
They’re from opposing sides of the Iron Curtain and forced to work together for the greater good. Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin – The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) Just look at how high Coburn can kick, and try to imagine Roger Moore doing the same thing… 23. Coburn gives Flint an easy charm, and he’s highly effective in his combat scenes.

Coaxed out of retirement because a superior agent isn’t available (“0008”), Flint’s a quintessentially ’60s spy – unflappable, flirty, and handy with a karate chop. It has a crazed criminal organisation, mad scientists with a dangerous device (in this instance, a weather-altering machine) and, of course, a suave secret agent – James Coburn’s Derek Flint. Long before Top Secret!and Austin Powers, there was Our Man Flint, a send-up of the whole swinging ’60s craze for spy movies. The film’s lightweight stuff, but Chan’s gleeful take on the genre is infectious – a scene where he’s frantically trying to get his high-tech trousers on while simultaneously fighting an army of bad guys is a particular highlight. The underlying joke is that charismatic spies like Bond get their miraculous powers of combat and seduction not from years of training and the kind of lingering self-confidence you get from going to expensive schools, but from wearing special tuxedos.
ARE THERE REAL SECRET AGENTS DRIVER
Jackie Chan affectionately sent up the spy genre with The Tuxedo, in which he plays an ordinary taxi driver who’s transformed by a feat of technological magic into a suave secret agent in the James Bond mold. Below you’ll find plenty of famous names from the world of espionage, but we’ve also picked out a few other great secret agents from cinema history who, we think, deserve their own brief moment in the spotlight. Some have trained for the life of a spy, but many of them have the world of espionage and imminent death thrust upon them.

Then again, the following list also proves, secret agents can come in many different forms. In fact, Britain’s national security agency doesn’t even call them agents – they’re covert human intelligence sources, or simply “officers.” Whatever we choose to call them, secret agents lead necessarily furtive and obscure lives – so obscure, in fact, that most of what we know about them is defined by what we’ve seen and read in books and movies.ĭuring the Cold War, the image of the secret agent as a well-groomed sophisticate in a suit proliferated all over the world, and even in the high-tech landscape of the 21st century, that image still stands–just look at such movies as Kingsman: The Secret Serviceand The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
