The Ambushers (film)
 Theatrical release poster | ||
| Starring | Dean Martin Senta Berger | |
| Directed by | Henry Levin]] | |
| Produced by | Irving Allen | |
| Written by | Donald Hamilton (novel) Herbert Baker]] (screenplay) | |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures | |
| Released | December 22, 1967 | |
| Runtime | 102 minutes | |
| Country | United States | |
| language | English | |
The Ambushers is a 1967 American adventure comedy spy-fi film starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm, along with Senta Berger and Janice Rule. It is the third of four films in the Matt Helm series and is very loosely based upon the 1963 novel of the same name by Donald Hamilton as well as The Menacers (1968) that featured UFOs and a Mexican setting. When a government-built flying saucer is hijacked mid-flight by Jose Ortega, the exiled ruler for an outlaw nation, secret agent Matt Helm and the ship's former pilot Sheila Sommers are sent to recover it.
Plot
Helm is sent to the ICE (Intelligence and Counter Espionage) Training Headquarters to uncover a traitor in the organization. While there he meets ICE agent Sheila Sommers, a test pilot who has been recovered from a Central American jungle with no memory of what happened to the experimental flying saucer she flew. Due to the electro-magnetic power of the saucer, only a woman is able to fly it, as males of the species are killed by the energy.
Helm had worked with Sommers on an assignment where the two had posed as man and wife. When Sommers meets Helm, her memory comes back. Mac, the head of ICE, decides to send Helm and Sommers (posing again as his wife) undercover as a photographer doing a story on the Montezuma Beer Brewery, whose advertising jingle is the same tune as the anthem of Ortega's political movement.
Along the way, they must deal with Ortega's henchmen, Francesca Madeiros (an operative for Big O, Helm's main nemesis), who poses as a model and seduces Helm, an assassin named Nassim, plus a tough thug named Rocco.
Themes
The film was a third of four produced in the late 1960s starring Martin as secret agent Matt Helm. It followed The Silencers and Murderers' Row and like those earlier films followed the approach of being a spoof of the James Bond film series rather than a straight adaptation of Hamilton's novel. It was followed by one more, The Wrecking Crew in 1969.
This entry featured a scene similar to a scene from the first Roger Moore James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) in which one of the hero's love interests, in this case, Sheila played by Janice Rule, is stripped of her clothes by way of a magnetic gadget.
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