The Quiller Memorandum
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Movie Reviews of The Quiller Memorandum
Movie Review: Very good solid plot
Summary: 5 Stars
Very fine movie. Very enoyable to watch with the family (perhaps not the kids). A thick plot about the rise of neonazism on Germany. I'm halfway throught the movie and enjoying it very much. And, even tho, my parents don't speak English they can enjoy it too with the Spanish audio dub. Go ahead and purchase yours today!Movie Review: Cold War
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a good movie. I seen it once before when I was in the army in Germany in the late 60's and all I could remember was the song Wednesday Child. I could'nt find it until recently. I'm glad Amazon had it. HoppybobMovie Review: The Quiller Memorandum DVD
Summary: 5 Stars
An excellent and intelligent spy thriller. Beautiful score by John Barry. The enhanced 2.35:1 picture is very good.Movie Review: The Quiller Memorandum
Summary: 4 Stars
I have watched The Quiller Memorandum twice, very recently. Once, for the first time--and now I've had another go-round with the film historians' commentary clicked ON.
This is a 60's spy movie that, if it sacrifices any realism along the way, doesn't lose it to big explosions, over-the-moon action sequences, or gimmicks and gadgets, but rather in its attempt to be somewhat surreal, even nightmarish in its effect. I thought film historians Lee Pfeiffer and Eddie Friedfeld might have been more willing to focus on the slightly cyclical nature of the film: our hero, Quiller, in an attempt to pinpoint the headquarters of a neo-Nazi group in Berlin, seems to go in circles no matter how hard he tries to outwit a legion of sinister villains who are closing in on him. There is a key moment in the film, quite late, where Quiller, played by George Segal, is walking towards a phone booth along a creepy Berlin street in the dead of night, peeking up at darkened windows looking for possible snipers. In fact, this scene is exactly the same as the opening of the film, where Quiller's predecessor, the spy sent earlier to root out neo-Nazis who didn't quite live up to the job, is in exactly the same predicament. By the time Quiller is wondering if he's going to reach that phone booth alive, the viewer can only wonder if Quiller has gone through EXACTLY the same circumstances, despite all his efforts to win the day, that his predecessor went through. This kind of thing gives the film a delicious sense of innate hopelessness; the small army of villains as supreme puppetmasters, leading the small, lone hero along an inescapable trail to a preprogrammed doom that nobody seems able to escape.
This theme of Quiller being just clever enough to stay alive and show a few tricks, but caught in a hopeless circle is reinforced in some smaller, subtler ways: the lead villain, Oktober, played splendidly by the amazing Max Von Sydow, flicks a dropcloth off a misleadingly inviting-looking red chair, so that Quiller can sit down and be tortured...be tortured in the same chair, in the same classy-dungeon setting, by the same smooth-talking Sydow, as he was earlier in the film. Also, when Quiller is given a time limit by Von Sydow to make a key decision that would mean betrayal of his mission and his boss, Pol, played amazingly by the splendid Alec Guinness, Quiller is ordered by Oktober to "go for a walk" to think it over, and his numerous attempts to shake off the thugs following him around lead to repeated failures.
These sequences, which at first glance suggest a film with a largely ineffectual--perhaps even an incompetent--hero, tie in well with the main disagreement that erupts throughout the commentary by Pfeiffer and Friedfeld; Pfeiffer does not like the Quiller character as much as Friedfeld does (or as much as I do), suggesting that Quiller is a "hollow man", not fully fleshed out or explained when it comes to his motives, his past, his commitment to the Berlin mission, or even why he's an American guy working for British Intelligence. I was expecting the film historians to start arguing about whether George Segal is, frankly, miscast--but the argument is never couched in those terms. They argue mainly about Quiller's effectiveness, not Segal's, and this leads to a lot of discussion about Harold Pinter's somewhat inscrutable script, when they are not unconditionally praising Von Sydow or Guinness or the entire filmography of either one (fair enough).
To my mind, Pfeiffer and Friedfeld fail to make a crucial "mental leap", although Friedfeld--my chatterbox of preference, here--skirts around the edges a bit. My take on Quiller being too mysterious or undefined is this: if Quiller is hard to fathom because we don't get enough info...what about Von Sydow's character, Oktober? And what about the bossman, played by Alec Guinness? For that matter, what about the pretty Berlin schoolteacher who befriends Quiller, admittedly under false pretences (Quiller lies to her--spies will be spies)? We don't know anything about anybody! It's fair to say that nobody in this film seems to know anything about anybody else; they're just working together, or working against each other. So if you start picking on Quiller as underwritten, where does it stop?
