1969 Directed by Basil Dearden
In 1908 London, a women's rights campaigner discovers the Assassination Bureau Limited, an organization that kills for justice. When its motives are called into question, she commissions the assassination of its chairman. Knowing that his colleagues have recently become more motivated by greed than morality, he turns the situation into a challenge for his board members: kill him or be killed.
Oliver Reed Diana Rigg Telly Savalas Curd Jürgens Philippe Noiret Warren Mitchell Beryl Reid Clive Revill Kenneth Griffith Vernon Dobtcheff Annabella Incontrera Jess Conrad George Coulouris Ralph Michael Katherine Kath Eugene Deckers Olaf Pooley George Murcell Michael Wolf Gordon Sterne Peter Bowles William Kendall Jeremy Lloyd Roger Delgado Maurice Browning Clive Cazes Milton Reid Frank Thornton Nita Lorraine Show All…
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When Dame Diana Rigg passed away, so went a piece of my childhood. One of my gateways into loving international film and television was by watching episodes of British crime shows on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery! program, hosted by Diana Rigg throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Her hair and outfits always looked so sophisticated and her voice made every introduction to a detective story redolent of cerebral intrigue. To pay tribute to this great lady, I chose a film I hadn't seen before, The Assassination Bureau, and it ended up being a totally terrific pick.
Rigg plays Sonya Winter, an enterprising young woman who is determined to make her mark as a pioneering female journalist in London just prior to…
- I’m surprised you’re shocked at the thought of war.
- Not at all. It’s purely a matter of business. How can we charge our sort of prices with everybody happily killing each other for a shilling a day ?
Any movie starring two of my very favourite screen actors, Diana Rigg and Oliver Reed, might just as well be the most god-awful dud out there - I probably couldn’t help but love it anyway. Fortunately this sly, groovy farce is anything but a dud, but is actually a whole lot of fun in an unmistakably late 60s anything-goes kind of way.
It’s a wacky, nostalgic retro-pastiche of the kind that was briefly popular during the 60s, with titles like…
Movies about hitmen don't get much frothier than The Assassination Bureau. My wife walked in at one point and thought I was watching Mary Poppins. The word "confection" springs to mind.
It's all very farcical and light. Nothing could take itself less seriously, which is interesting as this is a British film which must have broken the bank to make. The locations span the continent and are shot sumptuously. All this for a (let's face it) pretty pointless plot about Diana Rigg looking lovely while she tries to get Oliver Reed killed by his own assassination outfit. Obviously finding the whole idea of someone taking out a contract on his life with his own agency quite delightful, he readily agrees…
Mörder GmbH
Europa um 1900
Journalistin Sonya Winter kommt durch Kontaktanzeigen, auf die Spur einer Organisation die Auftagsmorde anbietet. Als sie mit dessen Chef Ivan Dragomiloff in verbindung tretet, erteilt Sonya den Auftrag in umzubringen. Dieser ist von der Idee Begeistert.
Britische Krimikomödie aus dem Jahre 1969, mit den typischen Schwarzen Humor des Landes. Die Regie übernahm Basil Dearden. Zum Cast gehören u.a.: Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas und Curt Jürgens.
So eine Art von Film ist genau mein fall, da er einen gewissen Charme hat. Lockere Sprüche zwischen den sympathischen Charakteren, wechseln sich mit einem Erzähltempo ab das einen dran bleiben lässt. Zeitgemäße Action und Zerstörung gibt es auch noch.
Natürlich sieht man dem Film auch sein alter…
A big lot of colorful characters, plot & play. Not unlike a Guy Ritchie romp mixed with some Moore Bond so basically Man From UNCLE but also weirdly some Dr. Phibes? (but 2 years before Phibes.) So yeah, it's a very oddball movie wrapped in a fairly ordinary description. Oliver Reed is as great as always and Diana Rigg is just marvelous and having a total blast being wonderfully snooty.
Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas star in a comedy about assassins. Oliver Reed gets to play a James Bond like character. Diana Rigg gets to play an Avenger like character....And Telly Savalas gets to play a villain. It looks like the main trio of performers are having fun in the movie....which makes watching it fun as well. A silly but fun movie. Rigg and Savalas went from this movie to the James Bond movie...On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
What starts off as a charmingly cartoonish romp gets quite repetitive. The winky performances make it impossible to get invested in the story, which would be fine if the humor were more consistent. As a comedy this worth a few chuckles, as an adventure film it flounders in its inability to take itself seriously and as a love story it is utterly uninteresting.
What charisma the film does have is owed nearly entirely to the cast.
Another celluloid slice of swinging 60s Victoriana (well Edwardian really) The Assassination Bureau is on the whole more enjoyable, satisfying and intelligent than The Best House In London and is a blackly comic tale about the business of murder based on an unfinished novel by Jack London.
The titular bureau is an international cartel that has its headquarters in England during the early 1900s and the reign of Edward VII. It murders for profit, but only victims that have been judged to be morally bankrupt and deserving of death. Its chairman and the son of the bureau's deceased Russian founding father is the English public school educated Ivan Dragomiloff played by Oliver Reed, who looks like he's having a ball…
Ivan Dragomiroff (Oliver Reed) is the Chairman of the Board of The Assassination Bureau Limited, an organisation which kills for money, though only with good moral reason. This moral guidance has begun to fall by the wayside much to Dragomiroff's disgust. Into the mix comes wannabe journalist and women's rights campaigner, the feisty Sonia Winter (Diana Rigg) to who’s attention the bureau has come to. Newspaper owner Lord Bostwick (Tele Savales), hires her and bankrolls her investigation, however he has his own agenda. Winter meets with Dragomiroff and proposes that the bureau assassinate Dragomiroff himself! Dragomiroff accepts and puts it to the board that they either kill him or Dragomiroff will kill them! Around Europe Dragomiroff tracks down the bureau…
Goes from a black comedy to a somewhat epic action adventure. Love the cast, the locations, the style, costumes, and set-design. It's a bit long and some of the special effects aren’t up to the high ambitions of the filmmakers but that hardly makes the film any less enjoyable. A delightful little gem of a movie.
A freewheeling action comedy that is surprisingly light despite the ridiculously high body count, The Assassination Bureau concerns a shadowy international organization that carries out high-profile murders for hire; they've existed for decades and pride themselves for their discretion and ruthless efficiency. But the Bureau are not simply amoral killers, at least in theory -- their bylaws dictate that they only take contracts on those they've vetted as evil and are therefore deserving of elimination.
Aspiring reporter and suffragette Sonia Winter (Diana Rigg) discovers the existence of the Bureau, concocting a plan to take them down and publish the story as a career-making exposé. With aid from her benefactor Lord Bostwick, she secures a meeting with the Bureau's young chairman,…
Can't you talk anything but shop? I've almost been killed here!
I don't know about you, but I definitely didn't have "Wacky Sixties Comedy About Political Murders" on my 2023 movie bingo card, but here we are, and I have to wonder who the bloody hell greenlighted this only a year after the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King?
Despite my misgivings and an utterly predictable plot, this light and frothy farce nevertheless managed to deliver some laughs, mostly thanks to Dame Diana Riggs' turn as an uptight suffragette newspaper columnist who takes out a contract on the head of the titular bureau, played by Oliver Reed, and then helps him escape numerous plots against his life by…
