Spy Films



FROM COLD WAR TO NEW WORLD ORDER

Just as the synthesis of glamour and disillusionment in Hitchcock's British espionage films increasingly tended toward a critique of the whole project of spying, the two poles were split for other filmmakers whose view of spying was formed by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Following a modest Red-baiting cycle that included I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Pickup on South Street (1953), the glamour of spying returned full force in James Bond, the British superspy created by Ian Fleming in Casino Royale (1953) and brought to the screen in Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and their increasingly souped-up sequels. The formula Fleming had honed—political paranoia overcome by personal toughness, personal style, and a license to kill on behalf of Her Majesty's secret service—was retooled in the film franchise, the most financially successful in history, which made Bond considerably more suave and less brutal, though the combination varied greatly depending on whether Agent 007 was played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, or Daniel Craig. A series of self-parodying imitations starring equally imperishable, but far more forgettable, agents like Derek Flint ( Our Man Flint , 1966; In Like Flint , 1967),

Sean Connery as James Bond emphasized the glamour of espionage in such films as From Russia with Love (Terrence Young, 1963).
Matt Helm ( The Silencers , 1966, and its sequels), and television's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–1968) helped make the spy the most ubiquitous culture hero of the 1960s.

Even as legendary counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was relentlessly combing the ranks of the CIA for the double agents he called "moles," The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) won John le Carré (b. 1931) a wide following for his far more jaundiced view of espionage, however idealistically motivated, as an endless series of double- and triple-crosses, often by one's own service. The 1965 film version was only the first and bleakest of a series of le Carré adaptations that included The Little Drummer Girl (1984), The Russia House (1990), and The Tailor of Panama (2001), as well as the television miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and Smiley's People (1982), which features le Carré's most enduring creation, resolutely colorless agent George Smiley, who had made his film debut with his name changed to Charles Dobbs in The Deadly Affair (1966). The more insistently 007 and his disciples asserted their heroic identities, the more Smiley and his inoffensive colleagues like Harry Palmer ( The Ipcress File , 1965; Funeral in Berlin , 1966; The Billion Dollar Brain , 1967) and television's John Drake ( Secret Agent , 1964–1966) and Number Six ( The Prisoner , 1967) shrank into the woodwork, convinced that the key to their survival lay in their ability to pass unnoticed.

Although the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989 took the edge off a genre that had already lost its urgency, cloak and dagger films survive in as many contemporary guises as the secret agent's own. James Bond stand-ins like Harry Tasker ( True Lies , 1994), though settling down to family life, refuse to retire, and outsized films of adventure, intrigue, or counter-terrorism emphasizing Bond-like action ( Die Hard , 1988, and its sequels), technology ( The Hunt for Red October , 1990), or special effects ( Mission: Impossible , 1996; Mission: Impossible II , 2000; Mission: Impossible III , 2006) continue to gross millions. The genre's appetite for historical nostalgia, already hinted at in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), has produced entries as varied as The Day of the Jackal (1973), Eye of the Needle (1981), The English Patient (1996), and the television miniseries Reilly: The Ace of Spies (1983). Films from The Crying Game (1992) to Ronin (1998) to The Truman Show (1998) have followed Hitchcock's lead in linking spying, or being spied on, to fears of a more general loss of identity, and The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) has made counterterrorism a metaphor for a fashionably radical epistemological skepticism served up with state-of-the-art digital effects. It remains to be seen what the legacy of September 11, 2001 will be for this durable, protean genre.

SEE ALSO Cold War ; Crime Films ; Genre ; Thrillers

Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero . London: Methuen, 1987.

Black, Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Cork, John, and Bruce Scivally. James Bond: The Legacy . New York: Abrams, 2002.

Langman, Larry, and David Ebner. Encyclopedia of American Spy Films . New York: Garland, 1990.

Lisanti, Tom, and Louis Paul. Film Fatales: Women inEspionageFilms and Television, 1962–1973 . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.

Parish, James Robert. The Great Spy Pictures . 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1974–1986.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers . Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wark, Wesley K., ed. Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intelligence . London: Frank Cass, 1991.

Thomas Leitch



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