Watching this with a friend of mine, he commented "I was just saying the other day, even the 'B' movies from the 70s are better than the best movies today." Even allowing for the fact that this came out in 1983, that's an excellent point.
They rarely make movies like this anymore. It's an exciting spy thriller, but it's realistic, and it's got some brains behind it as well. There are no idiotic "Air Force One" acrobatics, no gigantic explosions (with a character jumping towards the camera in the foreground) and no snappy catch-phrases. Just a good mystery and a boatload of great performances.
One thing that's interesting about this film is that in the end, the mystery turns out to be about commerce, not politics, which is unusual for this sort of cold-war Soviet thriller.
Another exceptional feature is the great script by the legendary Dennis Potter. This sort of thing makes me wish he had done more movie scripts for hire. While it's certainly not a personal project like Pennies for Heaven or The Singing Detective, Potter still turns in a top-notch script, filled with typically Potterian touches (like frequent references to losing your skin, and the smart, snappy, hilarious dialogue in general).
Another Potter touch (also used in Christabel) is the way all the characters (except the Americans) use British accents. This is a little disconcerting at first, but once you're used to it, it works really well. First, an actor playing a Russian and speaking English with a British accent is hardly any more "unrealistic" than an actor speaking English with a Russian accent. More importantly, the use of British accents (as in Christabel) allows Potter and the actors to indicate the characters' relative social status, by the type of accent they have. Intellectually, it doesn't make any sense to have the Soviet administrators talk in an upper class British accent, and the regular cops speak with a Cockney accent, but artistically, it induces an immediate emotional response in the viewer that makes a real difference between the two characters instead of just presenting us with two indistinguishable "Russian cops".
All in all, this is an under-appreciated thriller that holds up extremely well, over twenty years later.
They rarely make movies like this anymore. It's an exciting spy thriller, but it's realistic, and it's got some brains behind it as well. There are no idiotic "Air Force One" acrobatics, no gigantic explosions (with a character jumping towards the camera in the foreground) and no snappy catch-phrases. Just a good mystery and a boatload of great performances.
One thing that's interesting about this film is that in the end, the mystery turns out to be about commerce, not politics, which is unusual for this sort of cold-war Soviet thriller.
Another exceptional feature is the great script by the legendary Dennis Potter. This sort of thing makes me wish he had done more movie scripts for hire. While it's certainly not a personal project like Pennies for Heaven or The Singing Detective, Potter still turns in a top-notch script, filled with typically Potterian touches (like frequent references to losing your skin, and the smart, snappy, hilarious dialogue in general).
Another Potter touch (also used in Christabel) is the way all the characters (except the Americans) use British accents. This is a little disconcerting at first, but once you're used to it, it works really well. First, an actor playing a Russian and speaking English with a British accent is hardly any more "unrealistic" than an actor speaking English with a Russian accent. More importantly, the use of British accents (as in Christabel) allows Potter and the actors to indicate the characters' relative social status, by the type of accent they have. Intellectually, it doesn't make any sense to have the Soviet administrators talk in an upper class British accent, and the regular cops speak with a Cockney accent, but artistically, it induces an immediate emotional response in the viewer that makes a real difference between the two characters instead of just presenting us with two indistinguishable "Russian cops".
All in all, this is an under-appreciated thriller that holds up extremely well, over twenty years later.