The second feature film derived from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) is mostly made up of material from The Double Affair, a first season episode that was filmed in colour (the others, apart from the pilot episode Solo, later reworked into The Spy with My Face‘s double bill partner To Trap a Spy (1964), were filmed in black and white) as it was planned all along to release it to cinemas in some form. Writers Clyde Ware and Joseph Calvelli wrote enough material for an 88-minute feature which director John Newland dutifully filmed, with one eye on reducing it to the series norm of around 50 minutes. It’s a more overtly fantastical film than To Trap a Spy with a suitably loopy plot involving surgically created doppelgangers and a plot to steal a super weapon designed to protect the Earth from potential alien invasions.

T.H.R.U.S.H. have got wind of The August Affair, a yearly U.N.C.L.E. operation to deliver the new pass codes for a top-secret project in Switzerland, though they only know the name of the mission and nothing of its contents. While Mr Waverly (Leo G. Carroll) assigns U.N.C.L.E. agents Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaugan), Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum), Arsene Coria (Fabrizio Mioni) and Namana (Bill Gunn) to the mission, with another agent, Kitt Kittridge (Donald Harron), sent to shadow them in case of problems, T.H.R.U.S.H. send glamorous agent Serena (Senta Berger) to distract Solo. The man from U.N.C.L.E. is abducted and replaced by a lookalike created by T.H.R.U.S.H. doctors, though his cover is almost blown by Kittridge who he has to murder in an on-flight airliner. He’s also almost rumbled by Solo’s luckless girlfriend Sandy Wister (Sharon Farrell), an air stewardess who happens to be working on the same plane and is growing increasingly annoyed by Solo’s cavalier attitude to their relationship. Arriving in Switzerland, the team find that their destination is Project Earth Save, a weapon developed in case of alien attack. Solo is being held nearby but can he escape in time to prevent T.H.R.U.S.H. from getting their hands on the device?

One of the curious things about To Trap a Spy is that the villains – named WASP there – seem to know all about U.N.C.L.E.’s top secret base behind the innocuous frontage of the Del Floria tailor’s shop and T.H.R.U.S.H. exploit this lack of security by even getting photographs inside the complex. But this was par for the course for the “spy-fi” shows, riddled as they were with bits and pieces that didn’t really make a lot of sense and just expected you to go along with the crazy plots and sheer eccentricity of it all.

And there are certainly plenty of wonderfully odd bits of business to enjoy here. Kuryakin is menaced by a pair of killer toy robots, a scene played with the same po-faced seriousness as everything else in the film that just makes its absurdity even funnier; there’s that top-secret energy source meant to power Project Earth Save that’s so powerful that if you look at it without the correct safety goggled, you go into a trance and throw yourself into the machine leading to instant disintegration, a fact that the fake Solo uses to his advantage; and there’s a very unlikely bit of business in which THRUSH arranges for the real Solo to get a massage while in captivity, leading to THRUSH agent Darius Two (Michael Evans) dismissing a peeping tom guard with the immortal “Go about your duties you miserable pervert!”) Scenes like this sit easily alongside some of the footage not seen in the television episode, including Solo seducing Sandy with a very phallic inflatable clown doll or sharing a shower with Serena).

By this stage, Robert Vaughn has already established Solo as an effortless cool secret agent, much more debonair than the more down-to-earth Impossible Missions Force agents of Mission: Impossible (1966-1973), though not a patch on either Bond or Steed from The Avengers (1961-1969) of course. He’s been somewhat “de-Bonded” already, less in thrall to Sean Connery’s super spy and heading closer to becoming his own man and Vaughn is particularly good here. It was still too early for McCallum to get too much to do but he’s more prominent here than in To Trap a Spy which is always a welcome development. Berger really should have been a Bond girl and it remains a mystery why she was overlooked and plays that part perfectly here and Farrell is a lot of fun as the comic relief love interest, constantly being let down and disappointed by Solo.

It’s all good fun, thrillingly directed with lots of action and odd diversions though, for all its science fiction trappings, it feels a tad less exciting than the more mundane To Trap a Spy. Not that it’s a bad film – very far from it – just somehow not quite as brisk and to-the-point. It was certainly a hit with the punters – in the UK, where it was released to cinemas before the US, it was sold as a “Mr Solo” film as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had barely started on British television when it opened in London. Two months later, the film finally departed cinemas and the show was as big a hit on this side of the Atlantic as it was on home soil, leading to a whole string of further theatrical releases mostly edited from two-parters. While they may not have been able to afford the globe-trotting to exotic climes like the Bond films (Switzerland here is “played” by the Griffith Park Observatory in California) but what they lacked in resources they made up for in energy, colour and wildly inventive plots.