Modesty Blaise

This psychedelically inventive 1966 spy spoof, adapted from a British comic strip and directed by Joseph Losey, suggests the cinematic fireworks of an auteurist 007. The title character, played by Monica Vitti—the star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early-sixties masterworks—is an international secret agent who confounds powerful men with her charms and subjugates them with her intelligence. She’s summoned by the British government to deliver to a Middle Eastern sheikh a shipment of diamonds that’s sought by the arch-criminal Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde). Aided by her able sidekick, Willie Garvin (Terence Stamp), a working-class guy turned high-flying playboy, Modesty darts from Amsterdam (the site of some dazzlingly intricate aquatic plots) and London (in full sixties swing) to the posh island lair that Gabriel shares with the stylishly bloodthirsty Clara Fothergill (Rossella Falk). The vertiginous camera moves, the glitzy fashions, and the giddily miniaturized weaponry match the derisive tone of cloak-and-dagger depravity, complete with a shocking execution and two blithe musical numbers. Losey captures with comedy the same chill of modernity beneath the Mediterranean sun that Antonioni captures with melodrama. (Metrograph, March 24)