Trailer
Plot summary
BIG O, a secret organization that wants world domination, is killing agents of ICE with the aid of a mole. Matt Helm fakes his own death in his bathtub so that he can look into the campaign unseen. His boss Mac briefs him on Dr. Solaris, the inventor of a heliobeam, which concentrates sunlight into a weapon able to destroy a continent; Solaris has disappeared. Helm is to find him, and if he cannot, to kill him, and to take his own life rather than be brainwashed if he is taken. Under the name Jim Peters he flies to Nice, drives along the coast, and meets Suzie at a discotheque, where the police arrest him for a murder he did not commit.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Murderers' Row (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Bond films copied the Matt Helm spoofs: Diamonds Are Forever's orbiting heliobeam threat, Ironhead's electromagnetic demise repeated on the villain Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me, and a hovercraft-style gondola chase in Moonraker, with Hugo Drax joking like Julian Wall.- Murderers' Row was meant to be shot entirely on location, but co-producer and star Dean Martin refused to travel to Europe. Second-unit crews instead filmed sequences in Villefranche-sur-Mer, Monte Carlo and the Isle of Wight for the hovercraft and helicopter scenes.
- A fifth Matt Helm film, The Ravagers, with Sharon Tate reprising her Wrecking Crew character and Dean Martin in a dual role, was announced but never made; when Martin refused to make it, Columbia reportedly withheld his share of the profits on Murderers' Row.
- Karl Malden, who played the villain Dr. Julian Wall, came up with the idea that his character would speak in a different accent every time he spoke, which he thought would be amusing.
- Schifrin's score includes jazz pieces, one given a cover version by Bud Shank, and a song with lyrics by Howard Greenfield, "I'm Not the Marrying Kind", for Dean Martin that contractual rights kept off the soundtrack album but which appeared on Martin's LP Happiness is Dean Martin.
