Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966)

For my money, Alberto De Martino made the best non-Bond Italian Bond film with OK Connery. He also covered so many genres in his career: giallo (The Man with Icy EyesCarnal CircuitThe Killer Is On the PhoneStrange Shadows in an Empty Room), gothic horror (The Blancheville Monster), peblum (The Triumphs of Hercules), Spaghetti Westerns (100.000 dollari per RingoDjango Shoots First), the occult (Holocaust 2000The Antichrist) and even superheroes (The Pumaman).

Alberto is joined by co-director Sergio Grieco, who would go on to make plenty more Eurospy films like Argoman the Fantastic SupermanThe Tiffany Memorandum and The Fuller Report.

This is third and final episode of the CIA Secret Agent 077 series. Dick Malloy is played again by Ken Clark, who totally lived the Rick Dalton life.

Perhaps sensing that these films needed more than just a male hero, this film is named for Lady Arabella Chaplin, a professional killer and fashionista played by Daniela Bianchi, who just three years earlier played Russian Bond girl Tatiana Romanova in From Russia WIth Love. She also appears in De Martino’s OK Connery.

She’s the best thing in this movie, which begins with her dressed as a nun, walking into a church to machinegun some spies pretending to be monks before stripping her habit down to a swimsuit. All movies should start this great. Beyond wearing a ton of amazing outfits in this — she’s a fashion designer hitwoman, after all — she also dresses as an old woman with a wheelchair filled with guns.

Helga Line is also in this, which you can say about just around every other Eurospy movie of this era. This is not a bad thing. So does Ida Galli, who was in plenty of other movies under plenty of other names like Arianna, Evelyn Stewart and Isli Oberon. She’s in Fuci’s The PsychicThe Sweet Body of DeborahFootprints On the MoonThe Bloodstained ButterflyThe Case of the Scorpion’s TailThe Whip and the Body and so many more.

Villain Kobre Zoltan — who seeks to steal nuclear missiles from a submarine on the ocean’s floor — is played by Jacques Bergerac, who was the fourth husband of Ginger Rogers.

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