In short: Puppet on a Chain (1970)

Because a trio of drug dealers are murdered in the USA, some US drug-centric law enforcement agency sends their agent Paul Sherman (Sven-Bertil Taube, who is about as American as I am), and extra secret undercover agent Maggie (Barbara Parkins) to Amsterdam to put a stop to that part of the drug trade once and for all. The Dutch colleagues aren’t terribly impressed by him, or enamoured by the idea, and don’t know about Maggie.

From then on, Sherman tortures and murders his way through Amsterdam, following leads and clues in the least effective yet most violent manner imaginable.

Say what you will against Geoffrey Reeve’s Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain, but it is most certainly a film ahead of its time, prefiguring the asshole on a rampage movie style by someone like Michael Winner for quite a few years. Sherman is a deeply unpleasant hero, a law enforcement agent who seems to go out of his way to break ever law imaginable, all of the time, even in situations where going by the book would make rather a lot more sense. He’s usually more violent than he needs to be and lacks in any actual investigative skills. Much worse for my sometimes rather amoral tastes when it comes to this kind of movie, he’s no fun at all, with no character traits apart from a badly written love affair with Maggie (who is of course killed off to motivate him to further violence), and played by Taube with all the verve and charisma of a concrete pillar.

It would be enough to make a boy rather cranky, if not for a couple of saving graces that eventually do make the adventures of an unpleasant prick doing unpleasant things for little reason at least decently entertaining. For one, there’s a certain degree of weirdness running through much of the plot, with villains who occasionally seem to think they are in a giallo, and so tend to rather creative corpse presentations and plans that make even less sense than Sherman’s investigative techniques. Corpses just look better in traditional Dutch garb.

Secondly, some of the action sequences are pretty decent too. The film’s major claim to fame is a long and pretty great motorboat chase scene; that one’s not directed by Reeve, but by Don Sharp, who also did some other trouble shooting. If I were a cynical man, I’d suggest all the good bits were Sharp’s responsibility.