That Man in Hong Kong

Up to His Ears. Pairing Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress in a feckless adaptation of Jules Verne's The Tribulations of a Chinese Gentleman, Director Philippe de Broca overbids to repeat the success of his hilarious mock-action thriller, That Man from Rio. The trouble is that Director de Broca's imitation of his own winning formula is not a whit better than anyone else's, and a good deal worse than some.

Satirizing practically nothing, Up to His Ears sets up shop in Hong Kong, where Belmondo, as the bored-to-death young heir to a knitting-mills fortune, has anchored his yacht and tried to kill himself for the ninth time within a week. Someone suggests that he could turn his suicidal impulse to good account by insuring his life for $2,000,000 and letting himself be murdered. He does--and then meets Stripper Ursula, a girl worth living for. Fleeing a corps of assassins, the lovers go to the Himalayas and back by junk, ricksha, sampan, elephant, airplane and balloon. They survive shipwreck in a floating coffin, and even beat off an attack by a fleet of heavily armed Coca-Cola trucks.

In a comedy with residual plot development or a semblance of character, a few such antics might be funny. Ears mistakes physical exercise for humor, and before one-third of the marathon unreels it has exhausted everyone except its agile leading man, who is still one of filmdom's sprightliest actors. But not sprightly enough, perhaps, to carry off a role that requires him almost simultaneously to be like Harold Lloyd on a high wire, Buster Keaton pratfalling in a Chinese opera, and Humphrey Bogart doing a striptease in drag.

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