TOP SECRET

Gordon Scott

TOP SECRET (aka Segretissimo/1967). Director: Fernando Cerchio. 

Baron Von Klausen (Antonio Gradoli) has escaped from the communists and brought with him some top secret documents. But there is a question if this man is the real Von Klausen. Agent John Sutton (Gordon Scott) is assigned to find out what he can and comes afoul of thugs and lethal ladies in Casablanca, Rome and Naples. Sandra Dubois (Magda Konopka) is a beautiful Russian spy and Zaira (Aurora de Alba) is working with "Von Klausen" and his associates. It is a question who will snatch the documents away from Von Klausen's group: Sutton or the beautiful and highly competent Sandra. 

Magda Konopka

Top Secret is an above average eurospy film, certainly better than Scott's other 1967 spy outing Danger!! Death Ray. It has moments of intentional humor, a fast pace and light tone, and the players, including Scott, are all adept and enthusiastic. Polish actress (and baroness) Magda Konopka is so beautiful and sexy as the Russian spy that it's amazing that she never wound up in a James Bond movie (although she reportedly had an affair with Sean Connery, which makes her absence from the 007 films even stranger). The same year Top Secret came out Konopka married a billionaire but the marriage only lasted three months. She later wound up in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Top Secret

Scott and Konopka share an intimate moment

 has many entertaining sequences, although a bit with a conveyor belt death trap is too brief. Sutton also winds up being pulled up in the air by a copter as he swings helplessly in the cage below (but not enough is done with this sequence). The best bit has Sutton and Sandra locked in an automobile that's been deposited on the tracks as a train rapidly approaches, but our hero manages to free the two of them in the nick of time. At one point an angry Sutton actually hits Sandra, but she gets the better of him with her own martial arts moves. In a later scene Sutton is kidnapped by a pack of "nuns," one of which is a man in drag. Oddly, Scott's name does not appear in the opening credits. The "dabba dabba" theme song is horrible.

Verdict: Sexy leads, nasty nuns -- what more could you ask for? **3/4.