Word: mastermind
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...case history dominated the scene. Sooner or later there had to be a flashback to some childhood trauma, and its explanation (unloving mother, weak father, hateful sibling, stolen Teddy bear) became as de rigueur as the revelation scene at the end of a detective novel in which the mastermind explains who done...
...AVENGERS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). When eminent public servants begin performing acts of treason, sophisticated Spies John Steed and Emma Peel are sent in to tie a knot in the mastermind-bending plot...
Spies who become famous usually find it fatal. Richard Sorge, the shadowy Soviet mastermind of one of the most daring and successful espionage rings in history, was no exception. Although Russia made him a Hero of the Soviet Union, named a Moscow street and a tanker in his honor, and only last year issued a commemorative stamp (4 kopeks) bearing his likeness, Sorge was not around to take bows. The Japanese hanged him in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison...
Naked Naiads. The biggest, noisiest and naughtiest contender in the new spystakes is The Silencers, with Crooner Dean Martin playing Matt Helm, a secret agent for ICE (Intelligence Counter Espionage). Its plot pits Helm against the mastermind of one of those atomic conspiracies, headquartered in what appears to be a sunken carrier under the desert near Alamogordo. But the real contest is between nudity and gadgetry. The striptease fun, with Cyd Charisse as team captain, begins during the opening credits, then gets right down to business in Martin's circular bed, which turns, travels, tilts, finally plunges him naked...
Well, nobody goes to these things looking for slices of life. Still Thunderball is unusually ridiculous, even for its genre. One might have suspended disbelief, perhaps, if its characters seemed to feel as well as act. But the sinister mastermind Largo (Adolfo Celi), his lovely but treacherous "niece" (Claudine Auger), and the slowwited CIA man Leiter (a very inadequate Rick Van Nutter) are never developed beyond the comic-book level, and Bond himself (Sean Connery again) is slick and lifeless, as always...