| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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IN LIKE FLINT
Rating: 
USA. 1967.
Director – Gordon Douglas, Screenplay – Hal Fimberg, Producer – Saul David, Photography – William Daniels, Music – Jerry Goldsmith, Photographic Effects – L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank & Emil Kosa Jr, Art Direction – Dale Hennesy & Jack Martin Smith. Production Company – Saul David Productions.
Cast:
James Coburn (Derek Flint), Lee J. Cobb (Lloyd C. Cramden), Jean Hale (Lisa), Andrew Duggan (President Trent), Steve Ihnat (Colonel Carter), Thomas Hasson (Lieutenant Avery), Yvonne Craig (Natasha)
Plot: ZOWIE head Lloyd Cramden is knocked out with paralyzing gas during a golf game with The President. A surgically altered actor is then substituted for The President. Cramden engages agent Derek Flint to find out what happened. Traveling to Moscow and the Virgin Islands, Flint discovers a consortium of fashion queens are planning to take over the world. They have already brainwashed most of the women in the world onto their side using microchips planted inside hairdryers. Now they have smuggled two female Russian cosmonauts aboard a US Space Platform and are planning to fire nuclear weapons from it unless men surrender to them.
This is a sequel to the Our Man Flint (1965) which was one of the better parodies of the James Bond films. While Our Man Flint played with its tongue planted considerably in its cheek, In Like Flint gives the appearance of playing it relatively more straight-face. While it has some tongue-in-cheek moments and a way out plot, it seems more interested in being a straight thriller. The plot spends a lot of time building up to the main action – it never settles down and the dual running plot with Cramden finding someone in the department spying on him takes it all over the place. And what humour there is never really succeeds in standing out as pieces in the original did. Although the one moment that everyone remembers in retrospect is the scene where Coburn shakes his head in disbelief, “An actor playing the President.” All that one ends up with is a film that plays itself as a rather silly big-budget action-adventure cartoon. The plot is also a derivative rehash of the first film – with a group of idealists on an island paradise trying to conquer the world whose Utopian visions get waylaid by the more ruthless among them and with Flint’s women once again about to be brainwashed.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1995
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