Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

There were very few things the Soviet Union was efficient at doing. One was infiltrating the British intelligence apparatus. This complicated 1986 British thriller from the novel by John Hale opens and closes with an official funeral of great pomp presided over by the queen herself. At the start, the viewer has no idea of whose funeral it is or what the connection to the deceased the movie’s star, Michael Caine, who is in attendance with a chestful of medals, might have.

It is not obvious that the rest of the movie is a flashback (in chronological order) leading up to the funeral, but the viewer does learn that Michael Caine is a retired naval intelligence officer whose son (played by Nigel Havers, who played Lord Lindsay in “Chariots of Fire” and whom I remember especially well as Sergei in the wry spy flick “Sleepers”) is a low-level GCHQ employee whose job it is to monitor tapes of conversations from bugs planted within the Kremlin. This very likeable low-level operative loves the Russian language,and believes good always triumphs in the end. Beginning to feel that all is not right in the secret service, he wants to quit. His father, who has become a successful businessman, tells him that there is not a lot of demand outside government spydom for someone whose only skill is fluency in Russian and reminds his son that it took a long time, great effort, and considerable luck for him to establish himself.

The film jumps to a Soviet agent being rescued by the KGB just before he is unmasked. After plastic surgery, the agent phones Sir Adrian Chapple (John Gielgud), a much-honored member of the British elite. Whether he is another Soviet agent or planting a double or triple agent is not clear and to go any further in the way of plot summary might lessen potential viewer's confusion but would destroy the viewer pleasure of putting the pieces together. I mean: this is supposed to be the pleasure, though I did not think that the puzzle-solving pleasure here was very great. Suffice to say that the pile of corpses and the justified paranoia mount.

Michael Caine is both a loving father and an implacable investigator reluctantly confirming that what he tells his beloved son cannot be true. As in the more recent "Quiet American" he underplays effectively (and more affectingly than in that). Felicity Dean adequately provided romantic interest, Nigel Havers was typically charming, James Fox typically supercillious, and Sir John Gielgud performed his patented haughtiness. I think that there is too much plot and too little human feeling, though I guess the urge to keep one’s allies from finding out how one has been hoodwinked counts as being all too human.

The lengths to which spy agencies will go to cover up their failures is certainly a timely topic now, but one of the interesting aspects of this unemotional film is the absence of any glimmering that the Soviet Empire was about to collapse. From the film, as from CIA propaganda at the time, it looks as if the Soviets were winning the Cold War. At least in the sense that Soviet spies had corrupted the highest reaches of British intelligence and counter-intelligence, I guess they were successful on one front. As the bookish idealist says, "Underneath our daily lives is an entirely secret world, and their secret world has put out the light of the ordinary world." This may resonate in John Ashcroft’s America, where successes in exposing and indicting those within the United States who made the al-Queda strikes possible have been even scarcer than was British intelligence success in recognizing and stopping Soviet moles.




Recommended: Yes