Christopher East

The Lady Vanishes (1938) is one of nine Alfred Hitchcock films on the list — and based on some its weaker selections, there probably should have been more.  Like most Hitchcock adventures, this one mixes healthy doses of humor in with the suspense, and for the most part it’s an enjoyable romp — structurally messy and tonally curious, perhaps, but overall an engaging entertainment, and an interesting window into the psyche of pre-WWII Britain.

The film opens in an obscure mountain village in a fictional European country, where a number of stranded British tourists are waiting out an avalanche before they can head homeward.   Here we meet, among others, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a young party girl heading home to settle down and get married, and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a wisecracking musician who gets under her skin at the hotel during a noise complaint.  The tracks finally cleared, Iris makes her way to the train, along the way befriending a kindly old lady named Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who assists her when she takes a bump on the head.  Iris falls asleep with the smiling Miss Froy sitting across from her, but when she wakes up, Miss Froy has disappeared.  Iris begins a search, but it turns out everyone on the train has excuses not to help — some for selfish reasons, others for nefarious ones — and she finds her investigation obstructed at every turn.  Her one ally, of course, turns out to be Gilbert, who helps her unravel the mystery of Miss Froy’s disappearance, which spirals into dangerous intrigue.

The plot is a convoluted sequence of comic encounters and spy switcheroos, and it’s not one of Hitchcock’s tightest films:  the point of attack is late in coming, and it opens at a leisurely pace before finally ramping up to its intrigues.  But it’s a fun concoction, and an early look at many of the techniques and elements Hitchcock would master in later films.  Viewed in the context of its era, the film is also politically interesting, providing some pointed commentary on British attitudes regarding the possibility of a renewed European war — some of the British characters, sucked into the action against their will, are clearly stand-ins for public sentiment during those troubled times.

The Lady Vanishes may ultimately be a better example of a Hitchcock film than of a spy film, but it’s certainly a worthy entry on the list.

A mountain-climbing film dressed up in spy clothes, The Eiger Sanction (1975) is one of those oddball selections the list seems to include now and then just to stir up conversation.  How this one ever crept so far up the list is beyond me, though; it’s not a very good film.

Clint Eastwood stars as a retired assassin named Jonathan Hemlock (ugh), whose pedigree also includes a past in mountain-climbing and a current gig as an art professor.  Hemlock is lured back to the intelligence world by his former boss in the top secret agency “C2,” a man named Dragon (Thayer David), who blackmails him out of retirement for one last job, taking out a pair of enemy agents who stole a microfilm detailing a germ warfare formula.  Hemlock performs one hit, but the second one looks to be more of a challenge; the target, as yet unidentified, is suspected of being a member of an international mountain-climbing expedition to scale the notorious north face of the Eiger in Switzerland.  Hemlock’s mission:  join the team, identify the agent, and take him out.

Is there a spy movie plot tying together the sequences of The Eiger Sanction?  Sure, and it’s even got some classic elements:  the retired agent pulled off the shelf for one last job…the nefarious intelligence organization with murky motives…heroes just as morally questionable as the villains…dastardly misdirections…sexy femme fatales…a cynical (if not nihilistic) message about the costs of the intelligence world on its agents.  It sounds reasonable on paper.

But is it a spy film?  Not really.  It feels more like a macho ego-stroke for Eastwood Circa 1975, with his iconic monotone, square jaw, and bad-ass behavior.  The plot is serviceable, but fails to engage because it’s consistently trumped by its function as an action vehicle, an excuse to watch Eastwood scale mountains, thump thugs and bed babes.  The performances are wooden, and the script is full of lazy cliches — not to mention casual racism, sexism, and homophobia, a sad timestamp of the more politically incorrect characteristics of its film-making era.

Eastwood also directs, and not without some skill.  The film makes good use of its western U.S. and Swiss mountain landscapes, and some of the mountain-climbing shots are impressively hairy.  Eastwood obviously did much of his own climbing, which contributes greatly to the authenticity of those sequences.  On the other hand, he overuses the wide helicopter tracking shots of nature, and the film’s pace is all over the map.  Interestingly, a massive section of the film focuses on his rigorous training for the big climb.  I appreciate that — most action heroes wouldn’t bother practicing, they’d just automatically be awesome — but it has a brutal effect on the film’s pace.

Meh.  Most of the films on the list at least make a case to warrant their inclusion:  even Modesty Blaise, in its bizarre way.  But to me The Eiger Sanction is rated way too high at #67, and probably wouldn’t even get an honorable mention on my list.  Fans of Old School Clint might get a kick out of its testosterone-heavy exploits, but most spy buffs will probably be repelled.  Or is that rappelled?

