrics to the songs, which were in English; however, since the songs don’t reveal plot elements, this was pretty useless for me.

Actually, this movie turned out not to be as difficult to enjoy as I thought it would be. Spy movies tend to be difficult to follow in the first place, and ones in unsubtitled German would seem to be all that much harder. I think the reason this one didn’t give me much of a problem is simply that the main pleasures of watching these types of superspy movies are visual; the plot is only there to move you from setpiece to another, and though the overriding storyline would remain a bit obscure at times, I was able to discern the important elements in any individual scene, such as who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, and what they were fighting about. The science fiction elements in this one don’t really manifest themselves until the last ten minutes of the movie, but when they do, they are quite marked. Overall, I found it quite enjoyable, which is good; considering all the trouble I went through to find it, it would have been depressing if the movie stunk.