The Quiller Memorandum (1966) Arriving in the very midst of the spy movie frenzy kicked off by the Bond films, this one fell into that parallel sub-genre of more realistic, down-to-earth spy adventures......populated by far more mortal, vulnerable and realistically flawed anti-heroes like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer.....(see our recent 12/2/21 post on Caine's "Funeral In Berlin" as a prime example....)
Michael Anderson's mundane, mediocre direction exists here only in service to the dry sardonic screenplay crafted by famed playwright Harold Pinter. Pinter tosses out all the twists, turns and various machinations of the Adam Hall spy novel used as source material. (So unlike the Caine-Palmer series, you won't need to wrack your brain to figure out what's going on.......)
The spy vs. spy stuff couldn't be any simpler......In Berlin, .Quiller an American agent on assignment for stiff-upper-lip Brit spymasters is tasked with smoking out a cabal of Neo-Nazis deeply embedded in every strata of German society. The Brits want to know where they're hiding to round them up and the Nazis want exactly the same thing - where they can find the Brit spy HQ......
That's about it, plot-wise, but the actors and the coldly remote, witty Pinteresque dialogue sets the film above the ordinary. George Segal, then at the height of his A-list leading man stardom, makes Quiller something of a bemused yet intelligently wary secret agent.......he doesn't come equipped with either a gun or snappy retorts, but in his repressed arrogance, you can detect the wry contempt he feels for the business he's in and the people he works for.
The head spy honchos are true Pinter creations, a couple of uppercrust, imperious snobs (George Sanders, Robert Flemyng) who blithely discuss the murders of their previous two agents while lunching on pheasant at their posh men's club. Quiller's boss, Pol (Alec Guinness) radiates the same cool, stoic vibe as he and Quiller carefully contain their clear disdain for one another.
With the help of a local schoolteacher (the radiantly stunning Senta Berger) it doesn't take long for Quiller and the Nazis to find each other. No goose-stepping slobberers, these guys..... the Nazis here come across more like the pod people in Phillip Kaufman's remake of "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers".......they look like everyday pedestrians with silent blank stares. Only their leader, 'Oktober' stands out, a chatty aristocrat played by Max von Sydow with a Blofeld-ian cheerfulness. (and with more enthusiasm than when he actually was Blofeld in the 'rogue' Bond, "Never Say Never Again")
From that point on, the film breaks down to a repetitive series of foot chases, interrogations, foot chases, more interrogations and.......you guessed it, more foot chases.
The tireless Quiller, unarmed and way outnumbered finally does employ some Bond-like ingenuity to outwit and outplay Oktober's army of seemingly mild mannered goons, but only at the cost of finding out that all along, he's been played himself.......and cleverly betrayed as well. (We don't consider this much of a spoiler, since that's boilerplate stuff for all spy movies in this semi-realistic sub-genre...it comes with the territory......)
By the time we finished "The Quiller Memorandum", it dawned on us that we really did enjoy the film......for Segal's subtle but ever present cheekiness, Senta Berger just for being beyond scrumptious, for John Barry's melodic, mournful main theme and for those unforgettable Pinter dialogue exchanges.
(Our favorite by far - Segal's jovial but uneasy byplay with the hulking thug whom the Brits assigned as his 'minder', played with equal friendly threat by Peter Carsten, whom we forever remember as the odious Nazi mercenary from "Dark Of The Sun" You won't hear dialogue as strangely funny and unsettling as this in any other equivalent spy film....)
And especially for the film's casually bitter finale......implying that Quiller has barely skimmed a chip off the hidden iceberg of Neo Nazis hiding among the populace........(even more disturbing when we consider that state of America today, where the very presence of Donald Trump allowed these inhuman larva to emerge from the rocks they lived under.....)
A worthy addition to the 1960's spy movie filmography, we'd call it a fascinating 3 star (***) check-it-out for anybody who loves this genre.
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