The Innocent (DVD, 2004)

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

Looking at the filmography of John Schlesinger (1926-2003) after re-viewing (before reviewing) “Cold Comfort Farm,” I saw that there was a movie just before it, “The Innocent” (released in 1995) that I had never heard of, though it starred Anthony Hopkins and Isabelle Rossellini and was adapted by Ian McEwan from a best-selling spy novel he wrote. The movie is odd in multiple ways, starting with it being held back from release for two years, then released with no publicity campaign. I can well believe that there were concerns that viewers would not understand the movie. I understand what happened, but remain uncertain about several whys.

Odder still is the casting: Campbell Scott (son of American powerhouse actors George C. Scott and Coleen Dewhurst) as a Brit (the titular innocent), Sir Anthony Hopkins as a stereotypical crude (and not innocent!) American, and Isabella Rossellini (daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini) as a German. There is quite a lot of dialogue about national differences that is rendered peculiar by the unusual casting.

Scott plays a virginal man named Leonard who is engaged in top-secret work tapping phones under Soviet-occupied East Berlin (this is based on a real mid-1950s project, Operation Gold). The diffident British Leonard is under the supervision of the brash American Glass (Hopkins) and is easily seduced by Maria (Rossellini) who keeps asking him about his work under the guise of wanting to “really” know him. Whether she is a spy or under the domination of one (Otto, played by Ronald Nitschke) strikes me as a distinction without a difference (for Leonard).

As seems to me typical of McEwan confections, the triangles (Leonard/Maria/Otto, Leonard/Maria/Glass) are coldly observed. Leonard is a sap with whom it is difficult to identify (sympathize, yes!). Maria is (stereotypically for a Rossellini role) a cipher who seems to be a victim. I can’t imagine who would identify or sympathize with Otto or Glass or with Leonard's downstairs neighbor (Richard Durdan), who seems to be another spy for the Soviets.

There is an airport ending that cannot not recall Rossellini’s mother at the nocturnal airport in “Casablanca.” The part of the movie I most enjoyed was the half hour or so before that, which recalled  Hitchcock’s “The Trouble with Harry” to me. Any whiffs earlier on of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s “Notorious” only emphasized how vastly superior (as entertainment, as spy maneuvering, and as romance) “Notorious” is to “The Innocent.” Scott offers no competition to the memory of Cary Grant (the role of mystified Everyman is closer to Grant’s in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” than his operative in “Notorious,” btw).

For movies with crafty survivors and innocent occupiers in the ruins of the Third Reich, Carol Reed's "The Third Man" and Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair" (shot on location in the rubble) are vastly superior. (The former also has an Italian actress, Alida Valli, as the local (Vienna) survivor; the latter has the very credibly German Marlene Dietrich.)

Berlin locations, including its old airport, were murkily shot by Dietrich Lohmann (who shot some Fassbinder movies, including “Love is Colder Than Death,” “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” “Effi Briest,” and “The American Soldier,”  and “Ludwig” for Visconti.

Though it mostly doesn’t work either as a spy movie or as a romance, there are many worse Cold War spy movies/romances. Though mostly (not least in accent) seeming very American, Campbell Scott  (The Dying Gaul, The Sheltering Sky) is rather good in the role of the confused and besotted technician. I don’t think he was supposed to be charismatic.

Schlesinger could make a thriller (Marathon Man) but does not seem to have been trying to make one with “The Innocent.” He had made far better triangle movies (“Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and “Far from the Madding Crowd”), as well as two shorter movies about British Soviet spies (not spy movies), Alan Bennett’s “An Englishman Abroad” (1983) with Alan Bates as Guy Burgess visited in Moscow by Coral Browne amd "A Question of Attribution" (1992) with James Fox as Sir Anthony Blunt and Prunella Scales as Elizabeth II. Probably instead of using a screenplay from McEwan, he should have hired Len Deighton to do it.


©2013, Stephen O. Murray

Recommend this product? No