The Assassination Bureau (1969)

Basil Dearden and the other boundless optimists involved in the production of this film apparently did intend The Assassination Bureau to make money. This is maybe not a motive you would naturally assume on seeing it now – it’s a kitschy period-costume action-comedy about a fin de siècle duel between gentlemen-assassins, based on a pulp novel Jack London couldn’t bring himself to finish. But it was the late 60s, so if we're looking for an explanation as to how this got made, possibly "it was the late 60s" will do.

Consider the following for a naturalistic and plausible story. A suffragette in 1914 (Diana Rigg) hires an assassin (Oliver Reed) to voluntarily try and have himself assassinated by his professional killer colleagues. He’s the ring-master behind a wave of political bombings and assassinations or, to use today’s killjoy lingo, he’s a terrorist, but the film strenuously denies we should be worried about any of this, and to be quite honest, it doesn’t feel worth arguing about. And do I know the character’s names? Not really – it’s not the kind of film where they even need to have names.

So she hires him to have himself done in, by his own assassins, but allows him to defend himself against their attempts. He accepts without much hesitation because it’s a good opportunity to kill off the rivals in his organization. Our heroine accompanies her victim-client on his hazardous journey across Europe because she wants to become a reporter and she thinks this is a great first story to cover, as indeed it would be. And there’s some added fluff about how her publisher (Telly Savalas) is really working for a conspiracy and he’s up to a nefarious scheme and so forth. Later in 1969, Savalas would go on to play Blofeld in the most boring Bond movie ever made, marking the second time in a year he would co-star with Diana Rigg. Isn't that interesting? If this was a real thriller, Reed vs Savalas would be a thinly disguised Holmes/Moriarty rip-off, but it’s not a real thriller, so that aspect won’t be troubling us. Gradually Rigg falls for her dashing subject, it’s not believable for a single moment, and again it doesn’t matter.

I feel well disposed toward this idiotic movie because Dearden produces a string of amusing setpieces and silly plot twists all finely directed with lavish set designs, and advances the screwball rom-com, with its Burton-Taylor substitute pairing, in an English mode similar to the Pink Panther films - madcap but laconic about it. This is Rigg's best film, and while there are only molecules of chemistry between her and Reed, the lack only assures us that we're right not to over-invest in the campy jollity. When she hires Reed's services as a hitman and supplies his own name and description as her intended victim, he gives the impeccable reply, "Madam, I am compelled to believe you mean me." Surely this alone is enough to secure the film some hope of a chance with posterity. 

You would, of course, think that six years after JFK, four after Malcolm X and one year after King and Bobby Kennedy, a film called The Assassination Bureau would be somewhat political, but nobody seems to have blinked. I ponder vaguely that, despite itself, it does have some vestigial 60s politics still clinging on. Perhaps it’s intended as a send-up of all the conspiracy theories that surround those deaths, and the choice of suffragette as the voice of the summer-of-love paranoid hippy is satirical. Maybe they imagined an SDS pothead slumped in front of this, missing the point and drawling a sincere “right on.” 

But who could that pothead possibly root for? Who, in fact, is the bad guy supposed to be in this film? The Savalas character wants to bring down the world-order – perfectly attuned to the 60s zeitgeist – whereas the hero is determined to preserve the status quo. He wants to stop the “villain” because Reed’s profession is murder and a war would glut the market. So the film then feels obliged to add the particularly long-toothed cliché where the bad guy wants to start a war so he can make a fortune in armaments. But this doesn’t help us, because now the hero and villain are in a competition for profits, so they don’t actually disagree on values. Their fight reduces to the usual squabble between capitalists.

With a tremor of desperation, the script makes a lot of play about the idea that Reed’s hero has moral standards as to which contracts he takes. But not much is said about his criteria, and the only hints of them sound alarmingly generous in scope. Apparently it’s to his credit that he sets himself up as “critic”, whereas Savalas doesn’t think he has any right to do so – his villainy is that he’s morally humble. Let the market decide, after one small nudge that will globalise their business. This doesn’t give us a contrast between hero and evil capitalist, it gives us one between fascist and post-60s liberal. 

Rigg’s inability to resist her right-wing vigilante-for-money lover becomes, in that light, a probably unintentional comment on the suffragette movement’s notorious propensity to support Hitler, and a prescient glimpse of where the women’s lib movement would end up about fifteen years after this was made – in the arms of hard-right Republicans who offered what would now be called allyship. History, as Marx might have predicted, resolved all this in a grim synthesis – “strong defence” market-loving liberals with scrupulously feminist politics came to reconcile with the notion of murdering people after due consideration of the target’s moral failings, and the Assassination Bureau is now known in polite circles as the Disposition Matrix, where the characters of Rigg, Reed and Savalas are as one, and on the government payroll.