The characters in this film are subservient to the dangerous games they play, and to the cyclical nightmare reality that they fight it out in. Quiller makes mistakes due to recklessness, and gets outwitted by his enemies--and they are everywhere, as this quickly becomes a film where you wonder if you should trust anyone who is within a five mile radius of Quiller, even if they are blurry in the background, never mind the shady-looking guy at the bowling alley where Quiller asks too many questions!--but Quiller, if you watch carefully, fights like a wildcat to break the hopeless circles he wanders in, whenever he can. The film seems to take its most interesting turns at those key moments when Quiller is finally able to make a move that his enemies don't anticipate. But then Oktober and his minions stay on his trail, closing in, waiting for Quiller to get reckless again. There is kind of a surreal openness to the proceedings by the time Quiller has been sent off by Oktober to think about his fate and make a difficult decision, to walk around and mull it over "in freedom" while a group of nasty henchman simply follow Quiller around, right out in plain sight, to keep him from doing anything, y'know, heroic. This is a weird, fascinating spy movie, which the film historians doing the commentary describe as an "anti-Bond" approach. The truth is, if you liked the recent Bond film Casino Royale, but Die Another Day doesn't work anymore as a follow-up so you went back to Connery's 007 outings and now you need something beyond, you might give this a spin. There is some action: car chase, Quiller trying to punch his way past numerous bad guys, torture, big menacing villain, twists you may not see coming, deathtrap, explosion, some exciting scenery.
But, yeah, some of the cool stuff is "anti-Bond", including Segal's Quiller, whose strange mistakes and inefficiences just mean that the character is subservient to the film's real intent...in the same way that Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard, in Blade Runner, sometimes makes you think "is this guy any good at his job at all?". (Actually, Quiller comes off as more competent than Rick Deckard, in my opinion.) The Quiller Memorandum is a spy film with its own subtle maneuvers serving a secret agenda: it wants to feel slightly like a nightmare. I'm reminded of some other creepy films I like, with sinister puppermasters: The Parallax View, Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate. The Quiller Memorandum is a pleasure to watch, as the mysterious-stranger of spy films. And thank you Eddie Friedfeld, for interrupting Lee Pfeiffer's Cold War lectures and other long speeches enough to get the commentary back onto scenes actually occurring.
Movie Review: A satisfyingly cynical spy thriller with George Segal, Alec Guinness and Max Von Sydow; and a script by Harold Pinter
Summary: 4 Stars
If your idea of an exciting spy thriller involves boobs, blondes and exploding baguettes, then The Quiller Memorandum is probably not for you. With a screenplay by Harold Pinter and careful direction by Michael Anderson, the movie is more a violent-edged tale of probable, cynical betrayal by everyone we meet, with the main character, Quiller (George Segal), squeezed by those he works for, those he works against and even by the delectable German teacher, Inge Lendt (Senta Berger) he meets.
Quiller has arrived in Berlin for an assignment under the control of Pol (Alec Guinness). He is to infiltrate and locate the headquarters of a neo-Nazi organization headed by Oktober (Max Von Sydow). And, by the way, Pol tells Quiller, the two men who had the assignment before you were both killed. It's not long before Quiller realizes, as he's captured, drugged and questioned by Oktober, that Oktober's organization is just as interested in locating and wiping out Pol's group. Quiller managers to escape, but was it too easily done? Pol points out to Quiller that he's now a piece between two players who cannot see each other. Only Quiller can see them. If he gets too close to one player, the other player will follow him and know how to take action. Both Pol and Oktober, each in his own way, would be perfectly content to sacrifice one agent in order to catch the bigger game. Quiller is on his own. He's crafty, careful and resourceful. He doesn't carry a gun. The one thing he has going for him is that he knows he dare not take anything at face value. The resolution may see the bad guys finally taken...but not all of the bad guys. The Quiller Memorandum, while exciting in its own way, has a distinctly bittersweet air to it. The film doesn't leave you with world-weary angst, just the knowledge that if you want to trust anyone you'd better find another line of work.
I have no idea how many writers who wrote popular screenplays went on to become Nobel laureates, but at least one did. Harold Pinter, who won the Nobel for literature in 2005, brings some of the supposedly enigmatic Pinter style to the movie. There are stretches of dialogue that may make you wonder what on earth the point is, but then you realize the point is to let you think about what these people are up to and what they are really like. The scene in a sports stadium when Quiller first meets Pol is quite funny because it seems so irrelevant. Guinness and Segal play it straight, which makes it even better. But in between the mannered irrelevancies of Pol's observations about Nazi rallies, acoustics, how hungry he is and how good one of his sandwiches looks, we begin to think about how ruthless a man Pol probably is. Pinter uses the same approach with Max Von Sydow's gentlemanly questioning of a tied-up Segal. While John Barry's music score is, to me, often too Sixtyishly obvious, the quiet, thoughtful theme he uses under the credits gives fair warning that this is not going to be a rock 'em, sock 'em spy thriller. All the actors do fine jobs, including George Sanders and Robert Flemyng as two London spy mandarins at their club, who are as much concerned about the quality of the pheasant Flemyng is having for lunch as they are about the situation in Berlin.
I suspect that many people will be intrigued by the film, but that others will find it slow, too cynical or too complicated. Give the movie a chance; even cynicism at times can warm an empty heart. The DVD transfer looks just fine to me. There is a printed insert in the case which gives background on the film. The only extra is a commentary by Eddie Friedfeld and Len Pfeiffer, identified as film historians. I didn't take the time to listen to it.