Spies and Spying
Firefox (1982) – How Clint Won The Cold War!
Clickable links in red Director: Clint Eastwood Genre: Spy cum techno Thriller Time: 1 Hour 57 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (rent) Cast: Clint Eastwood. Freddie Jones It is 1980 and The Cold War is intensifying. Both sides are intensifying the race to create deadlier weapons. British Intelligence obtains information that the Soviet Union…
Read MoreThe Assassination of Trotsky (1972) – Interesting
All clickable links in red Director: Joseph Losey Genre: Spy Drama (True Story) Time: 1 Hour 38 minutes Platform: You Tube Cast: Richard Burton. Alain Delon. Romy Schneider. French Superstar Alain Delon, personified French cool in his best period during the 1960s and 1970s, where he played a wide range of interesting roles that ranged…
Read MoreNorth by Northwest (1959) – Classic Hitchcock
All clickable links in red Director: Alfred Hitchcock Genre: Spy thriller Time: 2 Hours 16 minutes Cast: Cary Grant. Eva Marie Saint. James Mason. Martin Landau. Platform: Amazon Prime Rent As mentioned in my post on Notorious (see here), Alfred Hitchcock made 11 spy movies, which were marketed as suspense thrillers. Hitchcock’s films are…
Read MoreMr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) – Scenes from a Spy marriage !
Director: Multiple directors Genre: Spy thriller. Drama. Time: TV series – 8 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Amazon Prime Cast: Donald Glover. Maya Erskine. Wagner Moura. Parker Posey. (Hopefully Ingmar Bergman fans will forgive me for that title) . A mysterious agency gives two strangers new identities. “John” (Donald Glover) and “Jane” (Maya Erskine) Smith…
Read MoreKleo – Season 2 (2024) – Goofy Quirky Fun
Clickable links in red. Director: Isabel Braak. Nina Vukovic Genre: Spy thriller Time: TV series – 6 x 55-minute episodes Platform: Netflix Cast: Jella Haase. Dimitrij Schaad. Julius Feldmeier. The open ending of Season 1 (see here for the post on Kleo Season 1) left no doubt that the infamous red suitcase, which Kleo…
Read MoreEye of the Needle (1981) – Superb spy thriller
All clickable links in red Genre: Spy Movie Time: 1 hour 50 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (rent or subscription) Director : Richard Marquand Cast : Donald Sutherland. Kate Nelligan. Christopher Cazenove. Ian Bannen. It’s the proud boast of British Intelligence that they controlled all the German agents in Britain during…
Read MoreThe Assets (2014) – Superb view of counter espionage
All clickable links in red Genre – Real-world Spying Time: 8 Hours – 8 x 50-minute episodes Platform: YouTube – free When the Soviet Union passed into history in 1991, the Western Powers thought that all the nasty stuff that went with it also had gone into history, including the KGB,…
Read MoreAdolf Eichmann Case – two films
All clickable links in red Today, Israeli Intelligence’s reputation is in tatters, thanks to the “sudden” Gaza war. However, this was not so in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s, when there were many brilliant, “out of the box” operations and sudden mysterious deaths of Israel’s opponents that gave the Mossad a reputation for…
Read MoreThe Robert Hanssen Case – two films
All clickable links are in red Truth is always stranger than fiction. It is a cliché but like all good cliches it is also true. Otherwise, how do you explain that an FBI counter espionage agent, dedicated to catching Russian spies and Americans spying for Russians, was a Russian spy? For 22 years? The…
Read MoreThe Falcon and the Snowman (1985) – Superb true story
All clickable links in red Genre: Spy Story (True Story) Time: 2 Hours, 10 minutes Platform: Amazon Prime (on rent) As the adage goes, the more you try to change something, the more things remain the same. Hollywood (and Bollywood) tries to convince us that “spies” wear nice suits, drive cool cars, bed…
Read MoreThe Ultra Secret – Superb Slow Burn Films on Enigma
All clickable links in red In 1974 a book, The Ultra Secret, was published. The contents were nothing short of sensational for anyone who bought it. Lest people thought it was a joke, more documents under The Thirty-Year Rule were released on the topic. Simply put, The British were reading ALL GERMAN-CIPHERED SIGNALS, SOMETIMES IN NEAR…
Read MoreAnek (2022) – Bold topic ….
Director: Anubhav Sinha Script: Anubhav Sinha. Seema Agarwal. Yash Keswani. Cast: Ayushman Khurrana. Andrea Kevichusa. Manoj Pahwa. J.D.Chakravarthi. Genre: Spy – action -police Story. Platform: Netflix Duration: 2 Hours 25 minutes Films about the North East are conspicuous by their absence. People from the North East are usually viewed through stereotypes in…
Read MoreThe Iron Curtain (1946) – Cold War’s absorbing beginning
Dir: William Wellman Screenplay – Milton Krims – based on Igor Gouzenko’s story Cast: Dana Andrews. Gene Tierney Popular legends about spies -outside the Bond-MI-Bourne domain-are usually of a dedicated man, deep inside the enemy/ target country’s system, quietly collecting information for one’s own country. But sometimes, the simple soldier or the unimportant file…
Read MoreKhufiya (2023) – Slow, refreshing and engaging
Music and Director: Vishal Bhardwaj Screenplay – Vishal Bhardwaj, Rohan Narula – based on Amar Bhushan’s story Cast: Tabu, Ali Fazal, Wamiqa Gabbi, Azmeri Haque Badhon, Navnindra Behl, Ashish Vidyarthi (All links are in Blue) Using a mole, Heena Rehman, code-named Octopus (Azmeri Haque Badhon), an Indian operation to “neutralise” the Bangladeshi “Jihadi” defence…
Read MoreNotorious (1946) – A romantic spy story.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock Writer: Ben Hecht Cast: Cary Grant. Ingrid Bergman. Claude Rains. Alfred Hitchcock was often referred to as the Master of Suspense. He was a supreme Auteur, the man whose personal stamp on the human condition was visible in every frame, scene and dialogue in his works. Every frame in his films…
Read MoreSeventeen Moments of Spring (1973) – Excellent
Story : Yulian (Julian) Semyonov Direction : Tatyana Lioznova Cast : Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Most of us are used to spy stories where Western Heroes set out to slay the evil Soviet Empire and save the Western Way of life. The Spy fiction genre has its rules in that the Western characters are usually the…
Read MoreAll the Old Knives (1994) – Slow Burn but Riveting
Dir: Janus Metz Cast: Chris Pine. Thandiwe Newton. Jonathan Pryce. Laurence Fishburne Story and Script: Olen Steinhauer It is said that the end of the Cold War also ended spy fiction as a genre, be it in print or on film. The post-1991 “unipolar” world soon proved to be a fallacy. As…
Read MoreHeart of Stone (2023) – That sinking feeling
Consider this. A secret agent is on a mission and saves the world. He returns to his home town and agency and is given a new mission. And then he discovers that he has to save the world all over again as he did not do a proper job of it in the first…
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