I watched Chuck with half an eye during its first season, liking it without quite loving it.  Its premise is ridiculous spy fantasy camp:  an immense database of intelligence data is downloaded into the mind of an aimless college dropout named Chuck Bartowksi (Zachary Levi).  Chuck, squandering his potential working at an electronics superstore, instantly becomes an intelligence asset, and to oversee his well being, he’s assigned two agents as handlers:  the CIA’s Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) and the NSA’s John Casey (Adam Baldwin).  By day, Chuck is a mild-mannered “Nerd Herd” computer tech trying to hold together a semblance of a normal life, but at night, he’s off on top secret missions, his unique ability to instantly access information on objects and people he sees helping Sarah and John overcome the threat of the week.  The first season was silly fun, easily watched and forgotten, held together chiefly by the goofy Levi, who I think is an outstanding comic lead, with timely support from Baldwin, who serves as a perfect grumbly foil for Chuck’s bumbling charms.

Season two elevates the show to a new story-telling level, though, and particularly in its early stages it really hits its stride, providing engaging A-story plots intertwined with increasingly effective lore and a nicely developing ensemble feel.  Chuck’s puppy dog infatuation with Sarah matures into a credible will-they-or-won’t-they romance, and the often incongruous elements of Chuck’s personal life — sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster), future brother-in-law Captain Awesome (Ryan McPartlin), best friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) — finally start to feel more integral to the the events of Chuck’s secret life.

The season definitely has missteps, most notably a two-episode arc where Sarah alledgedly falls for a sleazy MI-6 agent — and everybody mysteriously decides to start acting out of character. Chuck’s occasional tendency to feel like it’s being written by giggling adolescent boys is at its worst here.  The season rescues Morgan from his irritating, show-stopping presence in season one, making him more sympathetic and noble — but does so at the expense of the rest of the Nerd Herd.  Lester (Vik Sahay) and Jeff (Scott Krinsky) merely turn up to exhibit repulsive male behavior, while Anna (Julia Ling) is just completely destroyed as a character — when she’s even given any material.  The Buy More sequences are still kind of an albatross around the show’s neck in season two, even with Tony Hale turning up to provide some quirky retail villainy.

That said, the major plotlines and season arcs of season two are much more impressive and engaging — watching Chuck come into his own as a reluctant spy, learning a bit more about Sarah and Casey, developing the family dynamic with Ellie and Awesome, some heroic moments and character growth for Morgan, and the overarching plot of Chuck’s attempts to get “the intersect” out of his head.  There are definitely moments of emotional connect here, not on a par with, say, Buffy at its finest, but moments where the terrorist threats (or vampires) stop mattering as much as the characters’ personal struggles and interactions within the tense framework of those situations.  I wasn’t expecting this much from Chuck when I started watching it, so it comes as a very pleasant surprise.

And now, a belated review of Salt (2010), which I saw last weekend at the Arclight.  Salt is an all-too-plausible cautionary tale about the dangers of…no, wait, it’s a preposterous action vehicle for Angelina Jolie.  But it’s not without its silly charms.

Salt is a rather odd film:  a campy 1960s spy-fi premise wrapped up in ultraviolent, modern thriller trappings.  Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, an agent for a clandestine outstation of the CIA, and it’s just another day at the office until she and her boss Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) are informed they have a “walk-in” — a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) has shown up on their doorstep, bearing gift-wrapped intelligence.  According to Orlov, there is going to be an assassination in New York City later that day.  The name of the assassin?  Evelyn Salt.  “Outed” as a Russian spy, Salt goes on the run — but is she really an enemy of the state, or is something more complicated afoot?  Winter isn’t sure, but counterintelligence officer Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) isn’t taking any chances, and the pursuit is on.

Salt opens as a fairly conventional spy story, but descends quickly into non-stop, often irrational-seeming action.  Filled with video-game-like stunt setpieces, wild firefights, and insane switchback plotting, the film aims for and mostly delivers big budget spectacle and frequent (if often silly) surprises.  Its complicated twists and turns are pretty out there, but if you surrender to the camp early enough, the ridiculousness of it all actually works in the movie’s favor; the story keeps going places it just shouldn’t, and doesn’t care, which is kind of liberating in a way.  It somehow manages to engage and insult your intelligence simultaneously.

Curious to note that Salt was originally written for a male lead, and was retooled as a vehicle for Jolie.  In fact, this film is next-to-nothing without her.  Jolie is becoming one of those screen figures whose celebrity persona is constantly threatening to consume her every role, but I’ve got to hand it to her:  she can totally carry a film, and it’s hard to imagine Salt working at all without her.  Schreiber and Ejiofor provide solid support in a cast that is otherwise undistinguished.

