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Operation Gold -- a review


Harold Sakata is best known as Odd Job, the intimidating henchman to the titular character in the classic James Bond film Goldfinger. With his steel-rimmed bowler hat and impressive strength and martial art skills, Odd Job was more than a match even for Sean Connery’s Bond in his mid-60s prime. The character was so popular that Odd Job had his own toys and a figure model kit. Sakata, who was born in Hawaii, got his first acting job with Goldfinger, but it certainly wasn’t his last.


I was watching an oddity on Amazon Prime recently called Operation Gold, which Amazon Prime has listed as being made in 1980. But while viewing the film, a broad comedy about the hunt for a valuable scepter, I thought the movie had looked like it was much older than 1980. I also thought the actor who played the museum curator looked a lot like Odd Job. It turned out I was right on both counts. Despite the “1980” date that Amazon has listed, Operation Gold was actually released in 1966 under its original name of Balearic Caper, and Sakata had indeed played the museum curator in the film.



But Sakata wasn’t the only Bond alumni to appear in Operation Gold. Daniela Bianchi, who plays the wealthy jewelry collector Mercedes, was also in the James Bond film From Russia With Love as Tatiana Romanova. In Operation Gold, Bianchi is more of a Bond villain, who’s willing to do whatever it takes (even illegal means) to get what she wants. Spending most of the film’s running time aboard her personal yacht, Bianchi is usually clad in alluringly scant outfits as befitting such an outlandish villain.


But while some may regard Operation Gold as a Bond spoof, it’s more of a spoof of caper flicks in the Pink Panther mode with a little Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang thrown in for good measure (a more recent version of a fun caper flick is The Brothers Bloom, by director Rian Johnson). The Macguffin of Op Gold, a golden scepter, is found by divers in a crashed airplane at the bottom of the ocean. One of the divers kills the other underwater, and the murderous diver is himself killed by another fellow on the beach--who is then killed by a weird assassin who hides in a cargo box. Just when you think the film is going to be ‘one killer is killed by the next killer’, and so on, the caper part of it finally gets going.



Once word gets out that the famously lost scepter is found and will be displayed in a museum on the small island of Ibiza, every thief in the world heads to the Spanish coastal island for the chance to steal the priceless piece. The humor in this film is very broad and over the top, with a special agent (Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) being assigned to the case, but he’s such a bungling idiot (completely lacking any of the charm that Peter Sellers had in the Pink Panther films) one wonders why they should bother sending him at all.



The real heroes of the film are Pierre (Jacques Sernas) and Polly (Mireille Darc), who team up to find the scepter on their own. Pierre is an inventor with a gaggle of kids in his household and a curious old yellow car--it looks like a Ford Model-T--that responds to his voice commands. This is where the Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang vibe comes in, as the car (named Eusebia, after the Roman Empress) pretty much has a mind of its own as it drives around by itself, causing a ruckus (this sentient car also gives the movie a heavy Herbie The Love Bug vibe, as well). If this magical car seems a little over the top, bear in mind that Op Gold also has the aforementioned killer cargo box, which stalks its victims from afar and kills them by shooting them with arrows and darts through holes in its sides.



The movie just seems to be a lackadaisical affair; it’s a breezy lazy flick that moves from one slender plot point to the next while throwing in every action/spy film trope it can think of--it was almost as if the filmmakers were just making this stuff up as they went along. And you know what? I enjoyed it. Yes, it was extremely silly. But once you accept that Operation Gold is just a big, live action cartoon, it winds up being an enjoyable romp. The fact that it’s playing on Amazon Prime is nothing short of a miracle, since this movie hasn’t even been released on VHS or DVD, making its debut on Amazon its first public wide release in over fifty years. It would be nice if Balearic Caper would also find its way to DVD/Blu-Ray eventually in a restored version. Sometimes you just need to watch a little silliness every now and then. --SF









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