Could Get Killed

By | TEDDY JOHN BEARE | The Spy Spoof that left behind the standard spy plot was revealed in 1966: By A Man Could Get Killed! Some films are remembered scene by scene, quoted and revisited for generations. Others survive almost by accident, kept alive not by the picture itself but by something the picture happened to produce along the way. A Man Could Get Killed, a 1966 Universal Pictures release starring James Garner, Melina Mercouri, Sandra Dee, and Tony Franciosa, belongs squarely in the second category. Few casual film fans today could describe its plot, but almost everyone has heard its melody — because buried in the score, under the working title “Beddy Bye,” is the tune that would become “Strangers in the Night,” the song that gave Frank Sinatra one of the biggest hits of his career. The film that introduced it has drifted into relative obscurity, unavailable on VHS or DVD for decades and only recently given a proper home-video release. But taken on its own terms, A Man Could Get Killed is a lively, good-natured artifact of the mid-1960s spy-spoof boom — a Lisbon-set caper that borrows liberally from Charade and the early Bond films, wraps mistaken identity and diamond smuggling around a game cast, and, whatever its flaws, never quite loses its sense of fun. The premise is pure accident-of-timing farce. William Beddoes, an American banker played by James Garner, arrives in Lisbon on ordinary business for his firm. Unbeknownst to him, a British government agent has just been murdered while investigating a ring of stolen diamonds, and Beddoes — through nothing more than bad luck and a passing physical resemblance to what everyone is expecting — is mistaken for the dead man’s replacement. From the moment he steps off the plane, every character he meets assumes he is a secret agent on a dangerous mission, and no amount of protest on his part can convince anyone otherwise. His denials are simply read as cover, which is, of course, exactly what a real spy would say. This is the same engine that powers a whole run of 1960s thrillers-with-a-wink — the ordinary man swept into extraordinary danger because of a case of mistaken identity, a device Alfred Hitchcock had perfected across decades and that Charade, released three years earlier, had reworked into something knowing and self-aware. The man who could get killed rebuffs dangerous situations with ease while having some sun.

Premise is Established

Once the premise is established, the film fills in around Beddoes with a small crowd of overlapping romantic and criminal interests. Melina Mercouri plays Aurora Celeste, the lover of the murdered agent, whose grief is entangled with her own designs on the missing diamonds and, before long, on Beddoes himself. Tony Franciosa is Steve Antonio, a smuggler with his own stake in the missing gems, being pursued in turn by Sandra Dee’s Amy Franklin — a young woman who, we learn, has carried a crush on Antonio since girlhood and refuses to let adulthood or danger get in the way of finally catching him. Robert Coote plays Hatton-Jones, a British embassy functionary who inserts himself into Beddoes’s affairs under the guise of helping him, and who turns out, in the film’s final accounting, to be the dead agent’s actual, legitimate successor — the real spy the whole plot has been dancing around. Roland Culver rounds out the group as Dr. Mathieson, the ostensible mastermind behind the diamond theft, a man who commands fear and suspicion from everyone around him despite not actually knowing where the stolen gems are hidden. it’s a plot built on parallel deceptions: nearly every character is chasing the diamonds, nearly every character is lying to someone else about their real motives, and Beddoes — the one person with no stake in any of it — is the only one telling the truth, which is precisely why nobody believes him. The film eventually herds this entire ensemble aboard Dr. Mathieson’s yacht for its climax, where Beddoes, cornered and out of patience, improvises an escape for the whole assembled cast of smugglers, spies, and hangers-on. The diamonds end up, fittingly, in the hands of the one character who was supposed to have them all along: Hatton-Jones, revealed as the murdered agent’s true replacement. Beddoes, exhausted by weeks of being mistaken for someone he isn’t, simply wants to go home. The film’s last joke belongs to Aurora, who steals his passport at the airport so that he can’t leave — a coda that plays as much like the setup for a sequel as it does a punchline, though no sequel would follow. Garner’s casting matters a great deal to how the film plays. By 1966 he had already built a reputation, especially through his television work on Maverick, for a particular kind of leading man: charming, a little cynical, quick with a rejoinder, and never entirely comfortable playing the conventional hero in earnest.

