Film / The Phynx

Hey, hey we're...headed for The Shelf of Movie Languishment! (l to r: Dennis, Michael, Ray, Lonny)

The Phynx is a 1970 Warner Bros. Comedy/Spy Story/Satire/Musical, directed by Lee H. Katzin, with songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

A number of American pop culture icons have disappeared, kidnapped by a tyrannical Albanian colonel (Michael Ansara) and held captive in a castle. Agent Corrigan (Lou Antonio) of the United States SSA (Super Secret Agency) fails in several attempts to infiltrate the castle. His superior Bogey (Mike Kellin) consults an advanced government computer, which recommends that the agency form a massively successful rock band who can undertake a secret mission to the castle, and recommends four typical young American men for the job: A. Michael Miller, Dennis Larden, Ray Chippeway and Lonny Stevens. After getting kidnapped and shipped to a secret base, the quartet undergoes extensive training on both military tactics and musicianship (with Dennis on guitar and keyboard, Michael on guitar, Ray on bass and Lonny as drummer), and becomes the most popular band in the world, but they still need to accomplish the dangerous mission they were selected for.

With a screenplay by longtime Warner (Bros.) Records executive Stan Cornyn, this was an attempt to create a new prefab rock band in the manner of The Monkees. But it ended up getting shelved after disastrous previews, only resurfacing when it was given a DVD release in 2012. Some viewers consider it a Cult Classic of the So Bad, It's Good variety.

The Phynx contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc: It sure feels like the sequence where the band breaks out of the camp was supposed to lead to solo segments featuring all four members, but only Dennis (who heads back to college only to be rejected by his old friends as "Hello" plays) actually gets one.
• Actor Allusion: The celebrity cameos at the end have several.
  • For old time's sake, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan say "Me Tarzan" and "Me Jane".
  • Pat O'Brien speculates that, had he played George Gipp and Ronald Reagan played Knute Rockne, he'd be governor of California.
  • On a meta level, there's Richard Pryor interacting with the band's Token Black drummer, since Pryor had himself been the Token drummer in Wild in the Streets.
• Animated Credits Opening: After a Medium-Shift Gag where the movie switches to animation following Corrigan's final attempt to break into the castle, the opening credits continue in that style.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The map to the castle is tattooed on the bellies of Foxy's three daughters, who have these hair colorings.
• Cameo Cluster: A massive number of well-known people, both from The Golden Age of Hollywood and The '60s, make brief appearances here, which can be divided into three categories.
  • Familiar faces in small character parts (Joan Blondell, Patsy Kelly, Martha Raye, George Tobias, Fritz Feld, and Andy Warhol star Ultra Violet).
  • Notables appearing As Himself (Dick Clark, James Brown, Richard Pryor, Ed Sullivan, Clint Walker, Harland Sanders).
  • And the huge number of icons being held captive in Albania (Wikipedia has the full list).
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Corrigan assumes he'll get lucky at the orgy, but all the young hot women ignore him, and he only draws the attention of an elderly USO worker who happens to be there (played by Patsy Kelly).
• Expy:
  • With The Monkees as the role model, it seems like they were going for Dennis=Micky (the main singer and the extroverted one), Michael=Davy (the Chick Magnet), Lonny=Mike (the Deadpan Snarker) and Ray=Peter (the Butt-Monkey). It's even been noted that The Phynx followed The Monkees in pairing two musicians (Larden, Stevens) and two actors (Chippeway, Miller).
  • Corrigan is basically a variation on Maxwell Smart, as a dorky, barely-competent government agent.
  • As his name indicates, Bogey sounds and acts like Humphrey Bogart.
• Fun with Acronyms: The SSA's supercomputer is called MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps America), and is built in the shape of a curvy woman (with a punch card printer in the "crotch" area).
• Genre Roulette: Although Leiber and Stoller wrote all the songs, there's quite a bit of variety in them. Most of them fall into a Bubblegum Rock or Sunshine Pop vein, but there's also light Psychedelic Rock ("They Say That You're Mad"), Harry Nilsson-style pop ("Hello") and Soul ("The Boys in the Band").
• Government Agency of Fiction: The Super Secret Agency (the SSA). It's revealed that the Black Panthers, the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy Scouts and even prostitutes are all secretly working for them.
• Groupie Brigade: Couldn't be a rock band from The '60s without one. As part of their mission, they sell out a concert in London for just red-haired young women, and attract thousands of blondes in Copenhagen for the opportunity to sleep with them.
• Looped Lyrics: The climactic song, "(How 'Bout a Little Hand for) The Boys in the Band", is largely just the song's title repeated over and over, punctuated with "just a little bit louder" at various points.
• The Mockbuster: Of The Monkees. Lou Antonio (Corrigan) had been a guest star on the actual series (in the "Hillbilly Honeymoon" episode).
• Myspeld Rökband: Instead of "The Finks".
• Nerd Glasses: The major visual trademark for Dennis.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Eccentric Insufferable Genius Record Producer Philbaby (played by Larry Hankin) is obviously a jab at Phil Spector (with ultrahip The Mamas & the Papas producer Lou Adler possibly as a secondary target).
• Non-Human Head: Number One, the head of the SSA, wears a huge box with a face painted on it over his head.
• One-Book Author: This film was the only known acting credit for both A. Michael Miller and Ray Chippeway.
• A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: In what the band assumes is a routine visit to SSA headquarters, they're rewarded with a staged orgy, as dozens of women eagerly throw themselves at the guys (though Dennis somehow wakes up with a statue in his arms).
• Pop-Star Composer: While they weren't exactly pop stars, Leiber and Stoller were big enough names as songwriters that their "words and music by" billing in the opening credits comes immediately after the film's title. Sadly, this was their only full-length film score.
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: The movie discreetly sidesteps "drugs", but definitely not "sex", with the orgy sequence and the later scene with the band literally having sex with thousands of young Danish women as they search for one who has a part of a crucial map tattooed on her stomach.
• Shout-Out: A bracelet with the word ROSEBUD on it figures into the story.
• Spell My Name with a "The": Is the band called The Phynx or just Phynx? They're referred to both ways in the film. For what it's worth, the card printed by MOTHA in response to the question of what the ideal name for a rock band would be just has "PHYNX" on it.
• Step Up to the Microphone: The song "Hello" is sung entirely by Dennis, and he's the only band member featured in the sequence as well.
• Stylistic Suck: Leiber and Stoller aren't the first names you would think of to pen a set of Beatle-esque rock songs, and several of the songs seem like they're intended to be banal and derivative. "What is Your Sign?" is even presented this way In-Universe.
• Token Minority: Ray (Native American) and Lonny (African-American).
• Unbuilt Trope:
  • Elements of this movie are surprisingly similarly similar to Top Secret! and the Austin Powers movies, but it predates them by more than a decade (obviously, they're all spy movie spoofs, but it's interesting that The Phynx anticipated some specific elements used by the later films).
  • The song "They Say That You're Mad" could be taken for a knockoff of Jethro Tull's "Bungle in the Jungle", except it predates it by several years.
• Vocal Tag Team: All four band members get lead vocals on at least one song (though Dennis gets the most), and trade off vocals at several points.
• X-Ray Vision: The Rome sequence has the band wear special X-ray glasses that visually strip the people they see down to their underwear. Hilarity Ensues (as does Fanservice).