I’d be hard pressed to recommend Salt over the scads of other, higher quality spy films I’ve seen recently, but despite my snobbishness I still kind of got a kick out of it.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a curious film, an Aaron Sorkin script largely populated by non-Sorkin-ish actors (with apologies to Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and dealing with a subject not exactly tailor made for Sorkin’s highly stylized dialogue and sense of humor:  the covert U.S. war to support Afghanistan in their war effort against the Soviets in the 1980s.  As an unlikely blend of subject matter and approach it’s not entirely unsuccessful, but it’s certainly an odd bird.

Texas senator Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a smarmy, sexist liberal hawk, whip-smart under his hedonist lifestyle.  On a whim, he doubles the CIA intelligence budget against the Russians in recently invaded Afghanistan — which doesn’t help them much, but does put him onto the radar of a wealthy, right-wing activist named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts).  A militant anti-communist, Herring maneuvers Wilson into meeting with the president of Pakistan about the severity of the situation on their border, and Wilson — along with his erstwhile aide Bonnie (Adams) — is so moved by the plight of the Afghanis that he undertakes to clandestinely support their war effort with every means at his disposal.  To that end, he liaises with curmudgeonly CIA officer Gust Avrakatos (Hoffman), and they work together to secretly get the needed weapons to the resistance fighters, meanwhile escalating Soviet defense spending to unsustainable levels, which contributes to the collapse of the USSR.

Sorkin and director Mike Nichols bring an oddly cheerful, rah-rah aesthetic to this period piece biopic, which has all the earmarks of a bitter, grim spy tale but doesn’t play any of them up.  Unlike Sorkin’s The West Wing (which it resembles in tone), it’s hard to determine which political end of the spectrum the film is playing to; if this covert war is depicted as something of a Pyrrhic victory, it’s also shown as a heroic effort to down an evil regime, and the bizarre tone makes the message seem a little muddled.  (I’m not well schooled enough in the history here to know how accurate the depiction of events is, which makes it even harder to render judgement.)

Hanks performs adequately in the lead role, although he’s definitely not a natural fit for a “bastard with a heart of gold” role — as a persona, he might be just a little too nice-guy for this.  He’s also not a natural with Sorkin dialogue, nor is Roberts or most of the cast; there’s a certain rhythm to Sorkin’s writing that only Adams and Hoffman seem adept at rendering.  (The great Hoffman, by the way, is easily worth the price of admission.)

In the end, I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War without loving it.  If nothing else, its oddly upbeat tone makes it a refreshing change of pace to the genre’s characteristic cynicism.

A well made film examining the intelligence war on terror, Body of Lies (2008) nonetheless feels slightly humdrum, perhaps because many of its themes and ideas have been dealt with more memorably by other films.

Roger Ferris (Leonard DiCaprio) is one of the CIA’s top men in the Middle East, and as the film opens his work in Iraq turns up a lead that may put them onto a major terrorist leader whose cell has been setting off bombs all across Europe.  Ferris is reassigned by his manipulative Washington control Hoffman (Russell Crowe) to Amman, Jordan, where he makes headway in the manhunt by initiating a tense alliance with the head of Jordanian intelligence, Hani (Mark Strong).  Between the hard-nosed Hani and the deceptive Hoffman, Ferris has his hands full accomplishing his mission, and things only get more complicated when his involvement with an Iranian nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), finds its way into the intrigue.

The plot is stocked with clever gambits, its intricate machinations playing out neatly, and director Ridley Scott brings plenty of energy to the exciting action sequences.  DiCaprio — who keeps turning up in this blog lately! — carries the film with aplomb, and it’s generally well acted; Strong makes for a particularly formidable foil.  But there’s something a little bit expected about it all.  The film’s major mission seems to be contrasting the harrowing experience of the man on the ground (DiCaprio) with that of the distant, calculating higher-ups pulling the strings (Crowe), and there’s something a little heavy-handed about how that comes off.   Hardly in poor form, Crowe may nonetheless be a little too obvious a D.C. schemer for the film’s own good.  Similarly, Ferris’ ill-considered romance with Aisha seems a bit out of character, pro forma plot maneuvering.  A few on-the-nose turns of phrase in the dialogue also contribute to the sense of familiar thematic ground.

An earnest, well produced, and structurally satisfying film, then, but in the end Body of Lies doesn’t quite stand out from the crowd.

