User Reviews

Based on the Michael Loggan novel Leyton et les Chatelaines, Jess Franco directed and wrote this movie about American secret agent Dan Leyton (Eddie Constantine) being sent to Istanbul to investigate a spy ring operating out of a boardinghouse for women. His girlfriend Marion (Anita Hoffer) is also there working undercover, which complicates things when Janet Spokane (Diana Lorys), the wife of the man in charge of all of this evil spy planning, tries to seduce him.

It fits squarely into the Eurospy world but at least has some of Franco's love of jazz in there, even if none of the astoundingly strange things he would soon bring to cinema. That said, Lorys is, as always, gorgeous. She'd also appear in Franco's The Bloody Judge as well as the oddball Westerns Get Mean and Blindman, as well as Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.

I love looking at reviews of this: Eurospy fans say its boring and Franco fans are excited by how good of a setting Turkey could be for the film.

"Residence For Spies" is one of the dullest spy films of the 1960s I've seen so far. Lots of (meaningless) talk and wandering around Istanbul, but very little action. What action there is, has to accommodate the fact that leading man Eddie Constantine is at least a decade too old for the kind of two-fisted lady-killer he plays here (women half his age can't keep their hands off him). Diana Lorys, who has a magically exotic face and a thick, curvy body, encapsulates the female glamour and beauty of the 1960s, but her role is largely irrelevant to the plot. Much tamer than you'd expect from a Jess Franco movie, even an early one, it does at least display colorful cinematography, scenic Istanbul locations and some pretty female legs. But it's just SO boring. * out of 4.