ABSTRACT
The movies The 1960s sample includes two James Bond movies: Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962) and the same director’s Thunderball (1965). Others include a comedy, Theodore Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), two espionage thrillers, Sidney Furie’s The Ipcress File (1965) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969), and a fictionalized documentary, Paolo Heusch’s Bloody Che Contra (1968). Beyond this random sample, other films of the decade were viewed. These included two other James Bond movies, Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger (1964) and Val Guest and Ken Hughes’ Casino Royale (1966). There was another comedy, featuring James Coburn: this was the second of the “Flint” movies: Gordon Douglas’ In Like Flint (1967), appearing only a year after the first, Daniel Mann’s Our Man Flint (1966). The term “CIA” is not used in either of the Flint movies. Derek Flint (James Coburn) is an ex-agent of Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage), which appears to enjoy the same level of presidential access and status as the CIA, and we should assume therefore that it is intended to stand in for the CIA. There were two espionage thrillers, Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). The CIA is a particularly egregious absence in Torn Curtain, which is precisely why it is included, for reasons we will explain. Although it may be only circumstantially about the CIA, the Costa-Gavras movie Z (1969) deserves a mention. Additionally, two movies from the tail end of the previous decade, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1959), merit discussion. The CIA does not figure in this latter which is, none the less, worthy of attention because of its humorous attention to spy craft and its vanities, and because of its curious prediction of Cuba as a potential threat to the United States, coming only three years before this actually became the case. Combining these categories, sample and non-sample, yields 14 movies, of which four are James Bond movies, two belong to the Flint series (sometimes regarded as a US-style spoof of the British Bond) and three are “realist” espionage dramas – two of these directed by Alfred Hitchcock – dealing with historical events or establishing realist connections with events of their time. One is an
espionage thriller without pretensions of reality, and two are (almost) drama documentaries. The Bond movies are based on the character created by novelist Ian Fleming. Other celebrity novelists represented here are Len Deighton (The Ipcress File), John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and Leon Uris (Topaz). The Ipcress File, featuring fictional down-at-heel MI5 spy Harry Palmer, was one of a trilogy of Palmer movies that appeared in the 1960s, all of them based on novels by Len Deighton. The other two were Guy Hamilton’s Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Michael Caine starred as Palmer in all three. The latter two 1960s Palmer movies barely featured the CIA. There is no reference to the CIA in Funeral in Berlin. In Billion Dollar Brain, there is a disparaging reference to the CIA not being up to date in its surveillance of the activities of an insane Texas oil billionaire, General Midwinter. Midwinter plans to destabilize the Soviet Union, starting with an uprising in Latvia. Audience credulity is indeed stretched beyond its limit to imagine that the CIA would not have had a role to play, even if only in support of Midwinter’s ambitions. A different instance of this phenomenon is Michael Anderson’s The Quiller Memorandum (1966), whose screenplay was written by Harold Pinter. This concerned a neo-Nazi movement in Berlin penetrated by British agents. From the vantage point of the 2000s, it again stretches credulity that such an operation would not have been coordinated in some way with American intelligence. The hero, British agent Quiller (George Segal), is even played by an American. Two more Palmer movies appeared in the 1990s (George Mihalka’s Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Lewis Gilbert’s Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1996)), in which Caine also played Palmer. But these were based on original scripts, unrelated to novels by Len Deighton. The three 1960s Harry Palmer movies were all produced by Harry Saltzman, who was also coproducer with Albert Broccoli of the Bond movies Dr. No (Terence Young 1962), From Russia with Love (Terence Young 1963), Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964), Thunderball (Terence Young 1965), You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert 1967), and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt 1969). Harry Saltzman and Alfred Hitchcock between them produced about half of all the movies mentioned for this decade.