The latest, excellent Alan Furst adventure, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), takes us to Warsaw in the mid-thirties, where newly appointed French military attache’ Jean-Francois Mercier, a veteran of the Great War and a widower, has become a soldier of the intelligence world.  His first assignment in Poland involves putting the squeeze on a German who’s fallen into a French honey trap and is well placed to provide insight into German armor production.  From here, Mercier’s intelligence-gathering efforts evolve to paint an ever-clearer picture of German military intentions, as he combines reluctant forays into diplomatic circle gossip with hands-on, in-the-field adventures running agents, investigating the German-Polish frontier, and spying on Wehrmacht military exercises.  Along the way, he falls for a lawyer for the League of Nations, Anna Szarbek; becomes entangled with Russian spies jeopardized by Stalin’s purges; acquires a brutal nemesis in the SS; and makes contact with a potentially important, highly placed German scientist.  Mercier carefully balances duty, expediency, and personal happiness as he fights this clandestine battle against the increasing Nazi menace.

I find it hard to comment on a Furst novel without first mentioning its unwavering adherence to a distinctive formula, and then adding how much I don’t care about that, because it’s such a great formula.  But with The Spies of Warsaw it strikes me that Furst’s work is changing, subtly.  As opposed to the sprawling, epic scope canvases of his first few books, his more recent ones have been impressively focused works, happy to center on their protagonists and one specific area of historical interest.  If the earlier works felt more immersive and comprehensive, these more recent ones feel brisker and more intense.

Either way, Furst always delivers a vivid window into the past, both entertaining and illuminating.  The Spies of Warsaw is a tightly composed and thoroughly engaging novel that leaves you wanting more, but happily so.

Somewhere between the camp of James Bond and the cynicism of John Le Carre’ lies Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer — or at least, so I’m guessing based on Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third film in a series featuring a young, bespectacled Michael Caine.  (The other two films are also on the list, but I haven’t seen them yet.)

Here, Palmer is retired and running a sordid detective agency.  MI-5 wants him back on the job but he resists, instead accepting a curious assignment from a mysterious voice synthesizer over the phone to deliver a package from London to Helsinki — which he determines are eggs.  The delivery job puts him back in touch with and old acquaintance, American scofflaw Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden), who recruits him into a nebulous organization running agents in Soviet-controlled Latvia — or so it seems at first, anyway.  Newbigen and his slinky girlfriend Anya (Françoise Dorléac) are actually running this network for a power-mad Texas oil industrialist named Midwinter (an over-the-top Ed Begley), whose plans are all organized and calculated on a supercomputer.  Newbigen, however, has been gaming the system, and Midwinter’s ill-conceived plans are likely to lead to a world war.  Reluctantly pressed back into service, Palmer needs to save the day.

Directed by the provocative Ken Russell (of Altered States fame), Billion Dollar Brain is a curious concoction, opening with a brief noir feel before morphing into a dark, mysterious puzzler, then descending into unrealistic camp.  It feels like a film struggling to bridge the gap between squeaky-clean industry code and boundary-pushing 1970s trangression.  Russell makes good use of the Scandinavian scenery, but in other ways the direction is intrusive, the pacing a stop-and-start muddle.  Underneath it all is a reasonably clever plot, but realism goes out the window when the proceedings shift to Texas, where Begley’s gun-slinging yahoo and legions of cowboy-hatted “redshirts” propel the film into ludicrous territory.  The climactic scenes are totally bizarre and unexpected, certainly interesting, but not entirely satisfying.

Caine and Malden are in good form, and the film has its odd charms; it left me curious about the other episodes in the series.  But pretty uneven stuff, all told.

Certainly not for the first time nor the last, we’re back to World War II for Hangmen Also Die! (1943), which comes with a considerable pedigree, what with Fritz Lang at the helm and Bertolt Brecht contributing to the script.  Despite some indisputable espionage trappings, I’d probably classify this more as a wartime drama than a “pure” spy film, but it’s certainly satisfying – if not entirely enthralling – on both counts.

If the era is well trodden, the geography is not:  the setting is Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, for a change, in 1942, at the height of Nazi dominance in Europe.  The Czech resistance strikes a blow for the Allied cause by assassinating infamous Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich, sinister figurehead of the German “protectorate.”  Fleeing the scene, one of the Czech assassins, Dr. Franticek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy), finds himself in a tight spot when his getaway car is forced away by a German patrol.  By sheer chance, young Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee) finds herself in the position to misdirect the German forces searcing for him – much to her later regret, as it turns out.  Svoboda – with no other options – later seeks refuge in her home.  Reluctantly Mascha and her father, a respected profesor and political leader (Walter Brennan), shelter the assassin just as the incensed authorities are ramping up their retaliatory crackdown on the Czech populace.  When Professor Novotny is rounded up by the Nazis, as one of 400 political prisoners ultimately used in a ploy to lure out the assassin, Mascha finds herself in a horrifying position, watching her father suffer for the heroic “crime” of a Czech patriot, and having to make dark, impossible decisions about which of them to save, and why.

