3 reviews
A past its prime British intelligence agency lead by Ralph Richardson persuade a Polish defector (Jones) to validate photographs of a missile in East Germany.
Fairly slow moving Le Carre adaptation. The agency of yesteryear spies are enjoyable for those expecting a Tinker, Taylor style thriller and engagingly played by Richardson, Hopkins, Urqhurt etc. The film is less effective when Jones is on screen. All very James Dean / rebel without a cause type performance is solid but misplaced here.
Fairly slow moving Le Carre adaptation. The agency of yesteryear spies are enjoyable for those expecting a Tinker, Taylor style thriller and engagingly played by Richardson, Hopkins, Urqhurt etc. The film is less effective when Jones is on screen. All very James Dean / rebel without a cause type performance is solid but misplaced here.
I will watch almost any espionage movie but am almost invariably disappointed. And there's really little to recommend about this one.
The characters, especially those played by Christopher Jones and Anthony Hopkins, are quite hard to like or to care about - indeed, they're pretty off-putting - and unfortunately if you don't care about the Jones character, recruited for a dangerous spying mission into East Germany, the story, such as it is, becomes thoroughly uninteresting. I stuck with it all the way through, but I kept checking to see how long before it ended.
Hopkins is awfully mannered here, all tics and eye rolling, mouth oddly agape, spitting out histrionic Richard Burton-ish line readings; you do tend to keep watching him, but that's not necessarily a good thing. The romantic scenes are REALLY boring, with the beautiful blonde Pia Degermark improbably available and way too eager and obliging; as someone here has pointed out, she shows up like a deus ex machina at the convenience of the plot. The plot itself is quite cynical, but that's to be expected - in fact, it's de rigueur - in anything with Le Carré's name on it.
The best I can say about the film is that it has a good veteran British cast and is not actually embarrassing or terrible.
The characters, especially those played by Christopher Jones and Anthony Hopkins, are quite hard to like or to care about - indeed, they're pretty off-putting - and unfortunately if you don't care about the Jones character, recruited for a dangerous spying mission into East Germany, the story, such as it is, becomes thoroughly uninteresting. I stuck with it all the way through, but I kept checking to see how long before it ended.
Hopkins is awfully mannered here, all tics and eye rolling, mouth oddly agape, spitting out histrionic Richard Burton-ish line readings; you do tend to keep watching him, but that's not necessarily a good thing. The romantic scenes are REALLY boring, with the beautiful blonde Pia Degermark improbably available and way too eager and obliging; as someone here has pointed out, she shows up like a deus ex machina at the convenience of the plot. The plot itself is quite cynical, but that's to be expected - in fact, it's de rigueur - in anything with Le Carré's name on it.
The best I can say about the film is that it has a good veteran British cast and is not actually embarrassing or terrible.
- writers_reign
- Oct 12, 2019
- Permalink