cult film freak: STEPHEN BOYD & CAMILLA SPARV IN VAL GUEST'S 'ASSIGNMENT K'

Title: ASSIGNMENT K Year: 1968 Rating: ***1/2

British director Val Guest and Irish actor Stephen Boyd are both underrated and only known by film buffs: Boyd the super-handsome, square-jawed, cleft-chin villain in BEN-HUR while Guest directed the more suspenseful Hammer entries including non-scary crime flicks...

Here both converging into what's basically a James Bond spy movie the same year Sean Connery replacement George Lazenby took to the snowy alps in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE...

Stephen Boyd in ASSIGNMENT K

As most of ASSIGNMENT K occurs in and around the slopes and nightclubs of a Bavarian ski resort, providing Boyd a great-looking and sophisticated role against an adversary that's hardly ever around...

But eventually Leo McKern forces the Playboy-looking super-agent (pretending to be a toy manufacturer) to reveal his fellow agents... a plot-line taking up the last half while the best moments occur between two extremely terrific looking people (while making otherwise intriguing characters by Vivi Bach, Robert Hoffman, John Alderman, Catherine Schell, Jane Merrow and Michael Redgrave not really matter)...

Camilla Sparv and Stephen Boyd in ASSIGNMENT K

Enter insanely gorgeous, sophisticated rich girl Camilla Sparv who, in almost the same role as the following year's equally-icy ski-drama DOWNHILL RACER opposite Robert Redford, is who Boyd both loves and protects...

The latter after her third-act kidnapping forces Boyd into that aforementioned naming-names corner that... while overall looking Swinging-60's colorful and with creative-camera moves by highly affable Val Guest... could have been a lot more effective rooted into a more basic crime-genre-plot (where Guest excels) than all the mazy (and sometimes exhausting) espionage entanglements.