SINFONIA PER DUE SPIA (1965)
aka Serenade for Two Spies, Serenade fur zwei Spione, Sympathy for Two Spies
Article 2647 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-5-2008
Posting Date: 11-11-2008
Directed by Michael Pfleghar
Featuring Hellmut Lange, Tony Kendall, Barbara Lass
Country: West Germany/Italy

A spy attempts to get his hands on a laser device…

…or so the plot descriptions I’ve found seem to tell me. I couldn’t make heads of tales out of this one, but then, I watched it with the worst possible print. Apparently, the English language version is lost, so I watched it on a bootleg DVD in unsubtitled Italian with faded color, horrible pan-and-scan cropping, and a running time that is only slightly more than half of the length of the movie on IMDB (they say 87 minutes, my copy runs 45 minutes). Under these circumstances, I’d be surprised if it made sense. Apparently, it’s a comedy, but it’s hard to tell. It takes place in the United States, it has a soundtrack that sounds as if it were more appropriate for a cheesy travelogue than a spy movie, and it features what may be the most jaw-droppingly unconvincing underwater sequence in cinema history. Beyond that, the movie is a question mark.