The Ambushers (film)

The Ambushers
Theatrical release poster by Robert McGinnis
Directed by	Henry Levin
Produced by	Irving Allen
Written by	Donald Hamilton (novel) Herbert Baker (screenplay)
Starring	Dean Martin Senta Berger
Music by	Herbert Baker Hugo Montenegro
Cinematography	Edward Colman, ASC Burnett Guffey, ASC
Edited by	Harold F. Kress
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date	December 22, 1967
Running time	102 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$10,000,000

The Ambushers is a 1967 spy comedy film filmed in Acapulco starring Dean Martin, Senta Berger and Janice Rule. It is loosely based upon the novel of the same name by Donald Hamilton as well as The Menacers that featured UFOs and a Mexican setting. When a government-built flying saucer is hijacked mid-flight by Jose Ortega, the exiled ruler for an outlaw nation, secret agent Matt Helm and the ship's former pilot Sheila Sommers are sent to recover it.

Helm is sent to the ICE (Intelligence and Counter Espionage) Training Headquarters to uncover a traitor in the organisation. Whilst there he meets ICE agent Sheila Sommers, the pilot of the saucer who has been recovered from a Central American jungle with no memory of what happened to the saucer she flew. Due to the electo-magnetic power of the saucer, only a woman is able to fly it, males of the species are killed by the energy.

Helm had worked with Sommers on an assignment where the two had posed as man and wife. When Sommers meets Helm, her memory comes back. Mac, the head of ICE, decides to send Helm and Sommers posing again as his wife undercover as a photographer doing a story on the Montezuma Beer Brewery, whose advertising jingle is the same tune as the anthem of Ortega's political movement.

Along the way, they must deal with Ortega's henchmen, Francesca Madeiros (an operative for Big O, Helm's main nemesis), who poses as a model and seduces Helm, an assassin named Nassim, plus a tough thug named Rocco.

The film was the third of four produced in the late 1960s starring Martin as secret agent Matt Helm. It followed The Silencers and Murderers' Row and like those earlier films followed the approach of being a spoof of the James Bond film series rather than a straight adaptation of Hamilton's novel. It was followed by one more, The Wrecking Crew in 1969.