The Assassination Bureau

In London, during the early 1900s, aspiring journalist and women's rights campaigner Sonia Winter (Diana Rigg) uncovers an organisation that specialises in killing for money, the Assassination Bureau Limited. To bring about its destruction, she commissions the assassination of the bureau's own chairman, Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed).

Far from being outraged or angry, Dragomiloff is amused and delighted and decides to put it to his own advantage. The guiding principle of his bureau, founded by his father, has always been that there was a moral reason why their victims should be killed – these have included despots and tyrants. More recently though, his elder colleagues have tended to kill more for financial gain than for moral reasons. Dragomiloff, therefore, decides to accept the commission of his own death and challenge the other board members: Kill him or he will kill them!

With Miss Winter in tow, Dragomiloff sets off on a tour of Edwardian Europe, challenging and systematically purging the bureau's senior members. Little do they realise that this is a plot by Miss Winter's sponsor, newspaper publisher Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas), to take over the bureau (Bostwick is the bureau's vice-chairman and is bitter for having been passed over in favour of the founder's son). Bostwick and the other surviving members of the Bureau plan to get rich quick by the "biggest killing" of them all — buying stocks in arms companies and then propelling Europe into a world war by assassinating all the European heads of state while they attend a secret peace conference where the kings, emperors and prime ministers of Europe are trying to avoid a possible war over the assassination of a Balkan prince (killed by a bomb intended for Dragomiloff).

Dragomiloff and Miss Winter uncover the plot which is to drop a bomb from a hijacked Zeppelin airship onto the castle in Ruthenia where the peace conference is held. Dragomiloff steals aboard the airship and destroys it, killing the remaining members of his board of directors. He is then decorated by the heads of state he has saved. It is implied that Dragomiloff may wed Miss Winter as well.

The film was based on the Jack London novel, The Assassination Bureau. London purchased a storyline from Sinclair Lewis in 1910 and used it as the basis of two stories and a novel. He was two-thirds of the way through finishing the novel (having written 40,000 words) when he died in 1916. The novel was later completed by Robert L. Fish and published in 1963.[2] The New York Times called it "delightfully ridiculous".[3]

Film rights were bought and in May 1966. United Artists announced that Burt Lancaster would star in a film.[4] Lancaster, however, pulled out and film rights reverted to Paramount, where it was made by the team of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph; it was their 25th film together.[5]

Filming took place in April 1968.[6]

Michael Flint of Paramount later said the film wound up costing a lot of money "because it was decided that it must be a locomotive", namely, a sort of film which "would really carry weight with exhibitors and eventually television networks buying batches of our films, by virtue of stars or production value". He added that in the case of Assassination Bureau "we laboured under the delusion that this could be ensured by spending more on 'production value'."[7]

By February 1969, the film had not been released. According to Diana Rigg, "the film company is stuck with the rather awkward - for America - title and hasn't made up its mind what to do".[8]

This film was issued on LaserDisc in the mid-1990s. It was also released on VHS at the same time and later on a Region 1 DVD.

• Assassinations in fiction
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

• The Assassination Bureau at IMDb
• The Assassination Bureau at AllMovie
• The Assassination Bureau at the TCM Movie Database
• The Assassination Bureau at the American Film Institute Catalog