The Quiller Memorandum [1966] [DVD]

The Quiller Memorandum was originally intended by the Rank Organisation to launch a series to replace the Harry Palmer films after Harry Saltzman took them to Paramount and subsequently United Artists after both studios dropped out of Saltzman's Battle of Britain. It got off to a good start at the box-office but never caught on outside the big cities, although the BBC did resurrect the character for a short-lived series with Michael Jayston in the 70s. Ironically not only filming but also some locations overlapped with Funeral in Berlin, resulting in at least one bizarre photo-opportunity of the two jaded spies happily swapping notes.

The battleground is political ideologies again, but unlike other sixties spies and despite being set in West Berlin, Quiller isn't concerned with cold war politics or communist spy rings (you don't even see the Berlin Wall) but instead with the far right. Well, unless you saw it in Germany on its original release, that is, where Max Von Sydow's cabal of neo-Nazis became communists in the dubbing process. Its use of locations is exemplary, the Nazi focus on healthy minds and healthy bodies working its way into the choice of settings, from swimming pools to schools, and the influence and flow of history illustrated by the die-hard neo-Nazis hiding in the bombed out ruins of the old Germany while the next generation of fascists work out of gleaming modern buildings that are part of the rebuilt Germany. George Segal's Quiller is even briefed in the Olympic stadium Hitler had built for the 1936 Games by Alec Guinness's ever so slightly camp salami-munching cockney.

Perhaps alone among spy thrillers, this is the one where everyone knows the screenwriter's name but virtually no-one remembers the director's. Harold Pinter's often sadistically playful script is without doubt a cut above, preferring unspoken deceptions and more insidious mind games to action scenes. Indeed, the first interrogation scene between a drugged Segal and a quick-thinking Von Sydow is a particularly smart and convincing bit of wordplay as the one tries to steer the questions away from the subject with thoughts of sex only for the other to use them to lead the cross-examination back to the point, while the rematch at the end of the film sets the spy a far more effective moral conundrum. Certainly as Michael Anderson's reputation has diminished and Pinter's grown it's become one of the few films where all credit has gone to the screenwriter, but Anderson's direction is surprisingly strong, particularly if you see the film in its original Scope ratio. John Barry's score is quietly impressive too, eschewing the downbeat jazz of The Ipcress File and the boldness of his Bond scores for a haunting loneliness that helps set Quiller apart from his more popular predecessors.

Network's widescreen 2.35:1 UK DVD doesn't have the edge enhancement problems of the previous Carlton issue, but sadly it does have a lack of detail, with some shots appearing out of focus and faces tending to be flattened. The extras package, however, is superior to both the Carlton DVD and the recent US DVD, offering 35-minutes of on-location interviews with Segal, Von Sydow, Guinness, Senta Berger, Anderson and producer Ivan Foxwell, stills gallery and the UK theatrical trailer. (Fox's region 1 DVD shows willing on the extras with an audio commentary, US trailer, booklet and trailers for Our Man Flint, In Like Flint, The Chairman, Deadfall, The Magus and "Peeper.)

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.

A realistic spy thriller with a marvellously layered script from playwright Harold Pinter, The Quiller Memorandum was produced in the mid-1960s, when Bond-mania was causing filmmakers to jump on the espionage bandwagon with enthusiasm. However, the world inhabited by George Segal's Quiller is dour, downbeat, and treacherous, a far cry from the gadget-laden fantasy world of Sean Connery's James Bond; the film is closer in tone to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Funeral in Berlin (the movie it most resembles), but is even more unconventional as an exercise in genre cinema. Though its atmosphere is one of suspicion and intrigue, featuring a couple of accomplished suspense sequences, this movie is more interested in exploring the mental games spies play than it is in delivering action-packed adventure (even the climax takes place off-screen). The vastly underrated Segal gives a fine performance of confident cool; a man assured of his own brains and skills to such a degree that he makes looking cocky and over-confident a point of pride. He loses his overbearing bodyguards with ease, openly threatens men tailing him, and deliberately reveals himself to his enemies in order to get close to them. The scenes in which he tells various bad lies to those he suspects in order to make himself look foolish and clumsy are marvellously subtle. He doesn't even carry a gun, reasoning that it means he is `less likely to get killed'. Rarely regarded as an A-list leading man in movies, Segal nevertheless starred in some of the most underrated movies of the 1960s and 70s, like prisoner-of-war drama King Rat, and Mike Hodges' nihilistic sci-fi piece The Terminal Man. Also very good are Alec Guinness as Quiller's sarcastic boss (not a million miles away from his portrayal of George Smiley for the BBC), and Max Von Sydow as the head of the neo-Nazi cell Quiller is trying to expose, and the gorgeous Senta Berger. Michael Anderson's unobtrusive direction is perfectly in tune with Pinter's enigmatic script, and best of all is the movie's ending, when Quiller's suspicions about a certain character prove to be true, and yet the exhausted, betrayed agent still manages to be hurt by the revelation; it manages the unthinkable and makes this most cynical of spies just a little more cynical.
This DVD edition is by no means exhaustive in its selection of extras, but is probably about as extensive as it can be, given the age and relatively little-known status of the film. The trailer is a marvellously overblown attempt to sell the film as an all-out action movie, whilst the on-set interviews with the main players are interesting, even if Segal, Guinness, and Von Sydow look distinctly uncomfortable giving them.