The Karate Killers

The Karate Killers (1967)

A new U.N.C.L.E. thriller !

International spies Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin travel around the globe in an effort to track down a secret formula that was divided into four parts and left by a dying scientist with his four of five daughters, all of whom live in different countries. His widow, Amanda, is murdered at the beginning by the counter-spies of the organization THRUSH. Evil THRUSH agent Randolph also wants the formula, and is aided by his karate-chopping henchmen.

Date of release
1967-04-07
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (20)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Thriller
Director
Barry Shear
Collection
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

The Karate Killers is a 1967 American spy film and feature-length film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s third season two-part episode "The Five Daughters Affair". The episodes were originally broadcast in the United States on March 31, 1967, and April 7, 1967, on NBC. It, as does the television series, stars Robert Vaughn and David McCallum. It is the sixth such feature film that used as its basis a reedited version of one or more episodes from the series. Joan Crawford, Telly Savalas, Herbert Lom, Diane McBain, Jill Ireland and Kim Darby are among those in the cast. The film was directed by Barry Shear and written by Norman Hudis with the story by Boris Ingster.

Production

The first four The Man from U.N.C.L.E. feature films made significant changes and additions to the episodes from which they were drawn. This movie, like the one immediately before it, The Spy in the Green Hat, makes relatively minimal changes to the episodes. No major scenes were added or removed, but various trims were made to fit the episodes into the running time of the film and musical cues and accompanying music were sometimes changed.

Also changed were some short scenes that became more violent or sexy than generally shown on American network television at the time. For example, both the dead bodies of Amanda True (Joan Crawford) and Randolph (Herbert Lom) are shown with eyes closed in the TV episode; in the movie, their eyes are open and Randolph's death is more brutal.

Other changes were made for apparently no reason other than artistic. For example: there is a scene that is essentially identical in both the episode and the movie, but while in the episode, Reikko (Irene Tsu) calls Sandy True (Kim Darby) “kid”, in the movie, she calls her “teeny-bopper”.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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