Adventures in the Secret Service is a return to form for the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones movies after the previous installment, Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen was a bit iffy. This one mashes together Austria, March 1917 and Petrograd, July 1917; both of which are solid adventures.
Austria, March 1917 has the conceit of Indy babysitting Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma and his brother Xavier as they travel undercover into Austria, to convince the new Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl, to sue for peace. This was known historically as the Sixtus Affair and as anyone with even a passing knowledge in WW1 history will know, didn’t work. It does, however, provide an exciting backdrop to the three men getting into Austria under assumed identities, changing identity once they arrive, staying one step ahead of other spies, visiting with the Emperor and so on. As a story, it’s got a lot going for it.
This is the Young Indy series doing what I love – taking the character and the situations he’s in a little more seriously than it sometimes does. Indeed, I pondered while watching if the movie could even be considered boring for some viewers because, in between Indy and his mates running wildly through European towns at nighttime (which is quite exciting!), there’s a lot of other scenes featuring people, in rooms, talking “historical stuff”. While I eat that sort of thing up, I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Notably, in a series chock-full of cameos, Sir Christopher Lee turns up in this story as Count Ottokar Graf Czernin. In real life, Czernin was all for peace, however, in this story he’s portrayed as too cautious and something of a roadblock, presumably to ratchet up the tension (Indy abuses him to his face at one point), which seems a little unfair. It is, however, a good example of how historical TV shows and movies can sometimes give viewers the wrong idea about a character for the sake of taking a story in a certain direction. Far from being cautious, Czernin is historically remembered for being quite erratic at times!
Despite getting the princes in and out of Austria, meeting with the Emperor, and also getting a personal letter from him asking for peace (in addition to the ‘official’ letter that Czernin writes), Indy’s superiors regard his mission as a failure because the peace deal doesn’t come off. How Indy was meant to stop the German Kaiser from pulling the Austrian Emperor into line over this, however, is anyone’s guess.
Petrograd, July 1917 is an equally strong story on the whole, although without its original title, the audience has no way of knowing how long Indy has been in Russia. This makes things a little confusing because it feels like he’s left for Russia straight after the Austrian adventure… yet he’s also shown to have infiltrated a group of Bolsheviks and is called “old friend” by one of them, multiple times.
Even working with the original title of the story, he can only be four months into his life in Russia and the extent to which he’s trusted and well-regarded by the Bolsheviks – even though they know he’s an embassy spy – is quite strange. At one point they even throw an 18th birthday for him with a massive banner like he’s some sort of visiting dignitary. But this is one of my only quibbles with the story.
The story also takes the bold step of showing Indy to have hot takes on the Bolsheviks that are misguided at best and wrong at worst. Despite Indy being quite cocky throughout this story (to an almost ugly degree), James Bond, he is not. The purpose is two-fold. On one hand, it highlights his youth and naivete, and it also puts him into regular conflict with another intelligence officer, Brossard.
Lenin gets a cameo in the story, riling up the proletariat before heading off to Finland for a rest. Indy gets to see his speech, ticking the box of an historical person being in the episode, but nothing as on the nose as Indy just happening to bump into him, or share a pot of tea with him, or something improbable.
I like shoehorning historical characters into scenes like that, versus having Indy meet them them directly. And I know I say that in a review that saw Indy meet the Austro-Hungarian Emperor in the first half, however, that meeting felt reasonably natural, under the circumstances. Here, with no good reason for Indy to meet Lenin, it would have been extremely weird if that had become part of the storyline.
On a personal and rather self-indulgent note, having not seen the story for at least a decade, it surprised me that my memories of the ending being a major gut punch weren’t quite as I remembered. Sure, there’s a little gut punch, but I remembered something a lot bigger for some reason. Just one of those quirky things that can happen when you re-watch a TV show or movie after a long time has passed.
Score-wise, I’m quite comfortable throwing an 8/10 at this. I pondered going half a point higher, and I almost went there, but I think 8/10 feels right. It’s not quite as good as the other “serious adventures” I’ve previously given big scores, but it’s close. This definitely sits in the upper tier of the TV movies.