![]() ![]() The Second Best Secret Agent features a Swedish scientist who is in London trying to set his ‘reverse gravity’ technology when his partner is murdered by the pram-wielding psycho-mother. The lyrics include lines like ‘he’s every bit as good as whathisname’ and ‘not the 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st when the challenge is hurled, but the second best secret agent in the whole wide world’. Levine also recognised that the Bond films were iconic because of their theme songs, so he commissioned Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to write such a tune for Sammy Davis, Jr. Levine re-edited the movie to include the opening scene where a woman with a pram and two babies assassinates someone with a machine gun in the middle of an idyllic park. He is perhaps most famous for being the man who brought Godzilla to the US. Levine specialised in taking foreign features and marketing them to the American film-going audience. While it isn’t the most subtle pastiche of Bond it is light, entertaining and quite imaginative so it is no surprise it was picked up by producer Joseph E Levine for US and worldwide distribution. The movie began life as Licensed to Kill, a low-budget British comedy directed by Lindsay Shonteff and written by Shonteff and former RAF Intelligence officer Howard Griffiths. Like many 1960s spy thrillers The Second Best Secret Agent was on the radar of the CIA. From the Donald Trump school of naming things came The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, a 1965 spoof of the James Bond movies. ![]()
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