Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1688 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-06-06
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Formats: Colour, Dolby, PAL, Subtitled
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 374 minutes

DVD Description
A Perfect Spy traces the rise and fall of Magnus Pym and his career through intelligence. From chance meetings with people will be important to him in the future to a life in Czechoslovakia, Washington and finally on the run in England Pym weaves his way through the complicated world of espionage. Where no-one is safe from betrayal, not even his father.

Synopsis
Top British Spy Magnus Pym initiates a massive man hunt when he goes missing. He's desperate to uncover who he really is, and must find himself before his hunters do...

Customer Reviews

A slow starter, but ultimately rewarding
Peter Egan, the nominal star of this serial, makes his first appearance in episode 3. In the first two episodes we see his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. The pacing is very slow at the beginning. Flashback sequences would have alleviated this, but the programme can be seen as an excellent antidote to the frantic cutting of modern television productions.

This role is Egan's best performance I have seen to date. In one scene he sits in a restaurant with his father and you see his attitude melt from bitterness to unwilling humour by facial expressions alone. Egan also impressively portrays the ambiguousness of the enigmatic Magnus Pym, an ambivalence that inhabits every part of his life - personal or professional.

By episode 5 the story is in full flow, and the building sense of unease compels you to watch. Magnus's life looks set to unravel. His spy bosses, his wife, even his young son begin to perceive what kind of man he is. Only Magnus's father accepted him for himself, for there is a subtle but clear similarity between them. Again, Peter Egan is convincing enough for you to lose yourself in the drama.

One of the most fascinatingly mysterious characters is Axel, who crops up throughout Pym's life and, it seems, will be a major force in his destiny.

neal beard
This is an extremely long movie, which means you may become very bored before it becomes interesting, but its length provides opportunity for its characters to find permanent attachment in your sympathies.

If you are moved by the guilt of the loathsome you will find it particularly heart-wrenching, because it is a story that finds its heroes among the evil and the weak. If you can love a monster you'll cry for Magnus Pym, the spy who betrays everyone - notably his country, his friends and family - a man who has also been manipulated and moulded since childhood by those same people.

There isn't one truly likeable character in the entire story, not one loyal, 'moral' personality to sympathise with. But watching the whole thing without the help of a tissue would be quite remarkable.

I really enjoyed it in the end. Well worth it for people who like inciteful movies about baser human character.

A Perfect Spy
The 3-disk set is of 7 episodes of a John Le Carre novel of the same name serialized for television in the late 1980s. Casting was good, especially Ray Macanally in the role of Rickie Pym in a masterly a performance as the con-man and father of our hero, played by Peter Egan. Only Peter Egan, a competent actor, was mis-cast. He never succeeded in projecting a young man's version of his father's charm, so seemed implausible both as a spy with conmanship in his bloodstream, and as someone capable of firing guns and engaging in unarmed combat (though this was never depicted directly). The play was faithful to the book, but its unremitting tone of gloom, reflecting the Cold-War 1950s, the lost world of upper-middle-class values which even those with first-hand experience might prefer to forget, plus Egan's inability to engage my sympathies meant that in the end I persisted only out of curiosity for what form the denouement might take. Of course! Suicide! Woodenly directed, the appetite and need for betrayal depicted seemed in the end little more than a study in individual morbid psychology.