IMDb user comments for
Serpent, Le (1973)

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9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Twisted and somehow realistic, 29 December 1999

Author: Eric Sayettat (sayettat@hotmail.com) from Paris, France

We all know about the living characters who inspired the plot but this movie adds a note of ambiance and gives a inside view of the cold war merciless hunt for deeply buried moles...

The actors, American, English and French are outstanding, the plot is larger than life. It seems now a piece of History but it reminds us that a lot was at stake not so long ago.

"Le Serpent" is probably one of the best spy movies ever made, it is certainly one of the best French ones.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Enjoyable espionage thriller with a great international cast, 23 November 2005

Author: Mark Pizzey from Reading, England

Finally I was able to see the thriller The Serpent on DVD under a new but poor title NIGHT TRAIN FROM MOSCOW (why this has been changed I don't know).

Any film that has Yul Brynner, Henry Fonda & Dirk Bogarde has to be worth watching but this is rarely shown on TV so I was pleased to find the recent Pathfinder DVD release. The film is very much in the trend of your typical spy drama from the sixties (see The Spy who came in from the Cold and The Quiller Memorandum) despite being made in 1973.

Brynner is Vlassov a valuable KGB agent who defects on the condition he supplies the CIA with information regarding Double Agents operating in the West. Question: Is he telling the truth or is he himself another carefully placed spy? It's up to CIA head Henry Fonda with the help of British Intelligence Representative Dirk Bogarde to determine this.

Phillipe Noiret, Farley Granger, Robert Alda (father of Alan) and Virna Lisi provide the support in an intriguing thriller. Although some of the plot twists are predictable and there's a lengthy absence of the 3 main protagonists in the second act, the pace is just right as opposed to other Bond alternative spy dramas where slow pacing and no action result in boredom.

Surprising therefore that The Serpent isn't more widely known as it's a gem of a thriller with a good ending.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Too Good To Be True, 1 June 2008

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Talk about international cast, this French film Le Serpent boasts players from America, The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Russia. It's an espionage story with Yul Brynner as a high ranking KGB colonel defecting to the west and bringing a whole lot of goodies with him.

What Brynner is bringing to CIA chief Henry Fonda is a list of fifth columnists who've been operating for years in the west in all the western allied countries. A lot of deaths start occurring in all these countries as problems are dealt with one way or another.

Of course this information wreaks havoc with the intelligence services of the west. Which just might have been the desired Soviet intention.

In this cast the best performance hands down is that of Dirk Bogarde as a Kim Philby like MI5 man. Somebody's had their eye on him for a long time.

Spying can be a dirty business and Le Serpent certainly shows the seamier side of it. If you're looking for James Bond like heroics this isn't your film.

Le Serpent is in the tradition of the Richard Burton classic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Not as good but better than a whole lot of stuff these old timers were appearing in during the Seventies.

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Titanic !, 24 July 2008
Author: ahmed elshikh (ahmed_abd_elreheem@yahoo.com) from Egypt

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

At that era, there were a lot of big production movies with a lot of international stars, something to challenge the mighty power of television back then, and the strange mood of films that hit the genres' formulas in the groins !

Maybe someday I'll give you a list of this kind of movies as it ended up mostly being flops, real proud turkeys, and another huge titanics.

Here, it fulfilled all the previous conditions, yet the ambition was just well meaning. Actually after the astonishing (Z - 1969) the term "political thriller" became encouraging. 4 years later (Night Flight from Moscow) tries to make something balanced between the serious satire (the cold war is never over despite any detente), and the commercial sense of suspense, to achieve eventually mediocre work both ways. It could've been genuinely one great espionage movie where all the parties enjoying deceiving each others, but the finale result was that tasteless and a little bit embarrassing putting in mind the big names.

It's frigid, and that's strange when you look into the history of its director (Henri Verneuil) !, it's silly like a noir movie where all the killings and all the killers are complicatedly successive, it's idiot when you examine the evidences that finally exposed the Russians' real trick.. You've got to think whether the whole Russian intelligence is so dumb? Or the real dumb ones whom want to convince you with some things as low as this ?!

It's, though, a fest of stars, one paranoiac movie, and an early time to launch a twist that surprising ..I think, despite some weakness, it was unpredictable and even more, considering the year of production, as since the 2000s, this became ordinary fashion in movies.

It deserves a view, and for the wicked sentence that (Yul Brynner) said to his watchers through the camera, plus the way he said it.

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