At the outset, yet another KGB agent has just been shaken out of the ranks of British Intelligence, and paranoia is running high. Or is it really paranoia at all? This is unmistakably John le Carré country or its next-door neighbor (the director, Simon Langton, had done the television miniseries of Smiley's People), and recognition of its familiar topography (lots of bogs and gullies) and more importantly its familiar climate (damp and drear) will tip off the viewer immediately to expect no better from Our Side than from Their Side. Michael Caine, a mere civilian treading a path remarkably similar to that of Jack Lemmon in Missing, is as always a marvelous actor to watch: such economy of expression that any expression at all comes to seem quite extravagant. Not so much he, but a lot of the actors around him, are slowed down by some unmouthably sententious and expository dialogue. That, and an atmosphere of dismal realism so relentlessly enforced that nothing resembling excitement is ever allowed to creep in. With John Gielgud, James Fox, Gordon Jackson, Nigel Havers. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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