Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9930 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-10-17
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 103 minutes

Synopsis
A tense, cold-war spy thriller from the pen of John Le Carre. The plot revolves around a secret service scheme to send a young Pole into East Germany to find a top secret film.

Customer Reviews

Behind enemy lines
The year is 1969 and the Cold War is raging. A British spy who was investigating missiles on the East German border has just been killed. The West needs another agent fast and they hire Leiser (Christopher Jones), a handsome and clever young man from Poland. He agrees to be a spy in exchange for political asylum in the West. He sneaks into East Germany and finds not only missiles, but also an very pretty girl, while his trainers (Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Richardson) anxiously wait to hear from him.

This isn't the James Bond kind of spy movie; there's no glitz or glamour and definitely no humor. Instead, it's a grim, pitiless look at the men who pull the strings in the espionage game. There isn't a lot of action; the bleak and hopeless mood of the times pervades the story. With Hopkins and Richardson around, one has to wonder why they recruited an outsider to join British Intelligence, but if you can overlook this plot hole, it is an engrossing film. Handsome Christopher Jones, a James Dean look-alike, is appropriately petulant and charismatic. It's a shame his voice had to be dubbed; one wonders what his voice really sounds like. Young Anthony Hopkins brings his usual intensity and dignity to a rather thankless role. It's an interesting and quite cynical look at the paranoia that characterized the 60s.

Games Behind The Wall
A good adaptation of the John le Carre novel, made in 1969, some years after the short book came out. British Intelligence wants a spy on the ground in East Germany (DDR) and recruits a recently defected young Polish seaman for the purpose. He is trained in Morse code and radio and in the arts of defence with pistol, bare hands and anything else around the home. An amusing scene has him fighting back for real with a youngish Anthony Hopkins at the safe training house in Brighton, run by a sexy Service widow (one of the best played roles in a tight field). The police come to the door about the noise of fighting, only to be reassuringly fobbed off by the woman in such terms as "oh, fficer, I'm so sorry, only the boys having a little wrestle!" leaving the plods to imply that "the boys" are about 10 years old. In the end, the defector is played back into Eastern Europe to try to film misiles (placed there contrary to the East German disarmament understanding). It all goes wrong, he is caught, not least because the British have deliberately given him an obsolete and bound to be tracked radio. He is killed and hopkins has an epi over the coffee cups as the callous older agent-handlers and bosses look slightly embarrassed. Well done on the whole. I enjoyed it.

Hopkins Does His Best with a poor film!
Good story, made on a tight budget, sadly. Hopkins clearly showed his early talents in this stark, moody film. However, I hadn't known Finnair was still in business after the 70's (Do they still fly anywhere at all?!) so that was a moment of light relief. Otherwise, it's simply a film which showed (as the first Reviewer comments) the true paranoia and desperation of the times.