11 spy movies to shake you and stir you
PHILIP Seymour-Hoffman's last starring role, in is a John Le Carré adaptation, where he plays a German spy, Günther Bachmann who is keeping a close eye on a Chechen illegal immigrant in Germany.
It being Le Carré, this isn’t a simple story of the hunter and the hunted. We find a banker laundering cash for terrorists; a doctor suspected of working for Al Qaeda and an idealistic immigration lawyer all tangled up in a web of intrigue and suspense.
Below is a few, of what we think, are the best spy films ever made.
Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) isn’t technically a spy in Alfred Hitchcock’s version of John Buchan’s classic novel, but when he tries to help a spy he’s forced to go on the run. Hitchcock was a master craftsman of the spy thriller (North by Northwest, Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much, et al); unsurprisingly, perhaps, Ian Fleming wanted Alfred Hitchcock to direct the first James Bond movie.
Novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) investigates the death of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in post-Second World War Vienna, with Carol Reed directing Graham Greene’s adaptation of his own story. Wonderfully tense and atmospheric, it made the Ferris Wheel an unlikely icon of spy fiction. Quote the elusive, unrepentant Harry: “In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.”
The first feature-length James Bond movie (Casino Royale had previously been adapted for an hour-long US TV movie) found Ian Fleming’s 007 shaking and stirring his way around the Caribbean in pursuit of a dastardly megalomaniac. Sean Connery was perfectly cast as the debonair spook with the heart of ice, and the first sighting of Ursula Andress as she sashayed out of the turquoise sea remains iconic.
With the Cold War chilling to sub-zero temperatures, John Frankenheimer’s tale of a brainwashed American POW from the Korean War (based on John Condon’s novel) was a masterpiece of tension and paranoia. Frank Sinatra stars as a decorated army veteran who experiences flashbacks that convince him the Reds are coming out from under American beds and planning political assassinations.
The antithesis, at least in terms of realism, to the glamorous adventures of 007, as Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, John le Carré’s disillusioned but dogged British spy who refuses to step away from the Cold War even though he’s likely signing his own death sentence. Grim, tense, and utterly compelling, it’s also the polar opposite to le Carré’s blackly comic The Tailor of Panama, in which a self-styled ‘spy’ invents false information to sell to the highest bidder.
Adapted from Len Deighton’s novel, The Ipcress File is another low-key British riposte to the implausibility of James Bond, as the ostensibly dull, mundane civil servant Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) battles his own department’s bureaucracy as much as he investigates the apparent brainwashing of British scientists.
Mild-mannered CIA researcher Turner (Robert Redford) returns to work from lunch one day to discover all his colleagues have been murdered, with himself as the next target. Who to trust? A slow-burning classic of the ‘paranoid thriller’ genre, Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of John Grady’s novel also stars Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
The mainstream spy movie was played as much for knowing comedy as thrills by the time Doug Liman adapted Robert Ludlum’s thriller for the big screen. Matt Damon stars as the anonymous young man who is pulled from the sea by a fishing boat, riddled with bullets and no idea of who he is — until he discovers very quickly that he possesses a whole range of lethal skills. The reinvention of the spy thriller started here.
Not to be confused with the 1967 version, which co-starred Woody Allen as ‘Jimmy Bond’, Martin Campbell’s movie was the first of the re-booted 007 franchise, and starred Daniel Craig and Judi Dench as M. Some say Craig is the best Bond since Connery; others argue he’s the closest thing to Ian Fleming’s charming but heartless killer.
The John le Carré purists might prefer the BBC’s 1979 TV series, which starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley, the man charged with winkling out the Russian ‘mole’ , but Tomas Alfredson’s feature-length film starring Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ciarán Hinds stands up to the comparison.
