I will sometimes get a picture of a grizzled, old man sitting on a bench outside a general store. At first glance, he looks like any old guy but closer inspection reveals a rock hard presence and a playful gleam in his eye. There is a suggestion that he has lived and has some stories to tell. His life hasn’t brought him the type of riches you can put in a bank but instead he is wealthy in terms of memory and a sort of quiet achievement. A man who “contains multitudes”.

This is how I feel about many of our subjects when we gather to talk about ExPat Cinema and the Americans who forged a career in international film. They may not enjoy the type of pension plan that big time, lifelong Hollywood players do but that may actually ground them and make them more accessible. And some, while you may not recognize them on the street, they still had their time in the sun, even if it was shining over the Mediterranean and not Southern California.

This preamble pretty well sums up Brad Harris, who we were introduced to briefly in a previous Once Upon a Time but who here gets to bask in a spotlight of his own. Bradford Harris was born in 1933 in the little burg of St. Anthony, Idaho where Dean Cain was also born. By the way, today, Cain and fellow actor and resident Erik Estrada are reserve members of the St. Anthony Police Department. Brad – like Cain, actually – had a football career ended by a knee injury. In order to promote recovery from his injury, Harris took up bodybuilding.

Harris got into stunt work and it is rumoured but not confirmed that he performed stunts on Elvis Presley’s first three films. And as an actor, I see that Brad played “Minor role” in the original Ocean’s 11. A lot of our UOAT players ran out of road in La La Land and decided to try a career in Europe. Not so Brad Harris. He went to Rome to watch the 1960 Summer Olympics and ended up doing stunt work for Kubrick, Kirk & Co. on Spartacus. From there he worked his way in to Italian film as both actor and stunt man. His first three starring roles were as Goliath, Samson and Hercules (same guy, really) in three sword-and-sandal films released in ’61 and ’62. He then quickly rattled off a spate of those beautifully bonkers Italian, West German and French epics, adventures, adventure-spy, Eurospy and western films before featuring in Our Man in Jamaica, the film we talked about when highlighting Larry Pennell in this series. Also, while working in Germany, Brad perceived that filmmakers there had no conception of the “stunt gaffer” so Brad became the original stunt man and second unit coordinator for the German film industry.

Brad Harris’ next film was the West German-Italian co-production Kommissar X – Jagd auf Unbekannt or 12 donne d’oro or Hunting the Unknown or my favourite Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill. Kommissar X was a series of crime fiction books written by Bert F. Island (German Paul Alfred Mueller, 1901-1970) beginning in 1959 and continuing to number an astonishing 620 books. With the success of the translation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books to film, seven Kommissar X films were released between 1966 and 1971 with three of them coming in ’66. The movies featured New York private detective Joe Walker and NYCPD lieutenant Tom Rowland.

Directing and co-writing our film and the bulk of the Kommissar X movies is Italian Gianfranco Parolini (billed as Frank Kramer) who had directed Brad Harris in earlier sword-and-sandal films and who would go on to direct The Sabata Trilogy of spaghetti westerns starring Lee Van Cleef twice and Yul Brynner for the second film. Starring as Joe Walker is Italian model and actor Tony Kendall, born Luciano Stella in Rome. Kendall went on to a prolific but unremarkable career in international cinema and he never met a genre he didn’t like; Kendall made all types of films including sauerkraut and spaghetti westerns, giallo horror, crime films, women in prison, zombie horror and Godfather knock-offs.

Prettying up the place are two Austrian lasses. Maria Perschy was born in – get ready – Eisenstadt, Reichsgau Niederdonau, Nazi Germany in 1938 and died in Vienna in 2004. Maria made a clutch of American and UK films including 633 Squadron with Cliff Robertson and a pleasant film I’ve always liked, Man’s Favorite Sport? with Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss. Near the end of her career, she showed up in one episode of Hawaii Five-O. Christa Linder (b. 1943) was born in Bavaria and was Miss Austria of 1962. She made a dozen or so films, none you would have heard of and with no one you’d know (actually Boris Karloff’s last film, a Mexican sci-fi and a spaghetti western with Lee Van Cleef) and then somehow ended up with a small role in Hooper with Burt and Sally.