Hangmen Also Die! is a dark, intense drama that doesn’t pull its punches — by the standards of its time, at any rate.  It’s a grim depiction of cold-hearted Nazi brutality, and a rousing tribute to those who lost their lives to combat tyranny, often paying the greatest possible price.  By contemporary standards the film is somewhat slow and unwieldy, clearly the product of a more patient filmgoing era.   Or perhaps in its faithfulness to history, it overextends itself a little; the story mutates from a suspenseful manhunt into another kind of film altogether as, later on, the Czech underground works to turn the tables.  But it’s certainly an effective film, and one that doesn’t shy away from its subject matter.  Lang’s direction is crisp and stark, and there’s a sober, noir flavor to the proceedings, particularly in its realistic, unglamorized violence.  The performers are adequate, if unspectacular, and at the end of the day, the story closes satisfyingly.

In the overall scheme of the genre, my guess it that Hangmen Also Die! would be a pick for completists only, particularly those with more patience for the talky rhythms of older movies.  But students of history, both of the era and of film, will find plenty worth investigating here.

I have a hard time imagining I’m going to like the other James Bond films on the list more than Casino Royale (2006), the celebrated Daniel Craig reboot that returns the superspy to the beginning of his career, and finally takes Bond to task for his ego, sexism, and cavalier attitude toward murder.  This is still Bond, to be sure:  it’s got the high concept actions sequences, the gorgeous international scenery, and the episodic, setpiece-oriented story-telling.  But in many ways, this is a very different Bond.

In this outing, Bond (Craig) hits the ground running (literally) in Uganda, where his frantic pursuit of a terrorist leads to significant intelligence suggesting terrorist activity in the Bahamas.  Bond’s investigation puts him onto a dastardly plot to sabotage the stock of an airline manufacturer in Miami.  His involvement in thwarting this affair puts the villain of the piece, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), in the position of having gambled away over $100 million of someone else’s money on a scheme that didn’t come off, and in order to save himself, Le Chiffre organizes a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro, with designs on winning it back.  Bond of course wangles his way into the game, with the help of his boss M (Judi Dench) and treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).  Bond has to win the money away from Le Chiffre in order to prevent the funds from making their way back into terrorism-funding circulation.  But completing the assignment doesn’t end the story, this time, as the twists and turns keep coming.

There are a lot of things to like in this one.  The opening parkour chase is an action highlight, and the other action sequences are also compelling (particularly in Miami and Vienna).  There’s also credible spy tradecraft, convoluted switchback plotting, espiocrat politics and more to elevate this one above the cartoon action-adventure of the other Bond installments I’ve seen; it’s far more satisfying as a conventional, dark spy story than its predecessors.

But even better than its standard genre elements is the fact that Bond — whose smarmy quips, reckless womanizing, and casual killing has never appealed to me — is actually called to the carpet for being an egotistical, sociopathic asshole.  Craig gets it just right, pulling off the requisite Bond flash and dazzle, but examined (for once) with an eye for the consequences of what this kind of life would do to a person, not to mention the people around him.  Craig is supported ably by the entire cast, with Eva Green standing out as Vesper Lynd, who turns out to be more than just a Bond girl du jour.  Lynd sees through Bond’s vapid, selfish behavior and happily spits this knowledge back at him, even as the tensions of the operation lead her gradually into a (mostly) credible romantic relationship with him.  There’s plenty of eyeball-kicky action in Casino Royale, but there’s more to it than strung-together escapism; there’s actual character arc here, which in my scattered experience is no hallmark of the Bond franchise.  (Also worth noting is the outstanding Judi Dench, who as far as I’m concerned needs to have a spy show built around her.  How cool would that be?)

The Montenegro card game sequences in the middle of the film, so crucial to the plot, are the only real low point for me.  No-limit hold’em poker is pretty cinematic by card game standards, but the film doesn’t really capture its intrigues (and even gets some of the details wrong, it seems to me).  Some jolting action sequences attempt to make this area more exciting, but I think the film would have done better to expedite the game and make it more interesting.

Outside of that, though, there’s not much to complain about in Casino Royale, which I think is satisfying both as a celebration of the Bond formula and an enhanced subversion of it.