Angels in Los Angeles (1975)

D. Ted Grimley
Colour

The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.

But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.

As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.

And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.

The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.