Having been inundated with James Bond and Jason Bourne, it's easy to forget that much of the spy genre doesn't accurately depict the actual lives of spies. Not even in the same ball park.
Spies aren't one-man armies or charismatic seducers. They're people in the shadows like Greville Wynne who go about the same routine over and over in hopes of gleaming a trace of information that could make a difference in history.
The story is told at what I like to call the speed of history. While that's a different type of film than a spy thriller, the stakes are no less enormous and the intellectual and enormous weight of the costs are no less effectively portrayed.
Spies aren't one-man armies or charismatic seducers. They're people in the shadows like Greville Wynne who go about the same routine over and over in hopes of gleaming a trace of information that could make a difference in history.
The story is told at what I like to call the speed of history. While that's a different type of film than a spy thriller, the stakes are no less enormous and the intellectual and enormous weight of the costs are no less effectively portrayed.