Spychiatry

Blindfold marks the Hollywood debut of Claudia Cardinale, who must regret the expensive miracles of mismanagement worked in her behalf. Though still identifiable by her accent and by moviedom's quickest smile, CeeCee is lacquered with a standard starlet finish that makes her beauty appear sprayed on. Rock Hudson, meanwhile, plays his own 50th movie role as if to refute the hypothesis that experience is the best teacher.

Claudia gamely portrays a nightclub chorine, sister of a scientific genius who may or may not have been kidnaped by a top-secret U.S. security agency or by a sinister organization linked to "the international black market in brains." As proof of the brain drain, the movie offers more plot. Rock is a society psychologist and boudoir gallant who is afflicted with an obsessional neurosis against long engagements. When he is not carting diamond rings in and out of Tiffany's, he climbs into taxis, trucks and planes and travels, blindfolded, on house calls to a decaying mansion where Claudia's brother displays symptoms of severe mental disorder.

The maladroit inspirations uncovered in Blindfold run from Negro and Italian dialect humor to some waggery about a boyish archvillain (Guy Stockwell) who stutters under stress. Endowed with a schizophrenia of its own, the whole movie suggests a three-way split between sophisticated sex farce, straightforward suspense, and a spy caper so whimsical that Rock and Claudia are finally sent, along with a truckload of store dummies clad in underwear, to right wrongs in a swampy Southern backwater identified as "the goose capital of America." There, with shotguns blazing and red-eyed alligators slithering toward Claudia's thighs, the whole flight of fancy turns out to be a wild-goose chase.

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