The Matt Helm character has been written to play to Dean Martin’s lounge crooner persona. However, the lazy way that Martin plays the role – leering with double-entendre, perpetually boozing, filled with smug self-certainty and indifferent to anything that seems to happen – is insufferably obnoxious. Just the way that Martin drives a hovercraft through the streets waving to people or the look of winking-to-the-audience mock surprise when he freezes a guard with the drinks-chilling gun that shows he doesn’t believe the silliness of the gadget either, indicates that he regards the plot and surroundings as beneath him and himself to be the principal source of attraction in the film.

Murderers Row amplifies the worst aspects of the James Bond films – the machismo male fantasy about irresistibility to women who are shown constantly fawning over, preening in front of and ready to throw themselves at Dean Martin at the drop of a hat. Equally bad are the glories of being a lush that the film celebrates – any secret agent with an alcohol problem like the one Dean Martin has in the film should be drummed out of the service. And if one thought the depths the puns and double-entendres the later Bond films descended to were atrocious, Murderers Row contains some that go mining beneath that barrel bottom – Dean Martin to one of his calendar girls: “You’re the Spirit of ‘76”, “No, I’m only a 44.”

Karl Malden is badly unconvincing as the super-villain of the piece. One could probably not find a less convincing actor to cast as a comic-bookish super-villain than the pugnacious Malden who delivers everything with a rough-hewn working class accent. Ann-Margret, in one of her earliest roles, at least dances with a great deal of energy.