A Quick Look at Flint...

   There was a spy even cooler than Bond, and his name was Flint. Ask most movie spy fans which secret agent is our favorite, and the majority of us will tell you, without hesitation, Derek Flint. James Coburn scored his first major lead role as the strong-willed, unstoppable human computer known as Flint in 20th Century Fox's OUR MAN FLINT. In this adventure, a secret organization known as Galaxy has perfected a weather control machine and the only man who has a chance of saving the day is Flint! Coburn would return for the more elegant sequel, IN LIKE FLINT. (OUR MAN FLINT made Coburn a star, but he didn't want to get tied down a series.) In IN LIKE FLINT, Flint swings into action to help his former boss at Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage and happens onto a plot to replace the US President with a look-a-like, arm an experimental space platform, and shift the balance of power in favor of the female sex. During the course of events, Flint is assumed dead. (So, we have a thought-dead hero, an imposter president, and an armed space platform. I must wonder if that second G.I.JOE movie is officially a remake or not....) A little more elegant than the first film, IN LIKE FLINT is just as delightful. Unfortunately, saturation of the genre meant there wouldn't be a third film.* The two pictures have a breezy quality, a comic book mentality, that often has them written off as comedies. Unabashedly over the top, the films none the less deliver the goods. The two Flint films remain among my favorites in espionage entertainment. When I think of great spy music, it's Jerry Goldsmith's Flint theme that first comes to mind. For the tops in pop adventure, you can't go wrong with Flint!

(*Like Matt Helm, Derek Flint was revived for a TV movie in the 70's. While MATT HELM tried to capture the character played by Dean Martin, however, OUR MAN FLINT: DEAD ON TARGET shows absolutely no connection to the Coburn films. Ray Danton, who had played a Flint-like character in SECRET AGENT SUPER DRAGON, plays this Flint as a supposedly intelligent private detective in an adventure so bland and dull and poorly produced that it staggers the imagination. The action highlight is an exploding file cabinet, and the fireball might've at worst singed Flint's eyebrows. Really, the thing was terrible. And weirdly, Danton -with his dark greasy hair combed over his forehead- more resembles Harvey Lembeck than he does James Coburn.)