Our Fantasy Flint

Derek Flint performs hypnosis with the soothing lights on his self-designed watch

By Dan Hagen

The envelope, please. And the award for Most Brilliant Satire on 20^th Century Male Adolescent Fantasy goes to Mr. Derek Flint.

James Coburn’s two Flint films were inspired by the 1960s James Bond spy craze, but Flint pegged the meter on outrageousness. He was not even, strictly speaking, a secret agent, since Flint was too libertarian-cool to take orders from anyone. He was willing to work with the secret agency ZOWIE (the Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage, of course) on an ad hoc basis if a friend or the world was in serious trouble.

If they begged him. Maybe.

Flint’s really origins predated Ian Fleming’s 1950s fictional hero 007, stretching back to Street and Smith’s 1930s pulp superhero Doc Savage. Like Clark Savage Jr. and the later Buckaroo Banzai, Flint was an imperturbable physician, martial artist, inventor, pilot, linguist, author and so forth.

“Flint, How do you find time to read all these books?” asks the ever-exasperated head of ZOWIE, Lloyd C. Cramden (Lee J. Cobb).

“No, no, no, sir, I wrote those,” Flint explains politely.

Flint takes a refreshing nap by stopping his heart

Fencing? Check. Instructor to the Bolshoi Ballet? Check. Fluent in dolphin? Check. Flint can revive a man whose heart has stopped by sticking his finger in a light socket and stop his own heart, harmlessly, through meditation. Even a superman needs his rest.

But unlike the emotionally repressed Doc Savage — who was raised as an isolated scientific experiment in superhumanity by a father whose parenting skills we’d have to question today — Derek Flint took Hugh Hefner’s Playboy philosophy to its logical conclusion. He had a harem.

On a visit to ask Flint’s help, Cramden notices that the women are newer and fewer.

“Didn't there used to be four?” he asks Flint.

“Well, there were five at one time, sir, but that got to be a little too much,” Flint replies. “See, I'm trying to cut down.”

Much of the success of these classy comedy-action films can be attributed to two talented and assured performers. Cobb is a perpetually irritated everyman who can barely stand to ask Flint for help even when the planet is threatened with destruction. He wins our sympathy. Being around someone who is superior to you in every way you can imagine, and probably in many you cannot, is bound to get under your skin a little, however heroic the fellow might be.

But Flint, who ought to be insufferable, is not, thanks to the deft matter-of-factness with which the old hand Coburn handles the ridiculous character. His superhuman superiority is polite and off-handed. Flint is the very model of Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man, really too advanced a being to even take notice of the seething envy of others.

It’s refreshing that in both films, the villains’ schemes for global domination are not greedy, but are actually well intentioned. In 1965’s Our Man Flint, a trio of scientists wields weather control to force the nations of the world to accept a sane, scientific one-world government. But dictatorship, however benevolent, is not the ungovernable Mr. Flint’s dish of tea.

In the superior sequel, 1967’s In Like Flint, a trio of female CEOs uses hair dryers to brainwash women into independence as part of their scheme.

Think of that plotline in terms of a 12-year-old boy’s dream world and you can immediately see it as a nightmare explanation for the stirrings of feminism. 
It, like Flint, is perfect.

Flint spots a phony in ZOWIE headquarters