Richard Harrison is not a name most moviegoers in the U.S. are probably familiar with but film buffs around the world know him as one of the American actors who relocated to Italy in the early sixties and enjoyed a long and prolific career there in B-movie fare and low-budget genre films. In a career of more than 100 feature films, there may not be a bona fide classic among them but there are several cult gems and entertaining oddities to enjoy and one of my favorites is La Donna, il Sesso e il Superuomo (English title: Fantabulous Inc., 1968), directed by Sergio Spina. Although it is usually classified as a Eurospy flick released in the wake of the James Bond craze, it is actually a fantasy/adventure/satire that sends up the whole concept of the superhero in comic books and films. It also works as a subversive cautionary tale about the dangers of fascism delivered in the form of a comic cartoon.

William Klein’s Mr. Freedom from the same year was a much more sharp and pointed French satire on the same subject which played the art house circuit but Fantabulous Inc. was targeted at mainstream audiences as pure escapist entertainment and it delivers for the adolescent nerd lurking inside every adult male viewer.

For one thing, it is a peerless time capsule of 1960s flamboyance, mixing the tacky with the outre, from the fashions to the set design to the groovy beat soundtrack (by Alessandro Brugnolini) to the nudge nudge, wink wink sexual humor, which seems custom made for Playboy Magazine fans. Equally surprising is the integration of comic-book panels, cut-out animation and black and white WW2 newsreel footage into the narrative as a way to depict specific plot details (which would have been too costly for scenes requiring special effects). And some of the action scenes are flat-out bizarre such as a sequence where Richard uses a bunch of humanoid shaped helium balloons to float out of a window and up to a flat roof for an attempted getaway.

The nuttiness begins with a sensual credit sequence of bedroom foreplay rendered in close-ups (a finger drawing circles around a bellybutton, for instance) and we introduced to Richard Werner (Richard Harrison), a banker, and his girlfriend Deborah (Judi West), a professional model, as they get out of bed and prepare for the day ahead.

Things begin to go awry as Richard discovers his car won’t start. He goes to get gas but is given water instead by the suspicious gas station attendant. When he discovers the hoax, he calls the police via a call box but is rudely rebuffed. Then his car is stolen and when he flags down a cop car, they insist on taking Richard to the station instead of pursuing the car thief. But these are fake cops and they end up escorting Richard to the headquarters of a mysterious corporation called Fantabulous Inc.

At this point Richard is drugged and taken to a laboratory for numerous tests and an experimental program where he will be transformed into an invincible superman whose brain (via an implanted transmitter) will be controlled by a super computer. What Richard doesn’t realize is that he is the 17^th human guinea pig for this procedure – hence his code name F-17 (the previous experiments were all failures).

Deborah is later called to the morgue by an official police inspector to identity the body of Richard who died mysteriously. She confronts an exact duplicate of his body but when Deborah touches his chest she realizes his skin is not the same and refuses to confirm his identity. Then she hurries off to film a promotional ad for the Fantabulous company, not realizing they are behind Richard’s abduction.

The rest of the movie depicts Richard’s efforts to escape his fate while Karl Maria von Beethoven (Adolfo Celi), the insidious CEO of Fantabulous, plots to transform Richard into an indestructible superweapon he can auction off to the highest bidder (Russia? America? Europe?) while still controlling his actions. Utilizing his company’s promotional team, Beethoven presents Richard, now renamed Karl Meyer, as “Zorro, Batman, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse and all the gunfighters from the Wild West…a being more powerful than the powerful. A being who can fight every type of evil – the real superman.” And Richard does indeed become indestructible as we see him survive various endurance tests of severe cold and heat (from flamethrowers) and weaponry (he is immune to bullets and bombs). Plus he can fly and supposedly has the sexual prowess of a thousand men.

By the time Beethoven is finished with his new creation, Karl Meyer is little more than a mind controlled zombie. Dressed in a gold cape (it looks green in poor quality prints) and eye mask, he flies across the sky on a mission to steal a load of atomic plasma from a top secret facility as proof of his blind allegiance to Beethoven. Will he ever regain his senses and become Richard again?

What is especially peculiar about Fantabulous Inc. is that the film’s hero spends most of the movie as a human experiment and only emerges in the final moments of the movie to save the day. Richard sees Judi in a Fantabulous TV ad and her memory short-circuits his mind-control transmitter, freeing him from further orders from Beethoven and Professor Krohne aka Bucci (Gustavo D’Arpe), the mad scientist behind the project.

The real star of the film and prime scene stealer is Adolfo Celi (James Bond’s arch rival Largo in Thunderball, 1965), whose self-confident, debonair megalomaniac is a master class in villainy. D’Arpe is also amusing as the crackpot Bucci, whose hands have been replaced by metal pinchers (no explanation offered).

The only reason Fantabulous Inc. got lumped in with other Eurospy movies is because of Leonard MacFitzroy aka Uncle Mack (Nino Fuscagni), a supporting character who is a double agent for the U.S. and Russia. We are never really sure if Leonard is good or evil but he clearly knows how to infiltrate any side in his exploitation of Cold War paranoia.

As for the two lead players, Judi West as Deborah is an amiable and feisty heroine, appearing in an array of unflattering wigs and anatomy-focused outfits that highlight her best physical attributes (American moviegoers will recognize West as Jack Lemmon’s wife in the 1966 Billy Wilder comedy, The Fortune Cookie).

Richard Harrison checks all the right boxes as the handsome, virile hero who is also quite adept at performing his own stunts or delivering wisecracks. Although Harrison has a limited range as an actor and is often a bit stolid in his performances, he is relaxed, freewheeling and playful as Richard and seems to be enjoying himself immensely.