Relishing the Adventure

That persona translates well to Beddoes, a character whose defining trait is exasperation rather than derring-do. He isn’t thrilled to be mistaken for a spy; he isn’t secretly relishing the adventure the way a Bond-adjacent hero might. He mostly wants everyone to leave him alone so he can finish his business trip, and the comedy of the film largely comes from watching a fundamentally sensible man get dragged, protesting the entire way, through a plot that keeps refusing to make sense of him. Garner would later describe the picture as disappointing, a judgment that likely had as much to do with a famously difficult production as with the finished film itself. That production trouble was real and well documented. The film began shooting under director Cliff Owen, but a falling-out between Owen and the cast led to his replacement partway through by veteran filmmaker Ronald Neame in the summer of 1965 — an unusual mid-shoot change that speaks to real friction on set. Neame later recalled that Garner and Franciosa did not get along, and that a fight scene between their characters escalated into an actual brawl between the two actors. Garner, for his part, later claimed the punch he landed on Franciosa was provoked by Franciosa’s mistreatment of the stunt performers, who he felt weren’t being given the courtesy of pulled punches during their fight choreography. Whatever the precise truth of the story, the anecdote has become one of the more durable pieces of trivia attached to an otherwise little-remembered film — a reminder that behind the breezy tone on screen, the shoot itself was anything but relaxed. Sandra Dee’s experience was similarly unhappy. The film marked her final picture under contract to Universal, and in an interview given not long after production wrapped, she recalled having asked the studio not to make her do it at all, describing months spent in Lisbon, assorted fishing villages, and Rome on a shoot that dragged on far longer than planned, compounded by the mid-production change of directors. She likened the whole experience to reliving her earlier film Come September, suggesting a sense of professional déjà vu she hadn’t been eager to repeat. Like Charade before it, A Man Could Get Killed leans heavily on its European setting for atmosphere, with extensive location photography in Portugal giving the film a sun-washed, cosmopolitan backdrop of harbors, coastal roads, and old-city architecture and its warm charm.

Different Visual Flavoring

The choice of Lisbon rather than the more familiar Paris or Rome of contemporaneous thrillers gives the film a slightly different visual flavor — less overtly glamorous, more maritime and mercantile, fitting for a plot organized around smuggling and shipping. The yacht that serves as the setting for the film’s climax reinforces that same nautical throughline, situating the final confrontation not in a drawing room or a chase through city streets but on the water, among the people actually running the diamonds. No discussion of A Man Could Get Killed can avoid its strangest legacy: the score. German bandleader and composer Bert Kaempfert, working with arranger Herbert Rehbein, wrote the film’s music, and one particular theme — listed on the original soundtrack simply as “Beddy Bye” — recurs throughout the picture as an instrumental motif. That same melody, fitted afterward with English lyrics by Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder, became “Strangers in the Night.” Melina Mercouri was reportedly considered to sing a version within the film itself but felt the melody didn’t suit her voice and suggested it be given to a male vocalist instead. The song that resulted, recorded by Frank Sinatra rather than featured as a vocal number in the movie, became a global number-one hit and has since become a standard of the easy-listening and vocal-pop repertoire, as well as a fixture of Sinatra’s own legacy. At the 1967 Golden Globe Awards, it won for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture, beating out a genuinely stacked field that included the theme from the French romance Un homme et une femme, John Barry’s “Born Free” — that year’s Academy Award winner in the same category — Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” and Tom Springfield’s “Georgy Girl.” It’s a remarkable competitive field to have won, and a strange kind of immortality for a film whose title most people, including many Sinatra fans, would not recognize The rest of Kaempfert’s score drew on Latin and vaguely Mediterranean musical textures to underline the film’s globe-trotting intrigue, an approach that drew a mixed critical response even at the time, with some finding it evocative and others finding it an odd fit for a story set in Portugal populated largely by British and American characters but the location works.

Treating Hero’s Perdicament

A Man Could Get Killed leans even further into farce than Charade does, treating its hero’s predicament less as a source of dread than as a long string of absurd escalations. Beddoes doesn’t so much investigate a mystery as get swept along by one, buffeted from one dangerous encounter to the next by people who refuse to believe he’s exactly what he says he is: a banker, in the wrong place at the wrong time. A rerecorded version of the score was later released as a soundtrack LP through Decca, and it has since been reissued on CD alongside Kaempfert’s own hit version of “Strangers in the Night.” A Man Could Get Killed was never destined to be remembered as a classic in its own right, and its own leading man’s lukewarm assessment of the finished picture has done little to rehabilitate its reputation over the decades. It sat for years without an official home-video release, seen mostly by collectors and completists chasing down Garner’s filmography or curious about the odd bit of trivia behind Sinatra’s biggest hit. But watched today, it holds up as a perfectly enjoyable, if unpolished, entry in the 1960s wave of spy spoofs and continental capers — a film with a strong cast clearly having fun even amid a famously troubled shoot, a scenic and unusual location, and a plot silly enough to keep its mistaken-identity premise spinning for the better part of two hours without wearing out its welcome. It may never escape the shadow of the song it accidentally introduced to the world, but that shadow, at the very least, has kept the film’s name alive — a strange kind of survival for a movie that might otherwise have vanished entirely. There are many of these films which, are underrated and over looked by time and will be found in time by fans. The notion that the spy spoof movies of the 1960’s can not be taken seriously, is not the case with many movies of that era. They have to view with a quest for fun entertainment and not a plot that has to much drama, violence and destruction. The 1960’s movies were fun to watch then and especially, now, in the modern era of digital camera’s and their unrealistic purveyors of entertainment which lacks depht and the sense of realness. To me, and I am sure many others, can see the real quality of the analog movies of the past!

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