Movies about Soviet spy
Heroes of the KGB: the communist bloc’s spy films
A secret agent is attending a party in an elegant apartment. Beautiful young people wear the latest fashions, sip martinis and canoodle in corners. The spy slips into a back room and starts breaking into a safe. It looks like a scene from a James Bond movie – except this is communist Hungary, and the heroes are what western policy makers in the cold war would have called «them», rather than «us». The film is Fotó Háber, an ultra-stylish spy drama made in Budapest in 1963, and, like many of the films emerging from behind what was the iron curtain, it blows apart the glum, grey image of the eastern bloc from the inside.
That we have the chance to see Fotó Háber is thanks to a short season of European spy movies showing at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, to mark the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The western ones are worth a look, but the real interest lies in the much rarer films from Warsaw Pact countries, including Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union.
During the cold war, the spy movie genre became an obsession on both sides of the divide, with the same recurring themes either side of the iron curtain: the secrets and intrigue of the cold war, the futuristic new style of the space age, the exciting possibilities of high technology, and the even more exciting possibilities of the sexual revolution. Any preconceptions about the Soviet bloc being a dour place full of grumpy peasants in headscarves queuing all day for turnips may be left at the door. Instead, these films depict a world that is, like Bond’s, wildly aspirational: these are films with fast cars, sharp suits, hard drinking, and a seemingly endless supply of bouffanted young women in heavy eyeliner taking their clothes off.
At the beginning of Smyk (Skid), a lavish and lyrical Czechoslovakian drama made in 1960, a Czech agent in glitzy west Berlin slaps the stripper from Prague with whom he has just left a bar. This is a blow, he explains, «in the name of thousands of your countrymen working for the freedom of their country while you are acting the prostitute!» He suggests she could make money another way. «There are all kinds of possibilities. For example, espionage.» She fires back: «I think it’s more honest to act the prostitute.»
The 1960s, when most of these films were made, constituted a golden age for real as well as fictional espionage. The technology of war had moved on alarmingly fast, while the technology of communications lagged hopelessly behind. During the 1950s, both the Americans and the Soviets were pouring resources into the nuclear arms race. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev claimed – falsely – to be churning out intercontinental ballistic missiles like sausages from a machine. Horrified, the Americans churned them out for real. The very fact that Khrushchev was bluffing hints at how much the flow of information between east and west mattered, and how crucial it became for governments to control it. The further fact that American intelligence knew he was bluffing, and allowed the public and much of the government to go on believing in a «missile gap» anyway, confirms it.
This was a world in which a president could launch nuclear missiles against another superpower in 15 minutes, but could not telephone his counterpart first to tell him. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, messages between Khrushchev and John F Kennedy took 12 hours to arrive, during which both leaders’ fingers were figuratively hovering over the big red button. There was then no telephone line between the White House and the Kremlin. Moreover, long-range intelligence gathering was sketchy. During the early 1960s, the best long-range surveillance of Soviet military sites came from American U-2 spy planes. These took photographs on negative film. The film had to be flown back to base, then on to the United States; there, it was developed into positive prints and painstakingly analysed by experts. Data from U-2 overflights could take days to reach the director of the CIA.
In a world so dangerous, in which information flowed so slowly, the spy on the ground assumed unprecedented importance – as did counter-intelligence agents charged with thwarting them. This spy-versus-spy theme is central to 1964 Polish thriller Spotkanie ze Szpiegiem (Rendezvous With a Spy). A mysterious western-allied agent, dressed exotically in a pin-striped suit, checked shirt and flat cap, parachutes into a Polish forest. His mission: to gather information about missile base locations around the Baltic. He is spotted immediately by the enormous, dazzlingly hi-tech Polish military intelligence service – it may be worth stating again that these movies paint an aspirational picture – and three handsome counter-intelligence agents are sent to hunt him down. There follows a fast-paced game of cat and mouse, with the counter-intelligence agents using all the most modern surveillance techniques to bust the spy and his network without revealing themselves. There is even an impressively staged finale with a car chase. If it doesn’t quite live up to the adrenaline rush of Goldfinger, released the same year, perhaps that is because in place of Bond’s Aston Martin, Rendezvous With a Spy has to use a Skoda. However, eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the car chase bears a distinct resemblance to Bond’s first on-screen effort, 1962’s Dr No.
