Movie: The Assassination Bureau

My dumpster diving uncovered an absolute gem of a movie. This is worth a watch!

Yesterday, I was doing my usual Saturday routine and watching mediocre movies. Amazon Prime is loaded with tons of noir, schlock, SciFi B grade movies, and the like. Unfortunately, I seem to have finely tuned their algorithm to my illness — a need to view utter trash (ahem, Invasion of the Bee Girls) — that when something that is not just a notch above, but is truly a good movie surfaces, I am just shocked.

This is my shocked face, circa 2006, in Agrigento, Sicily

Today, that surprise was The Assassination Bureau, a 1969 movie starring Diana Rigg (rowr) and Oliver Reed.

I mean, Diana Rigg!

The setting is the early-ish 1900’s in the run up to the Great War, and it’s rough plot is that Ms. Rigg’s character (Sonia Winters) is freelancing as a reporter at a London based newspaper, where she uncovers a thread of adverts (classifieds) that seem to be tied to the assassinations of key people.

She is given permission to follow the leads by her managing editor, played by Telly Savalas, to engage and to understand this group. A torturous path of clues and odd actions ensue before she stumbles into the group. She hires the group to assassinate the director played by Oliver Reed (Ivan Dragomiloff), who sees it as a great idea. He accepts the commission for twenty thousand pounds sterling and takes it to the full board.

This pits the board against him, and a wild chase across Europe that covers a whore house in Paris, a cafe in Vienna, a bank in Geneva, and the big confrontation in Austria (after a detour through Venice).

Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg after eliminating the Swiss board member

It is a charming movie, and Diana Rigg is magnificent, her foil, Reed, is amazing, and I will say that the movie was thoroughly enjoyable.

Highly recommended.

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