Last week’s $64 million opening weekend for Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning showed that audiences will still turn out for spy movies. The genre probably hit its zenith back in the late 1960s and early ’70s. James Bond, as played by Sean Connery, ruled the box office, but there was also room for Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, James Coburn’s Derek Flint, and Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer. Everyone from Fred Flintstone and Doris Day to Sean’s brother Neil Connery and the comedy team of Allen and Rossi were donning trenchcoats and playing secret agents.
Small wonder, then, that in 1970 Warner Bros. thought it could tap into both the spy flick market and youth market with The Phynx (yes, it’s pronounced “Finks”). This psychedelic-flavored comedy followed a government-manufactured rock band sent behind the Iron Curtain to rescue a “Who Was Who?” of kidnapped U.S. pop culture figures.
The Albanian president (George Tobias) and his scheming general (Michael Ansara), you see, are holding the celebrities (more on them below) captive. This leads America’s most clandestine bureau, the Super Secret Agency, to ask its strangely voluptuous super-computer M.O.T.H.A.–Mechanical Oracle To Help Americans–for advice. M.O.T.H.A.’s solution: create a Monkees-like combo, train them in hipness and counter-intelligence, and have them play a concert in Albania as a decoy while they free the prisoners.
The multi-cultural quartet (Ray Chippeway, Dennis Larden, A. Michael Miller, Lonny Stevens) chosen to form The Phynx are sent to boot camp. There they receive basic training from Clint Walker, martial arts lessons by Harold “Oddjob” Sakata, and lessons in being cool from Richard Pryor, they get a “seal of approval” from Dick Clark. Their debut record, “What Is Your Sign?,” becomes a global hit and lands them an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (yes, Ed’s in this film, too).
After they’re presented with a gold record by James Brown (his finest cameo since Catalina Caper), The Phynx are dispatched to Europe to take part in a series of orgies (!) to find three women whose bodies have been tattooed with parts of a map revealing where the Albanians’ headquarters are located. Look quickly among the assortment of nubile young Phynx groupies taking part in the rather tame goings-on and you’ll spot a pre-All in the Family Sally Struthers, making her screen debut as “World’s No. 1 Fan.”
Once inside Albania, the band puts on a concert for the president, his American-born wife (Joan Blondell), and a room full of their treasured “guests.” The roster reads like a circa 1954 Hollywood Wax Museum program: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Xavier Cugat, Bowery Boys Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, Ruby Keeler, Dorothy Lamour, the Lone Ranger (John Hart) and Tonto (Jay Silverheels), Joe Louis, Col. Harland Sanders, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan…not exactly the sort of names that would have enticed teenage moviegoers in 1970. Truly, there are more living fossils on display in The Phynx than the last three Jurassic World films combined.
I don’t want to give too much away about the ingenious plan the fellas use to smuggle everyone out of the country. Suffice it to say that part of it involves cartloads of radishes, while another part involving playing guitars to bring down the fortress walls seems to have been borrowed from Chapter 6 of the Old Testament book of Joshua.
The Phynx exists in that netherworld of “Groovy Movies” (to borrow from the title of my friend Irv Slifkin’s book) greenlit by studio executives who had no clue what the counterculture of the 1960s was all about…like Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, for example. The depiction of the title band as a “Pre-Fab Four” like the Monkees (who were burnishing their credibility with their own cameo-packed project, Head) makes it hard to root for them as heroes. At least the songs that they’re given to perform, courtesy of legendary tunesmiths Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (who get top billing in the opening credits), aren’t that bad, if perhaps a little dated.
If those of you who were around 55 years ago don’t recall going to your local Bijou to groove to The Phynx, there’s a very good reason. After receiving an extremely limited theatrical debut, Warners pulled the plug on the picture domestically. For decades it served as a sort of Holy Grail for bad movie connoisseurs, before the company finally released it as part of their Archive Collection.
If you’re curious about makes this oddball slice of psychedelic cinema so “phascinating,” might I suggest getting a copy and having a Phynk-In viewing party? You know, where shots are downed whenever someone recognizes one of the blink-and-you-miss-them guest stars (“Hey, look! Isn’t that one of The Andrews Sisters?”)? In the meantime, if you want to see how to properly introduce a ’70s rock band in a movie, check out The Carrie Nations in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. And if you want to see how to depict a ’70s rock band that’s a cover for globe-hopping undercover agents, try the Hanna-Barbera animated series Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids.