Spies and Spying
The 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 MoreWasp Network (2019) – Slow but stunning true story
Writer-Director: Oliver Assayas Cast: Penelope Cruz. Edgar Ramirez. Wagner Moura. Ana de Armas. Genre: True Spy story Platform: Netflix Duration: 2 Hours 8 minutes (All links in red are clickable links) Cuba’s and America’s history has been a very tortured one. When the USA refused to recognise Castro and his genuinely popular…
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…
Read MoreThe Night Manager – two equally good versions
The end of the Cold War in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union supposedly gave a “peace dividend”. The enormous budgets of the Armed Forces on both sides of the US-USSR divide could now be used for “peaceful purposes”. Or so they thought. John le Carre’s The Night Manager was published…
Read MoreSmiley’s People (1982) – Riveting
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) was the first book of The Karla Trilogy. John le Carre’s follow-up to this story was The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which involved extensive travel to Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia, where he witnessed and made notes about the final assault of the Khmer Rouge on…
Read MoreTinker Tailor Soldier Spy – Great TV Series, Average film
David Cornwell, who went by the pseudonym John le Carre, wrote incredibly detailed books about spies, spying, morality, The Cold War and everything else. Many of his “Classic spy fiction” stories have been filmed or made into TV Serials. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was published in 1974 to universal critical and widespread acclaim. Le…
Read MoreThe Angel – The UNBELIEVABLE Spy
Ever since its birth, on May 14, 1948, Israel has led a precarious existence and has never known peace with its neighbours. Nowhere was this desperation more apparent than in the 1973 October war, known as the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was attacked simultaneously by Egypt from the South and Syria from the North.…
Read MoreEli Cohen – The (Impossible) Spy – two films
Mossad is the Israeli Civilian Intelligence Agency , collecting information on Israel’s foreign enemies. (Aman, is a purely military intelligence agency responsible to the Defence Ministry). Over the years, Mossad has executed daring operations worldwide and not necessarily in the immediate neighbouring countries that have sworn to destroy Israel and continue to threaten Israel’s existence.…
Read MoreKleo (2022) – ROCKING GOOD!
It’s 1987, and the Cold War is in full swing. Kleo Straub, an unofficial “wet work” specialist – meaning assassin – is infiltrated through The Wall into West Berlin to assassinate a target. She reaches the nightclub and entices the target, but not before an off-duty West Berlin cop Sven Petzold (Dimitri Schaad), tries…
Read MoreFUBAR (2023) – TV Series (8 Parts) – For Fans Only
Cast : Arnold Schwarzenegger. Monica Barbaro. Milan Carter. Gabriel Luna A secret agent is in a foreign country doing some caper. His guide keeps talking to him through a tiny two-way radio. The hijinks continue, and the secret agent just about escapes with his life after a spectacular ‘action’ scene where the bad…
Read MoreThe Fourth Protocol (1987) – excellent Cold War thriller
Director: John Mackenzie Cast: Michael Caine. Pierce Brosnan. Ian Richardson. Julian Glover. After the relative period of détente of the late 1970s, the Reagan administration’s talks of the “Evil Empire”, raised the tension in Europe to a new high. In the mid-1980s, “tactical” nuclear missiles were based in Germany and the UK. This was…
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