bkoganbing James Coburn found elusive stardom and top billing with Our Man Flint and its sequel film In Like Flint. He becomes the American version of James Bond and has to reluctantly save the world.He only gets his heart into the assignment after someone tries to kill him. Up to that point he's been ducking the assignment until a poison dart is shot at him and strikes Lee J. Cobb, nearly doing Cobb in.Science has run amuck with a group of scientists getting together and creating a climate control device. Their demands on the governments of the world, lay down your arms and submit to our benevolent rule as we know best. They've even created an island paradise and on first glance it looks like a place Coburn could love. The only problem is he likes pleasures unregulated, no one will tell him when and how much.Flint is an American James Bond, unlike Bond who leaves his indulgences when duty calls, Flint has to be coaxed. Lee J. Cobb dislikes the coaxing and Flint's undisciplined ways. Cobb overacts outrageously with tongue firmly in cheek as Derek Flint's harassed superior.Coburn too shows a wry sense of humor in his portrayal. In fact joining in the furniture chewing is Edward Mulhare, the head bad guy who just doesn't like sharing his black book, his "pleasure giving female units" with Flint.Not as stylish as the James Bond series, but still lots of fun.

Robert J. Maxwell A "parody" is a piece of work that sets out to amuse by exaggerating stylistic and other qualities of the original and almost always meant to be amusing. A satire has more edge. That qualifies "Our Man Flint" as a parody of the James Bond series that had begun (to immense success) just a few years earlier. The question is how to parody something that is already a parody of itself? Is it a META-parody?There's no question about the intent, not even in the first five minutes. The pre-credit sequence focuses on a crowded warehouse full of international VIPs trying desperately plying giant computers to figure out how to stop a secret organization from manipulating the weather. Behind the credits there are writhing silhouettes of naked girls. And instead of Bond glimpsed through a gun barrel, there is Flint frozen in an open doorway.I don't think I'll bother with the plot much. The hero, Derek Flint, is an expert at everything from self discipline to self indulgence. He speaks one thousand and forty-four languages fluently. The only reason he doesn't speak still more languages is that there are no more languages. He's a black belt in karate. He rests by stopping his heart for half an hour or so. He has more electronic tricks on his person than your most powerful Krey computer, the one that takes the transcendental constant of π out to a million digits without revealing the climax. One useful piece of information you can draw using π is that the area of a circle is equal to πR². Thus, if you get the diameter of a pizza pie you can find its area easily, and if you divide by the amount you paid, you can get the cost per square inch of the pizza pie.If you think THAT'S silly, you ought to see this movie. It reflect every male fantasy -- of the 1950s. Flint is impossibly rich, and seems to stride around leaving a cloud of pheromones behind him because all of the "girls" in his vicinity have too much make up and throw themselves at his feet. He has to keep saying things like, "Not now, Tondalayo." But these spy movies were very popular at the time of their release, the early 60s, say, and stayed so for the next ten years. They have worn out their welcome. It happens. Some jokes date badly. Our cultural history is littered with obsolete send ups -- "Gulliver's Travels," "A Modest Proposal," "Shamela", "The Master and Margarita." Except for the original "Casino Royale" in 1968. I always get a kick out of that until the last ten minutes.

fjaye969 Although "Our Man Flint" was billed as a spoof,it was too serious for its own good. When I hear "spoof,' I expect to see some really outrageous things -- taking conventions from the genre and then going over-the-top. Maxwell Smart comes to mind.But OMF lacked that sense of playfulness and fun. Sure, it had some silly touches (Z.O.W.I.E., the actor portraying Dr. Wu) but I think the movie would have benefited from developing them further; as it is, they were basically flat one-liners. An 83-function cigar lighter is a nifty concept -- but Flint could have/should have availed himself of many more of those functions. And the "villains" were on the weak side; more flamboyant characters (use the *original* Dr. Loveless as a reference point) could have certainly livened things up."Our Man Flint" is not a horrible movie by any stretch; just missing a certain "zing" factor.

gridoon2018 Of all the cinematic characters that were born in the 1960's (and later) as a result of the huge commercial success of the James Bond movies, Derek Flint is probably the most widely known (along with Matt Helm). However, when you sit down to watch "Our Man Flint", the first of his two vehicles, you'll find out that it's closer in quality to the many Euro-spy flicks of the decade rather than the official Bond entries. Although the movie does boast vivid colors and very impressive, large-scale sets, it seems that most of the budget went into building and then destroying those sets. The locations include New York, Marseilles and Rome, but you would hardly know it since most of the action takes place indoors. And speaking of action, there is little of that in "Our Man Flint". There are several fight scenes (which James Coburn executes very well), and lots of explosions at the end, but the rest of the time the movie plods. As a woman assigned to kill Flint, Gila Golan is dazzlingly gorgeous, but it is rather obvious that she will join his side by the end. And then there are the conflicted "politics" of the movie: Flint's biggest objection to the scheme of the "evil" scientists to control the weather and create a new world seems to be that they want to use women as robot-like "pleasure units"; at the same time, he has his own private harem, made of four beautiful women who are ready to serve his every wish (obviously the movie was well behind its time). At the end - SPOILER - he blows up the island where GALAXY's headquarters are, and rescues ONLY the women that he knows; what happens to all the other women who were being programmed as "pleasure units"? He doesn't seem to care. Flint is just not a very likable character. (**)