The actor has certainly had a fascinating career arc. A Salt Lake City native, Harrison entered the film industry in 1957 taking bit parts and uncredited roles before relocating to Rome in 1961 after appearing in a supporting role in AIP’s sci-fi adventure Master of the World (1961). His first Italian film was the lead in a peplum epic, Il Gladiatore Invincibile, 1961 aka The Invincible Gladiator, which led to other entries in the sword and sandal category such as Gladiators 7 (1962) and Messalina vs. the Sons of Hercules (1964). Unlike other American actors who appeared in peplum features like Steve Reeves, Gordon Scott and Gordon Mitchell, Harrison was not a bodybuilder despite his muscular physique and looks like a traditional leading man in contrast to his overdeveloped peers.

In an interview with the website Nanarland, Harrison admitted, “I was never considered a muscle man in Hollywood. I had a picture deal with AIP, but I chose to go to Europe instead when I was offered the contract. I had a great desire to go to Europe, especially Italy. I knew I didn’t have the tools to be a great actor, nor the desire, but I felt I had what was needed to have a career. Certainly there were more films being made in Italy than Hollywood at that time.”

His instincts were right because Harrison was one of the first American actors to appear in a spaghetti western – Gunfight in the Red Sands (1963) and appeared in many others like Dig Your Grave Friend…Sabata’s Coming (1971) and Deadly Trackers (1972). Harrison has also stated in interviews that he was approached by Sergio Leone to do A Fistful of Dollars (1964) but turned it down at the time. “After I affirmed I would not do the film,” Harrison stated in the Nanarland interview, “they read me three names of actors from Hollywood that had been sent to them. Since they did not know who they were they asked me to recommend one of them. I knew of all three. My choice was Clint [Eastwood], only because he knew how to ride a horse. So many American actors were not able to ride well. That is the real story.” So thanks to Harrison, Eastwood became a major superstar. If Harrison had taken the role in A Fistful of Dollars, it is hard to imagine that he would have enjoyed the same level of fame but we’ll never know.

Harrison continued to genre hop throughout his film career, dappling in the Eurospy thriller craze starting with Secret Agent Fireball (1965) and moving on to several Italian WW2 actioners like Churchill’s Leopards (1970) and Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977). He popped up in the poliziotteschi genre (Italian crime thrillers/cop dramas) in movies like Napoli…I 5 della squadra speciale (1978) and later appeared in a string of marital arts actioners starting with Challenge of the Tiger (1980) with Bruce Lee imitator Bruce Le. He even had prominent roles in two historic epics made in China by the Shaw Brothers – Marco Polo (1975) and Ba Guo Lian Jun (English title: Boxer Rebellion, 1976).

Since he worked primarily in B movies, Harrison made a lot of forgettable programmers and disposable junk but there are several career highlights to single out for cult film enthusiasts. Michele Lupo’s Master Stroke aka (1967) aka The Great Diamond Robbery is an immensely entertaining and cleverly plotted heist caper. Vengeance (1968), directed by Antonio Margheriti, is considered an iconic spaghetti western by aficionados. Beast with a Gun (1977) aka Mad Dog Killer from director Sergio Grieco is a sleazy, sadistic crime thriller which is admired by Quentin Tarantino (he featured a clip of it in his 1997 film Jackie Brown) and pits Harrison against a crazed prison escapee known as Ferocious (Helmut Berger, who allegedly was high on drugs during much of the production). Cheh Chang’s ambitious period action-adventure Boxer Rebellion features Harrison in a rare villainous role and one of his better performances. And Fantabulous Inc., of course, is a great introduction to Harrison, where he is amusing, sexy and athletic.

It is only in the second half of Fantabulous Inc. where director Sergio Spina begins to accent the film’s cynical anti-fascist messaging. In one of the bizarre comic-strip montage sequences, we see a failed commercial for Fantabulous’s superman, which is selling him as a law-and-order enforcer to a public fed up with crime. Seen today, Celli’s Beethoven is not unlike other dictators and well known political figures who have used the media and promotional devices to distort the truth, spread disinformation and brainwash the uneducated. It is always the first step toward toppling a democracy.

According to The Eurospy Guide by Matt Blake and David Deal, Fantabulous Inc. is “an archetypal sixties film, chucking in all kinds of ideas, styles and obsessions to come out with something gloriously messy and endlessly watchable. There’s a crazy-baby mix of psychedelic comedy, cool cinematographic tricks and just plain weirdness, as well as your habitual fashion models, beat music, sci-fi style costumes and pointless grooving. What’s not to like?” Well, some may find it relentlessly idiotic but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right?

Sergio Spina made his feature film debut with Fantabulous Inc. and followed it with a comedy set in ancient Rome (L’asino d’oro: Processo per Fatti Strani contro Lucius Apuleius Cittadino Romano, 1970). However, he mostly focused on TV work the rest of his career while his sparse feature output was focused on documentary filmmaking with a political slant as represented by such portraits as Farewell to Enrico Berlinguer (1984) and Another World is Possible (2001), which followed the protest movement against the G8 summit in Genoa the same year (Spina was one of several co-directors on this).

To my knowledge, Fantabulous Inc. never received an official theatrical release in the U.S. and has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray from an authorized distributor here. It has popped up in various gray market DVD-R dubs of mediocre to poor quality over the years. One of the few acceptable transfers was an English subtitled DVD-R from ETC (European Trash Cinema), a one person enterprise which sadly went out of business after the owner, Craig Ledbetter, passed away in 2022.

Other links of interest:

https://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Richard_Harrison

http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/richardharrison.html

https://www.nanarland.com/interviews/entretiens/en/richard-harrison.html

https://www.searchmytrash.com/articles/richardharrison(5-06).shtml

https://oneworldmusics.blogspot.com/2012/11/la-donna-il-sesso-il-superuomo-1967.html