Agent 505: Death Trap Beirut is a 1966 spy film, made in the same period as the early Sean Connery James Bond pictures and clearly in their commercial wake. The film was set in Beirut and partly shot in the city. One of those scenes was filmed on the property at Sporting Club Beach.

The clip below is the surviving piece of that footage. The relevance to the club is incidental rather than promotional — the production crew arrived, used the location, and left — but the result is one of the few pieces of moving film that show the property in the mid-1960s.

A short extract from the 1966 spy film. Sporting Club Beach is visible in the background of the scene; the production used the property as one of several Beirut locations.

What you can see

The footage is short. What is visible:

The shoreline as it looked roughly thirteen years into the club's operation
The same rock, in the same place, that the swimmers stand on today
Beirut in 1966 — a year before the Six-Day War, nine years before the start of the civil war, in the period the city now remembers as its golden age

The club opened in 1953. By 1966 it was thirteen years old. The film is now sixty years old. The shoreline in the clip is the shoreline in the photograph that hosts this page.

What we know and don't know

We know the film exists. We know it was shot in part in Beirut in or before 1966. We know the scene above was filmed on the property — the geography is unambiguous. We do not have the full production records, the full Beirut location list, or a precise shooting date. If you do, tell us. We will update this page with sources rather than adjectives.