Although spy films have existed since the dawn of cinema, with famous examples appearing in Fritz Long and Alfred Hitchcock in the 1920s and 1930s, it wasn't until the outbreak of World War II that spy films really took their place on the screen.
It is a genre of cinema closely related to the contemporary political climate, and its literary and cinematic peaks unsurprisingly appeared during the outbreak of world wars and the Cold War. The latter provides fertile ground for Ian Fleming's escapist adventures of James Bond and the tedious contrasts of John Le Carré and Ryan Dayton.
Whether we are in the shadow of occupied Europe, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, or under the blazing sunshine of a foreign land, this spy movie brings us intrigue and suspense, uncertain loyalty and moral ambiguity. It's adaptable enough to play comedy, action-adventure or political thrillers.
With the release of the new 007 movie and the outbreak of the epidemic, BFI brings you 10 excellent spy movies.
The Spy (1928)
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang's spy films alone make at least half of the list, but his penultimate silent film, Spy, is the originator of spy thrillers. After the commercial disaster of Metropolis (1927), the studio tried to cancel the contract with him, and the production cost of the film was greatly reduced.
Lang himself was not particularly interested in the project, believing it to be "a little movie, but with a lot of action". Despite the apparent budget constraints in the close-up shooting program, the most important scene here — the third act of train collision — obscures the fact that it was filmed nearly a century ago.
The film's opening scenes alone— detailing the theft of documents from the French Embassy in Shanghai and the assassination of the trade minister — are already a miracle of a montage narrative economy. Rudolf Klein-Ruger plays the villain Haji, who casts this type of template in stone with his previous role as the evil Dr. Mabuse (miniature camera, vanishing ink) and ruthless deception and disguise.
Humiliation (1931)
Joseph von Sternberg
In 1931, two of the most famous female stars of the time went undercover on the silver screen. Greta Garbo won the box office crown for her role in the film Marta the Witch, starring Marlene Dietrich. This is her third of seven collaborations with director Joseph von Sternberg.
In Humiliation, Dietrich plays the piano-playing Flower Street goddess who transforms into a patriotic spy, who is tasked by the Austrian Secret Service to steal secrets from Victor McLaren's Russian colonel. This is the most complex and versatile role joseph von Sternberg has created for his star, lover and muse: a series of disguises and disguises that all show the extraordinary range of actors, while making real characters hidden under endless self-protective performances invisible, or at least indistinguishable.
"I live a disgraceful life. It may be my good fortune to die a glorious death. "The real Mary finally, in an almost imperceptible moment, appeared before me, gaining elusive dignity in martyrdom.
Contraband (1940)
Michael Powell
This is the second collaboration between British director Michael Powell and Hungarian screenwriter Emerick Presberg, and "Contraband" is the second collaboration after last year's "Black Spy" filmed by the two at Orkney, co-starring Conrad Witt and Valeria Hobson again.
More lighthearted and fun than the previous film, Witt plays a Danish sailor whose ship is detained off the coast of Kent for cargo inspection. When his coastal pass was stolen, he went after Hobson's thief and entered london's lights, where he discovered a Nazi spy group.
Powell filtered his shots with his unique, eccentric feelings through clips of Hitchcock's expressionist dreams, and later shared details of a small supporting role he didn't cut out in his 1986 autobiography: "There's a cute little cigarette girl... With a lovely pair of watery eyes and pretty long legs, a small scene of her and Conrad Witt ends up on the floor of the editing room. Unfortunately, I didn't continue editing because this was deborah Cole's first time on screen. ”
North by Northwest (1959)
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock has used spy movies again and again throughout his career, from 39 Steps (1935) to Beauty (1946) to Breaking the Iron Curtain (1966), any of which could have made a place on the list.
Is North by Northwest (1959) the best of them? It's undoubtedly one of his best works, telling a story that spans the country, setting the set-piece from Manhattan to Mount Rushmore as a resounding benchmark.
George Kaplan sees the "bad guy" story unfold when the advertiser played by Cary Grant on Madison Avenue is kidnapped by James Mason's spy gang. In discussing the twists and turns of Ernest Lehman's script, giving the best impression of Hitchcock, he recombined clips from his earlier films into one of the highest-grossing series.
He may have given up the dark psychodrama of the previous year's Ecstasy and replaced it with some lighthearted thrills, but it's not frivolous to see a master and his main partner perform these hits in this way.
The Commissioner of Havana (1959)
Carol Reid
Graham Green, who knew nothing about espionage, was recruited into Intelligence Six— where he worked under the notorious Soviet agent Kim Philby — and was chosen by his sister. Although he was dismissive of his spy novels, he generously brought some of his most famous adaptations to the screen.
The Havana Commissioner, his third collaboration with director Carol Reid, was shot on location shortly after the fall of the Batista regime (with a beautiful widescreen design by Oswald Morris) much more relaxed than their earlier masterpiece, The Third Man (1949).
Green put his script into comedy, with Alec Guinness playing a vacuum cleaner salesman and newly recruited agent, maintaining his increasingly extravagant life through fantasy tales of selling high-tech weapons.
It's remarkable that Guinness played the maker at various stages of drunkenness, but the supportive shift as Caribbean network chief and London controller, Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson, best exemplifies the dry, comical satire of Green's script.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
John Frankheimer
Directed by John Frankenheimer, this Classic Cold War film is both a precursor to the paranoid conspiracy thriller of the 1970s and a descendant of the classic sci-fi film of the 1950s, The Enemy is Among Us. The film tells the story of a group of American soldiers who are kidnapped in South Korea and then brainwashed into becoming political assassins.
"They discovered a technique that relies half on light and half on drugs to get into the subconscious." Frank Sinatra, the traumatized Army major, who had repeated nightmares, also adopted this technique. The details of this Sino-Soviet plan came early, leaving Lawrence Harvey with only the outcome of the problem.
It's a strange narrative style for a thriller, but "The Manchurian Candidate" proves the Manchurian candidate's trump card (or, rather, the Queen of Squares).
From his unbalanced frame to the shift in focus to the properly hypnotic performance, Frankheimer maintains a disturbing and bizarre sense of paranoia and breaks the uneasiness with a sudden burst of violence. The suffering candidates played by Sinatra and Harvey are brilliant, but Angela Lansbury plays one of the most fearsome monsters in the movie.
007 Russian Love (1963)
Terence Young
Every spy movie should have a good train shot, which 007's second film couldn't be clearer. It's the first time James Bond (Sean Connery) and undercover Ghost Party leader Donald Grant (Robert Shaw) — "murderous paranoid, first-rate material" — meet each other for the first time as they sit down in a food truck and engage in a deadly battle over a stolen cipher machine. "Red wine with fish, that should tell me something," Bond said.
The Cold War strategy of Russian Love darkened and matured the themes established in Dr. Noe (1962), establishing spectre— the off-screen Q divisions of Brofield and Desmond Luerin. Grant, played by Shaw, is Bond's perfect moral and physical foil, while SMERSH's head of operations, the pointed Lotte Lenya, describes the evil entanglements of the series.
Spy Berlin (1965)
Martin Ritter
"What do you think a spy is?" Moral philosophers weigh whether everything they do is contrary to the words of God or Karl Marx? They are not. They're nothing more than a bunch of vile and lewd bastards like me. No writer can spoil the fantasies of James Bond in spy games like John Le Carré.
Spy Berlin is his third novel, and it is the first film adapted from his work: one that chronicles a "dirty operation" with the aim of bringing down an East German agent.
Richard Burton plays Alec Liamas, "a man in action", head of the Berlin railway station. He quickly disguised himself as a resentful drunk, beat up a grocery store owner, and baited the Germans to lure him into defecting.
Claire Bloom played an idealistic communist librarian, which was a cruel affair, and oswald Morris, the faithful cinematographer of spy films, shot the film naked again, and he later made Spy Dragon Fight (1973) and Odisha Secret Piece (1974).
Mission Impossible (1996)
Brian de Palma
The spy series Mission Impossible has been made six times (seventh and eighth are in production) and is still strong at the box office despite their increasing budgets. But the first in 1996 is still the climax of the series, the only reason: Mission Impossible may contain a lot of things, including a work by Tom Cruise Studio, but most importantly it is the work of Brian de Palma.
Three minutes of the film. An agent watched the interrogation on a video monitor filled with a television set that proved the film was a 60s TV series. At the end of the conversation, the target is anesthetized, his interviewer tears off his face, revealing the mask of Cruise's agent Ethan Hunt, while the room is found to be a set, destroyed and pushed away by the IMF team, and a dead girl (Emmanuel Bea) is resurrected.
Their faces and false pretense, double agents and disbelief what you see is today's order. De Palmar questioned the way the image was MO, all within the scope of a blockbuster A at the highest level. This is all before we get the credits, let alone the vault.
Munich (2005)
Steven Spielberg
2005 was an amazing year for Steven Spielberg. If his first film in 12 months, The Battle of the Worlds, was a 9/11 fable about the inability to control or overcome a disaster, Munich was a film about dealing with the consequences of trauma. The film ends with footage from the World Trade Center, which is not without reason.
It's an amazing technical achievement and one of Spielberg's best edited films, even though it only lasts three hours. It is also one of his most morally tortured and troubled films, telling the story of the revenge assassination of a black action group after the "Black September" attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The barrage of scenes is shocking, and nothing emphasizes Spielberg's skill in shot design more than telephone bombing: determining the geographic location and orientation of the space through the barrier between the characters and the camera, clarifying the stakes and the sequence of events, and then setting up obstacles — in this case, the obstacles are the target's little daughter.