DOCTOR JUSTICE (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I stumbled across DOCTOR JUSTICE while looking for a Eurospy title. But though the evildoers in the film are comparable to high-level conspirators, the hero, whose name is literally "Justice," is not an operative. The doctor (John Philip Law) is an athletic, karate-chopping WHO physician who accidentally witnesses a murder of a gangster by the criminal's superior. This draws the good doctor into a wild, larger-than-life adventure against a criminal plotter named Max (Gert Frobe) -- unless Max is really a lookalike named Orwall (also Frobe), who seems to be an eminent scientist testifying at a WHO conference. To compensate slightly for Max and his gang, Justice gains a resourceful romantic interest in Karine (Nathalie Delon) who joins him in his forays throughout most of the narrative.

To get the phenomenality out of the way, the story begins with a formidable "bizarre crime," in which an oil tanker arrives at its port and finds that all its stores of oil have vanished, replaced by seawater. The explanation for this clever crime isn't unveiled until the last half-hour, and it involves some diabolical drugs, but the mastermind behind the crime has a even deeper and more ambitious scheme, to which the oil-theft is a means to an end.

The director/co-writer is Christian-Jaque, known for other flamboyant entertainments of the period, my favorite being the raucous comedy LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING. The movie seems to have had a better budget than the majority of Eurospy films, given a fair number of splashy, swashbuckling scenes. John Philip Law had done other action-roles, but I think this is the only one where he had to emulate martial arts, and he does well there. His general upbeat attitude, so different from the various gloomy Bond imitations, has been compared to Doc Savage, albeit one with a French "je ne sais quoi." Delon has to support Law in many scenes, in contrast to the usual subordinate role of the lead female actor, and Frobe seems to have fun with his two disparate parts. Paul Naschy and Eduardo Fajardo appear in small roles, but I didn't spot them. It's not a great film but is worth a look.

As it happens, DOCTOR JUSTICE began as a French comic book, and an early bit of dialogue acknowledges this when the doctor jokes to Karine that he's "a comic book hero."