It's always a bit saddening to see a film such as Master Spy fall by the wayside. It is not the most brilliant movie that you will ever see, but it has its compensations, and is never offensive.
The shot over the opening credits is quite good if you have an inkling of how chess is played, black's position is squeezed as if by a boa constrictor. I thought it set the film up quite well, but if one is not being attentive it will pass you by quite easily.
I enjoyed seeing Victor Beaumont at the start, a German character actor, typecast as the snarling Nazi officer through most of his career trying here to put on a Russian accent.
The plot basically is about a Russian defector called Turganev who goes to work on his 'neutron ray' at a nuclear experimentation laboratory in England. It's quite clear from the start that his agenda is not so straight forward as is made out. In fact if you haven't worked out he is a spy, it's probably because you were too busy washing up the breakfast dishes whilst you watched this (the most likely time and place you will see this film is as a TV matinée).
But the spy plot is not really the whole point. The film does in fact have a nice late 50s early 60s atmosphere, very reminiscent in more than one way of Kingsley Amis' novel the Anti-Death League. A chap on Wikipedia said it better than I ever could, Amis, "championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure against the demands of any cosmological scheme." Well through the character of Leila (June Thorburn) that's exactly what we have here.
In the movie she is assigned as Turganev's assistant and it is clear that she humanises the man, turns him from a calculating double-agent into someone who is loathe to use his research to further human agony. It's not laid out on a platter like that for us, and there is no foolish melodrama, but that's the general sentiment. It's clear that Leila is disturbed by her own colleagues' lack of interest in the uses that their research is put to, so you can't really put Master Spy down as just another Cold War propaganda movie.
Another commentator has said that there wasn't much effort put into this film, well I for one thought the sets were pretty well done, there were some nice sculptures and paintings on display. I was thinking Paolozzi, Epstein, Moore, lending a nice little post-war British intellectual atmosphere. I think it quite remiss to write this film off as easily as some viewers have. One might expect when watching a movie like this to see a lot of derring-do, suspense, and gun-fights, well fortunately the director steered clear of all that.
Have a nice time watching this movie, but don't expect the world.
The shot over the opening credits is quite good if you have an inkling of how chess is played, black's position is squeezed as if by a boa constrictor. I thought it set the film up quite well, but if one is not being attentive it will pass you by quite easily.
I enjoyed seeing Victor Beaumont at the start, a German character actor, typecast as the snarling Nazi officer through most of his career trying here to put on a Russian accent.
The plot basically is about a Russian defector called Turganev who goes to work on his 'neutron ray' at a nuclear experimentation laboratory in England. It's quite clear from the start that his agenda is not so straight forward as is made out. In fact if you haven't worked out he is a spy, it's probably because you were too busy washing up the breakfast dishes whilst you watched this (the most likely time and place you will see this film is as a TV matinée).
But the spy plot is not really the whole point. The film does in fact have a nice late 50s early 60s atmosphere, very reminiscent in more than one way of Kingsley Amis' novel the Anti-Death League. A chap on Wikipedia said it better than I ever could, Amis, "championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure against the demands of any cosmological scheme." Well through the character of Leila (June Thorburn) that's exactly what we have here.
In the movie she is assigned as Turganev's assistant and it is clear that she humanises the man, turns him from a calculating double-agent into someone who is loathe to use his research to further human agony. It's not laid out on a platter like that for us, and there is no foolish melodrama, but that's the general sentiment. It's clear that Leila is disturbed by her own colleagues' lack of interest in the uses that their research is put to, so you can't really put Master Spy down as just another Cold War propaganda movie.
Another commentator has said that there wasn't much effort put into this film, well I for one thought the sets were pretty well done, there were some nice sculptures and paintings on display. I was thinking Paolozzi, Epstein, Moore, lending a nice little post-war British intellectual atmosphere. I think it quite remiss to write this film off as easily as some viewers have. One might expect when watching a movie like this to see a lot of derring-do, suspense, and gun-fights, well fortunately the director steered clear of all that.
Have a nice time watching this movie, but don't expect the world.