Movies: The 007 Girls

Here come the Jane Bonds. Any student of movie mentality could have predicted the reasoning. There was James, devastatingly male, totally urbane, and knocking enemies and audiences dead. So why not his girl counterpart, devastatingly female, totally urbane, etc.

There are three conspicuous ones, and an uncounted number of minor imitations. Most unlikely is Italy’s Monica Vitti, an intellectual type seen as a brooding nymph in The Red Desert. In a new British production, Vitti is Modesty Blaise of London comic-strip fame. Modesty has retired at 26 from the international smuggling racket to become a sort of freelance girl Friday for the British Secret Service. Armed with blouse-button bombs, cigarette lighters that turn out to be miniature flame throwers, and lipstick that untelescopes into a deadly arrow, Modesty outbombs and outshoots everybody, including that archcriminal Dirk Bogarde.

Twin Pistols. After being She in MGM’s 106-minute movie that seems like 2,000 years, Dr. No’s bikini girl, Ursula Andress, is back in happy Bond-land. But now she has qualified for her own license to kill in a wacky movie called The Tenth Victim. It opens in a weird, cubistic New York nightclub, where Ursula is bumping, grinding and stripping down to her glittering silver and green bikini. A Chinese brandishing a .45 automatic rushes at her, but Ursula is the fastest bra in town. Bang-bang, she has fired her twin pistols, whose small round muzzles protrude from her brassiere like iron nipples. As the Chinese slumps, Ursula coolly bends her head to blow the smoke away. Then off she goes in hot pursuit across New York, around Rome’s Colosseum and Ostia beach to get her tenth victim, none other than Marcello Mastroianni.

A third European Jane is Italy’s Rossana Podesta, who appears in The Seven Golden Men as a member of an international gang of bank robbers. In a Goldfingerish effort to rob the vaults of Geneva’s Union de Banques Suisses, she is a glowing decoy, dressed in a luminescent lace leotard and equipped with a lipstick microphone, a powder-case television eye, and a sapphire clip that turns out to be a two-way radio.

Mixed-Up Hormones. Hollywood’s Jane Bond entry is Israeli Actress Gila Golan in Our Man Flint. She is the chief operative of a sinister, SMERSH-type organization named Galaxy, which is bent on ruling the world. Gila is not hipped on personal combat, prefers to smear up the opposition with time bombs hidden in cold-cream jars. The most nonviolent Jane is Diane Cilento, the real-life Mrs. James Bond—or Mrs. Sean Connery to the literal-minded. In Once

Upon a Tractor, a TV special promoting the U.N., she jumps on the Bond-wagon with a chase across several mythical countries, disguising herself as a soldier with brown wig and handlebar mustache, leaping off a pier into the Tiber River—all to elude villains long enough to plead a cause before the U.N. The real James Bond would have had no use for any one of them. He liked his girls dependent. As he observed in Goldfinger, women of the Jane Bond type are simply “unhappy sexual misfits—barren and full of frustrations, girls whose hormones have got mixed up.”