It’s closing in on twenty years since I met Michael J. Totten, at a life-changing writer’s workshop in Michigan. Not long after, he contributed to another life-changing move for me, letting me crash in his spare bedroom for a while when I relocated to Iowa City. Since then, Mike’s gone on to become a highly [...]
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Some spy films offer heightened reality action-adventure, dashing heroes, beautiful femme fatales, and clockwork plots. Army of Shadows (1969) is not even remotely one of those films. This lengthy World War II period piece depicting the brutal, cold reality of life in the French Resistance is slow, dreary, and unnerving. Perhaps moreso than any other [...]
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If you were a TV producer who wanted to get my attention, you would succeed spectacularly by pitching your show as “Mad Men meets Rubicon.” This is exactly how I first heard The Hour (2011) described, and the shoe fits, although I think it brings even more elements to the table. The six-episode period piece [...]
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Historical thriller Eye of the Needle (1981) takes us back to wartime England in the 1940s. This one stars the ubiquitous Donald Sutherland as “the Needle,” the last German spy behind the lines in England during World War II. In 1944, shortly before the invasion of France, the Needle obtains evidence that Patton’s First Army [...]
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Over the weekend I finally caught up with The King’s Speech (2010), an excellent biopic that suffers only from being utterly unsurprising at every turn. Such are the perils of history-based films, I suppose… Colin Firth delivers a sensational performances as Prince Albert, the Duke of York, an earnest, introverted man whose taxing royal life [...]
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Ian Tregillis’ Bitter Seeds (2010) is a brilliant cross-genre mashup, mixing liberal doses of macabre dark fantasy, fascinating World War II alternate history, comic book action, and suspenseful espionage. It opens in 1939 in Spain, where the Germans are field-testing an elite unit of secret, superpowered soldiers in the civil war, in preparation for their [...]
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The Odessa File (1974) brings some good old-fashioned, post-WWII intrigue to the list. The film begins when German journalist Peter Miller (Jon Voight) receives the war diary of Solomon Tauber, an elderly Jew who committed suicide, from a friend on the police force. The diary tells the tale of Tauber’s experiences in a Riga concentration [...]
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The New Wave takes on the spy game in La Guerre Est Finie (1966) (The War is Over), a lethargic black-and-white affair that coalesces so slowly that it almost doesn’t coalesce at all. Yves Montand headlines the cast as the lugubrious Diego, an agent of the Spanish communist underground working to combat Franco’s fascist regime. [...]
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How is it possible that one of film history’s most famous masterpieces only made #46 on the Spy 100 list? Perhaps Casablanca (1942) isn’t a “pure” enough spy film? Whatever the justification, I think it’s wrong: this is a great, great film that deserves to be ranked much higher. It’s got great, well defined characters, [...]
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