The Silencers

For MacDonald, it takes nine seconds for the jacket buttons to explode.

For Helm, it takes only three seconds.

The female agent from "O" who leaves a trail of clothes for Matt Helm to find apparently came with two sets of shoes; one that Helm finds among the other articles of clothing she has shed, and the other that she is wearing when the camera pans up on her in the bathroom.

One of the guards is shot, and we see the exit wound on his back.

But when he turns toward the camera, before falling, he shows that there is no corresponding entrance wound.

Helm's car is smashed repeatedly by two other cars and emerges completely unscathed.

The line to the squibs under Kovack's shirt, running down her leg, can clearly be seen for a fraction of a second at the instant she is shot.

In the missle control room scenes near the end, Tung-Tze's submachine gun has no magazine in it when he enters the room but a magazine is present in a later shot.

A camera is visible through the rear window of Matt Helm's station wagon during the car chase scene.

Lovey is seen to be wearing a bra after she has supposedly climbed naked from the bath, been dried and then had a bathrobe placed on her.

During the car chase, Gail Hendricks can be seen sitting much closer to Matt Helm in the shots inside the car compared to the shots from outside (behind) the car.

Also the front seat is significantly different when seen from outside the car.

It is a bench seat with headrests.

After James Bond began piling up revenue with a string of box office winners, there were numerous imitators, lots of spies popping up on the big screen. Martin's Matt Helm was among the worst of the Hollywood rip offs.

Just in case this fact was not made clear in the other reviews. Back in the spy era (James Bond, Our Man Flint, Secret Agent, Man from UNCLE, I SPY, Callan etc etc) there was a very popular series of thrillers penned by a respected suspense writer, Donald Hamilton.

This comedy spy caper is so tongue in cheek that if you played a drinking game with this, you'd run out of vermouth. At the height of his rat pack popularity, Dean Martin scored a series of films spoofing the popular spy genre, and as an American version of James Bond, Martin is totally a hoot.

Though it lacks style or wit, The Silencers is the best of the 4 Dean Martin Matt Helm films. Like another Bond parody, 1967's Casino Royale, The Silencers features gorgeous women, endless innuendo and an irrelevant plot.

I've been trying to reconcile myself as to how I came to watch this particular movie. I do recall seeing it, or one of its sequels, on TV perhaps when I was 10 or 11 and I suppose responding to its spy-world escapism in the wake of the Bond movies or shows like "The Man From U.

THE SILENCERS is the first of the four Matt Helm novel adaptations starring Dean Martin as a suave secret agent in the Bond mould. I'm not really a fan of spy spoofs as I see the Bond films as virtual comedies to begin with, and these tend to go way over the top in terms of campiness and silly behaviour.

Good fun. A James Bond spoof, made 30 years before Austin Powers!

Matt Helm is called into action to stop nasty Victor Buono firing a nuclear missile.First of the 4 Matt Helm James Bond spoofs with Martin doing what you'd expect, a huge number of silly gadgets and Stella Stevens the best thing in this.

An American nuclear scientist has decided to defect to the criminal organization known as the "Big O". His intent is to give the "Big O" a tape which will detail plans concerning an upcoming American nuclear test which the "Big O" will exploit to create a massive radioactive disaster within the United States.