Kommissar X – Jagd auf Unbekannt is a Eurospy film that was shot in Dubrovnik, Croatia and is perhaps even set there. Private eye Joe Walker is on holiday in Europe and Capt. Tom Rowland is there on business. A woman hires Joe to find her nuclear physicist brother while members of a gang syndicate are being killed. One of the remaining members contacts Joe and Tom as he is fearing for his life but before they can get to him, he is killed, too. Turns out, one of the gang of four has eliminated his partners so he alone can benefit from their scheme. Concocted in a lair “done up in early Ian Fleming”, the plan – straight out of Goldfinger – is to utilize the kidnapped nuclear physicist to contaminate a stockpile of gold to dominate the markets. But the ambitious Oberon had his own designs; get rid of his partners and have the captured scientist create a bath that would reverse the decontamination of the gold stockpile

Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is not a bad film, really. It may not be chock full of great performances but the story and the execution are both essentially sound. It may – like many other films of its type – rely too heavily on Joe Walker being a ladies man and on the back and forth between Joe and Capt. Rowland but that is not enough to make it unwatchable. Joe is unorthodox, plays hunches and doesn’t follow the rules; Rowland becomes exasperated and threatens to lock him up but in the end the two men work together to achieve the outcome. This we’ve seen in countless movies and TV shows and this movie just follows suit. There’s a few gadgets, excellent interiors and sets, some fresh, springtime-looking locations, Tony Kendall is outfitted nicely and the cool theme music is referenced throughout.

Afterwards, Brad carried on in Europe making Kommissar X films and others, often paired again with Tony Kendall and also with Olga Schoberová. Just like Rick Dalton, Brad Harris married his European co-star. Olga was born in Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and had appeared with Brad in two westerns before the two married in 1967. They had a daughter named Sabrina Calley who has worked in wardrobe and has been a costumer in Hollywood film for years. In fact, her filmography is far weightier than both her folks’ (throw in her stepfather, producer John Calley) put together; she has been Angelina Jolie’s personal costumer on many films and has also worked on Nolan’s Oppenheimer and The Odyssey and 2026’s The Bride!.

Brad and Olga divorced in 1969 and Brad continued to work in films all over Europe and elsewhere including an Italian-Turkish comedy, a Bruceploitation martial arts film and a West German-Sri Lankan action film that somehow also starred Heather Thomas. He even served as Executive Producer on a couple including one called King of Kong Island, a jungle adventure film misleadingly titled as there is no island and no Kong – as in King Kong – but there is a mad scientist played by Marc Lawrence. I love this stuff. Brad Harris has such a varied and magnificent filmography and you know what? Just for kicks, throw in his more straitlaced work like episodes of Dallas, Falcon Crest and Hunter. Brad Harris certainly made a career of it.

Harris always maintained a solid rep in the bodybuilding world and he was always ripped, as seen above and in 1983’s The Seven Magnificent Gladiators in which he appeared with fellow bodybuilders Lou Ferrigno and Dan Vadis, who we have featured here before on Once Upon a Time, and he was a member in good standing of the Stuntman’s Hall of Fame. Harris could be proud of the tale he had to tell while rocking there on the front porch. He turned a holiday in Rome into a career that while it may have been far from the Hollywood spotlight it was also far from nothing. Brad entered the world of ExPat Cinema and forged a unique trail. Perhaps not endowed with many of the acting or business talents of others in the field, he nevertheless spent years cutting a substantial figure in rough and tumble films made around the world. And from the looks of it, it did it his own way. Brad Harris lived to be 84 and died in 2017 in Santa Monica. Upon his death, his daughter Sabrina said her dad had lived by his motto; “Stay fit. Have fun. Harm no one”.