Though many communist spy films qualify as propaganda movies – including Rendezvous With a Spy – they are far from the blatant flag-waving of second world war cinema. In the east, as in the west, the spy genre aimed to be a sophisticated form of entertainment. So, though viewers need be in little doubt that the three Polish agents are the heroes and the parachuted-in spy is the villain, the spy is a fully developed character. In one scene, he is checking out an apartment when a little girl and her grandmother return to it. He hides behind a curtain, barely daring to breathe. The tension is high, and you may find yourself rooting for the bad guy.
There is no such doubt in Skvorets i Lira (Starling and Lyre), a glossy 1974 melodrama from the Soviet Union made by Sergei Eisenstein’s one-time co-director Grigori Aleksandrov. It depicts the USSR as a would-be peacemaker among nations, under siege by a secret cabal of western capitalists known as the Council of Gods. «Peace with communists is absurd,» says one council member, decked out in the standard-issue western fat-cat uniform of white tie and tails. «To start a war, we need to create an anti-communist Europe.» Laborious theorising about the military-industrial complex is occasionally relieved by a syrupy romance, but the message is stark: capitalist propaganda from the west is aiming to tear eastern Europe away from its natural ally, the Soviet Union.
Despite the high production values and the high profiles both of Aleksandrov and his wife and leading lady Lyubov Orlova (in her last role), Starling and Lyre was never widely released even inside the Soviet Union. One rumour said this was because the ageing Orlova was upset by how she looked in the film. Another suggestion is that the film was canned by the authorities because some elements resembled the real-life «Guillaume affair» of 1974, in which a personal assistant to the west German chancellor Willy Brandt was discovered to be a Stasi agent. In hindsight, the film seems too kitsch to constitute much of a threat to anything except good taste; but it is nonetheless an intriguing glimpse into how the Soviet Union saw itself, and the west.
Not all Soviet bloc films were so heavy going. The dialogue-free Romanian film from 1961, S-a Furat O Bomba (A Bomb Was Stolen), features a man who goes flower-picking and accidentally ends up in possession of a bag containing a stolen nuclear bomb. In the madcap farce that follows, he becomes the unwitting object of a struggle between devious gangsters and sinister soldiers – rendered slightly less sinister by their low-budget safety attire, consisting of buckets on their heads. There is formation dancing, cross-dressing, a romance with a pretty tram conductor and a custard pie to the face.
Communist or capitalist, a custard pie to the face is somehow universal. The difference between «them» and «us» was not quite so great as either side thought.
The Celluloid Curtain: Europe’s Cold War in Film runs until Monday at Riverside Studios, London. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Alex von Tunzelmann’s Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean is published by Simon & Schuster.
10 Great Cold War Spy Movies
In Steven Spielberg’s movie «Bridge of Spies,» Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, an NYC attorney who previously served as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials. He’s asked to represent spy Rudolf Abel in a gesture designed to prove to the Soviet government that Americans take their principles seriously. Donovan takes that task a little too seriously for everyone involved and manages to save Abel by getting him a 30-year sentence instead of the execution the public wants to see.
Donovan realizes that Abel can be a bargaining chip and eventually is brought in to engineer a trade for downed U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers, also gaining the release of an American student arrested by the East Germans as part of the deal.
«Bridge of Spies» isn’t one of Spielberg’s serious Oscar-bait pictures (see «War Horse» or Lincoln»), recalling Hanks and Spielberg’s underrated capture-the-con-man flick «Catch Me If You Can» more than the kind of serious fare that gets awards-season attention. That’s a recommendation: the movie features great performances from Hanks and Mark Rylance as Abel, plenty of great period design and sure direction from the master. It’s the kind of literate movie that you’d think Hollywood could crank out by the dozen and you hardly ever see.
