Before her time bomb blow a personal airliner to pieces, Elke Sommer bails out over the ocean. This struck me as a very tasteful and artistic scene because before she bails out, Sommer sheds her long slacks and deplanes wearing only tight white plastic bottoms.

She’s picked up by her co-conspirator, Sylva Koscina, and together they swim to a beach and puncture a man with a spear gun. This was also handled very elegantly. Both of the young ladies are wearing only the most perfunctory of swim clothes. Sommer, in particular, is bulging out of her top. I didn’t care a hoot about the murdered guy, whom we don’t know anyway, but I kept wondering about who exactly fitted those exact swimsuits to those exact figures, and how did they do it? A chef d’oeuvre by some artist in the wardrobe department.

Before these magnificent events unfold, we have to sit through the credits while somebody warbles the theme song — “Deadlier Than The Mail” — before the musical score switches to speedy thriller noise with a lot of bongo drums.

Hugh Drummond, Richard Johnson, is some kind of insurance investigator, not that it matters. He’s James Bond in all but name. Well, not quite so fussy about his dress and his wine, but he speaks Japanese and is a martial arts expert like all high-echelon insurance men. He’s going to get to the bottom of this business, which involves a merger of two giant oil companies. Those who object to the merger, one by one, are picked off by the two girls in colorful ways — spear guns, rolling off a fifteen-story balcony, and the like. These vixens are viciously matter of fact about their misdeeds but this is no place to talk about my five ex wives.

I always enjoy Richard Johnson. Never a bravura performer, he was always reliably proper in his deportment. He doesn’t crack jokes with the facility of James Bond. He was the anthropologist in “The Haunting”, studying ghosts. I like him for that too, because that’s my profession and I even studied ghosts in a culture where ghosts are not just superstitions but something to contend with. The chief villain — or, in this case, we might call him the head honcho, surrounded as he is by porcelain-doll Japanese women — is Nigel Green. He’s a fine actor, unforgettable really. That suave tonality, that politely superior demeanor.

There isn’t that much action in this flick, despite the atmosphere of mock menace and several acts of violence. Johnson doesn’t dance off the walls, held up by wires. There are no highly ritualized sword fights, as in “Kill Bill.” Nobody’s head gets wrenched off, as in so many action movies.

So, it’s a shameless ripoff of James Bond, but it’s pleasant enough. If you can stand another James Bond movie, you can sit through this simulacrum.