Booze, Bullets & Broads

Behind the Scenes With Dean Martin's Matt Helm Films of the 1960s

De: Bruce Scivally

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

“See Dean Martin Save the World!” – trailer for “Murderer’s Row’

Matt Helm, the literary creation of author Donald Hamilton, was America’s answer to 007 – a two-fisted, hardboiled assassin whose exploits sold millions of paperbacks.

Dean Martin was an Italian crooner who rose to fame as the straight man of the comedy duo Martin & Lewis before embarking on a solo singing and acting career that made him one of the most popular performers of the 1960s, appearing in movies and TV and selling millions of records.

Martin’s easygoing, boozy. lounge lizard persona was far from Hamilton’s tough-guy concept of Matt Helm, so how did Jerry Lewis’s former comedy partner end up as an on-screen rival to Sean Connery’s 007?

And speaking of partners, how did Irving Allen – who had been a former associate of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, producer of the astonishingly successful 007 films – come to produce not just one but four profitable films based on the Matt Helm novels?

And how did Matt Helm influence the 007 movies? And the Austin Powers films? And become part of the backdrop of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood?

For the answers to those questions and more, pour yourself a drink and pick up your copy of Booze, Bullets, and Broads today!