Category Archives: Cold War

The Mind Benders (1963) – Tuesday’s Overlooked Film

Posted on 4 December 2012 by

Dirk Bogarde is the troubled scientist at the centre of this suspense drama combining espionage, brainwashing, sensory deprivation chambers and domestic navel gazing that often feels like a rich inverted pudding, light on the bottom and heavy on top. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Basil Dearden, Cold War, DVD Review, Espionage, Oxford, Scene of the crime, Spy movies, Tuesday's Forgotten Film | 20 Comments

Top 20 Spy movies

Posted on 27 November 2012 by

The release of Ben Affleck’s smart historical satire Argo, based loosely on the true extraction by the CIA and Canadian officials of six American Embassy staff members out of Tehran in 1980, made me reflect on the spy genre as … Continue reading →

Posted in 'Best of' lists, James Bond, Film Noir, Spy movies, Adam Hall, Quiller, Len Deighton, John le Carre, George Smiley, Scene of the crime, San Francisco, New York, London, Alfred Hitchcock, Espionage, Paris, Amnesia, Brian de Palma, Michael Powell, John Frankenheimer, Billy Wilder, Eric Ambler, Elleston Trevor, Cold War, Ian Fleming | 69 Comments

Telefon (1977)

Posted on 20 November 2012 by

This adaptation of the 1975 spy novel by Walter Wager has a great central gimmick and features the unlikely pairing of granite-faced action hero Charles Bronson and high-class beauty Lee Remick under the take-no-prisoners direction of Don Siegel. It often … Continue reading →

Posted in Amnesia, Cold War, Espionage, Los Angeles, Moscow, Scene of the crime, Spy movies, Tuesday's Forgotten Film | Tagged | 35 Comments

The Blake Edwards mysteries

Posted on 6 November 2012 by

In a career spanning six decades, writer-director Blake Edwards (1922-2010) really mixed it up, making almost every conceivable type of film. There were westerns (Panhandle and Wild Rovers), musicals (Darling Lili and Victor Victoria), dark drama (Days of Wine and … Continue reading →

Posted in Blake Edwards, Cold War, Espionage, Evelyn Anthony, Hollywood, London, Michael Crichton, Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer, Paris, Police procedural, Private Eye, Robert Bloch, Rome, San Francisco, Scene of the crime, Screwball, Tuesday's Forgotten Film, TV Cops | 43 Comments

Spaceways (1953)

Posted on 2 October 2012 by

An engaging if curious genre hybrid, this is a patchwork movie combining Cold War espionage, a murder mystery and two love triangles in a science fiction setting – and all on the tightest of budgets. Unpretentious and fun, this British … Continue reading →

Posted in Cold War, Espionage, Hammer Studios, Science Fiction, Spy movies, Terence Fisher, Tuesday's Forgotten Film | Tagged , | 24 Comments