Late, late night kino

With the temperatures in town remaining high well into the night, the Daily Wenzel office has been running showings of Dean Martin's satirical espionage series, Matt Helm. While based on the hard-edged novels by Donald Hamilton, Martin & Co. brought a decidely lighter atmosphere, infusing them with the same pop sensibilities as Adam West's Batman. Likewise, just as one can only watch so much Batman, four nights of Matt Helm left a few of us longing for weighty fare.

However, aside from acting as a license to break out the cocktails and 1960s loungewear, Matt Helm also provided a window to some particular behaviours that we would often like to think we have outgrown. For starters Dean Martin and friends were widely known as rampant alocholics, and often played up this angle during performances. Thus, Martin, as Helm, is constantly drinking, frequently while driving. While this is obvious meant as self-parody, given our current attitudes towards drunk driving, we wonder if these scenes would even be allowed. Another rather startling facet of the Matt Helm movies is the blatant objectification of women as sex objects. Again, parody is a function here, as the movies are filmed during the heyday of feminism and are meant to lampoon the womanizing of James Bond, altough Martin's own reputation as a member of the doll-chasing Rat Pack, highlights the aspect of self-parody.

In case our ramblings have you thinking that we were taking things a little too serious, the Matt Helm movies, with Dean Martin as the womanizing fashion photographer turned superspy, was of course the inspiration for Austin Powers, with Mike Myers effectively capturing the tongue-in-cheek whimsy of the original.