Written by: Pieter Boven on October 18th, 2005
Original Title: Agente 3S3, massacro al sole
Theatrical Release Date: Italy, 1966
Director: Sergio Sollima
Writers: Sergio Sollima, Giovanni Simonelli
Cast: George Ardisson, Frank Wolff, Evi Marandi, Michel Lemoine, Fernando Sancho
DVD released: March 1, 2004
Running time: 92m37s
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Non-Anamorphic Widescreen
Rating: FSK-16
Sound: German Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
DVD Label: Magic Video
Region Coding: Region 0 PAL (Germany)
Retail Price: 5 EUR
Discs: 1xDVD-5
EAN: 4045564122078
The Film :
A revolution on the Caribbean island San Felipe has put General Siqueiros in power. Working at his side is scientist Professor Karlsten, a known Russian collaborator. The Americans erroneously suspect Russia behind this and want to get their hands on Karlsten. Since agent 3S4 has lost contact they send agent 3S3, posing as an arms dealer, to find out what happened and abduct the professor. However, the Russians also want Karlsten back and have secretly replaced the American’s contact person Mendoza by an agent of their own. And the English are involved as well…
Video:
The image has been cropped from its original 2.35:1 techniscope format to somewhere between 1.66:1 and 1.78:1 which is often annoying as people are talking outside the frame. The transfer is not anamorphically enhanced and has a superfluous amount of blemishes, frame damage, jumps, instability and every other error you can think of. The entire film has a yellowish/brownish tint and daytime scenes look overexposed with washed out colours. Luckily nighttime scenes are not too bad so you can still see what’s going on.
Audio:
A German dub in dolby digital 2.0 mono is all we get. The dubbing is pretty good. Hiss and crackling is constantly present but dialogue is easy to understand. There are no subtitles.
Extras:
The animated menu with a scene selection consisting of 8 chapters looks absolutely hideous. The cover is equally hideous and features for some strange reason a picture of Giacomo Rossi-Stuart who has nothing to do with this movie.
Overall:
I was somewhat disappointed. Although in my opinion better than Sollima’s first Agent 3S3 film it doesn’t come close his excellent westerns or crime films like Violent City and Revolver. However it’s not a bad film, doesn’t become boring and there are lots of familiar faces in the cast to spot.
This DVD is really bad but unfortunately no other releases of this movie seem to exist. Still I’ve seen worse. Apart from the quality issues, I’m also not sure this DVD is uncut since the length reported on IMDb is 106 minutes, almost 15 minutes longer. I have seen 3 other DVDs by this label, including the prequel ‘Agent 3S3 kennt kein Erbarmen’, and all are of similar bad quality.