Here are ten other great Cold War espionage movies to enjoy once you get caught up in Allied/Soviet spy games.
1. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965)
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7 BEST Soviet detective, spy & adventure movies & TV shows (VIDEOS)
Set in the time of the Russian Civil War, WWII and the Cold War era, these productions will show you what suspense and adrenaline truly are.
1. 17 Moments of Spring
Tatiana Lioznová/Filmové studio Gorkého, 1973
A Soviet spy named Max Otto von Stierlitz, planted in pre-war Germany just before the Nazi takeover, must disrupt Nazi plans to hold secret negotiations aimed at forging a separate peace between Germany and the western Allies. Meanwhile, an officer of Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, begins the hunt for a Soviet mole in the ranks of the SS.
This TV series is widely recognized as the most successful Soviet espionage thriller ever made.
2. The Elusive Avengers
Edmond Keosayan/Mosfilm, 1966
Four youngsters make a pledge of mutual assistance after the father of one of them is tortured and killed by a warlord fighting in the Russian Civil War. The four young friends embark on a series of adventures aimed at disrupting the operation of the ruthless gang led by the bloodthirsty warlord. This is a classic example of the so-called ‘Ostern’ (“Eastern” in German) or ‘Red Western’ genre, a Soviet interpretation of classic Western movies.
3. Sherlock Holmes a Dr. Watson
Igor Maslennikov/Lenfilm Film Studio, 1980
Soviet movies about the famous British detective are widely recognized as a solid attempt at the renowned series of books by Arthur Conan Doyle. For many in Russia, Vasily Livanov acting as Sherlock Holmes became the face of the franchise.
Filmed between 1979 and 1986, this TV series was also appreciated on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Livanov was even made an honorary member of the Order of the British Empire for “service to the theatre and performing arts”.
“In fact, it was pretty great,” wrote The Guardian about the series. “[…] You barely notice a road in Latvia standing in for Baker Street.”
4. Desyat Negrityat (And Then There Were None)
Stanislav Govorukhin/Odessa Film Studio, 1987
This adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel published in 1939 is unique because, unlike Western adaptations, none of the characters or their respective crimes were altered in any way and the movie concludes with the grim finale from the original novel.
It was filmed in Crimea in 1987, with most of the scenes outside filmed near the legendary Swallow’s Nest castle, but as the rooms of the castle were too small, the interior scenes were filmed in a different location.
5. The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed
Stanislav Govorukhin/Odessa Film Studio, 1979
This Soviet TV mini-series accommodated some classic noir features in it. It features ambushes, chases, murders, shootouts and the iconic Vladimir Vysotsky as a police officer in post-war Moscow. The charismatic cop needs to crack a mystical crime syndicate going by the codename ‘Black Cat’.
6. Visit to Minotaur
Eldor Urazbayev/Central Film Studio of children’s and Youth films named after M. Gorky, 1987
This detective series is not as reverberating as the above-mentioned The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, yet it is a great example of the Soviet detective genre. It is set in Moscow in the 1980s. A unique violin, made by Antonio Stradivari, is stolen from a renowned musician. While the police investigate the case, the viewer is introduced to a parallel storyline set in 17th century Italy and featuring violin maker Antonio Stradivari himself.
7. TASS Is Authorized to Declare.
Vladimir Fokin/Gorky Film Studio, 1984
This spy mini-series is set in the Cold War era and depicts the struggle of American and Soviet intelligence agencies for the influence over a fictional country of Nagonia on the African continent. The KGB intelligence must neutralize a mole agent working for the Americans, who desperately seek secret information on Soviet supplies to the fictional African state. The miniseries is a classic example of a typical Cold War-era propaganda movie, yet not without its charm.
Click here to find out why Russian police ‘Robin Hoods’ executed criminals without a trial.
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