Spymaster, Trevor Howard, casually recruits Rod Taylor to become the state Assassin of the United Kingdom. This low-budget movie looks like a screen-test for Sean Connery’s replacement to play James Bond.

There are no gadgets. No special guns, no knives, no darts, no poisons, and no other weapons to kill human beings. Unlike the carphone in Goldfinger, there are no communication devices, like a shoe phone.There are no alternative identities – driver’s licenses, passports: all the victims are in Britain and pretty close to London. And there is no Dome of Silence. At the end of training Howard tells Taylor about his job in a crowded dining room – kill people whom Britain wants dead; Taylor also learns his code name L, for Liquidator – feels very Chicago in the 1920s.

What Taylor likes about his position is the lifestyle it supports: Meeting pretty babes and alluring each to his spacious flat, living room 1000 square feet supposedly with auxiliary rooms for essentials. While enjoying all that, Taylor hires professional hit persons to kill his targets. London is a very dangerous town.

Jill St. John is the love interest, so much so she is in most of the film. She always seems fully clothed. I too would have gone to France for a rendezvous with Jill in the 1960s before she became a Bond girl and got ruined. But on this unauthorized out-of-country trip for a honey-trap, I would not have gotten kidnapped, been roughed up by bad guys, turned, and sometime later hooked up with Jill after 20 minutes of emptiness (I didn’t watch; I was taking out the garbage.) In the next scenes Rod Taylor is true to his character: He is reluctant to kill his foremost adversary, Trevor Howard. The script somewhat plays toward comedy, but not the sly stuff at which the British excel.

If reading this writing about The Liquidator is dreadful, remember the film is worst. In my future and happening upon it, I will immediately turn to a station broadcasting Gilligan’s Island.

However, there are significant plot points to develop in The Liquidator. The story suggests The Bourne Identity et seq. and Airplane.