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And a B movie, never mind the big budget and the famous names, is exactly what Memorandum is. The plot is generally aimless, the lines are merely cute. Incredible that it was written by one of Britain's most brilliant playwrights, Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, The Homecoming). Did he do it to make money? No doubt, but he also did it to make propaganda. Editing the facts of life in modern Germany to fit an evident prejudice, Pinter blandly but incessantly insinuates that all Germans are still Nazis at heart and can hardly wait to go to heil again.
Murderers' Row exchanges Berlin-trigue for erospionage. The film describes the latest adventure of Matt Helm (Dean Martin), a U.S. super-snooper who doesn't seem to know the difference between spying and peeping. Matt lives high in a penthouse equipped with a swimming pool built for two, a pushbutton bed that rises to any occasion, and a harem of twelve haymates (among them a cutie named Lovey Kravezit).
Matt, of course, considers the world well lost for lust, but when duty calls he says CIAo to all that and flips off to forestall a mad master criminal (Karl Maiden) who is threatening to destroy the U.S. capital with a death ray and then take over the world. At first, Matt seems to have met his match. The vil lain has at him with a flamethrowing cigarette lighter, a high-explosive lavaliere, and a jolly pink giant of a bodyguard (Tom Reese) with a shiny steel plate in the top of his skull that looks like a chromium yarmulke. But Matt strikes back with a delayed-action automatic, a bugged harmonica and a rocket-launching cigarette.
All this flim-Fleming produces some funny lines. "Come along, Julian," the master criminal's mistress murmurs comfortingly when she finds the vile fellow sulking over an unsuccessful assassination. "Maybe we can find somebody to run over on the way home." The wackiest crack, however, is delivered by the beastly bodyguard. When somebody protests that it isn't nice to "kill a perfect stranger," the brute tolerantly replies: "Nobody's poifick."