The Spies (1957) User Reviews

Wildly Unpredictable Version of The Old "Spy Vs Spy"/"Who Can I Trust?" Plot

[mbs · 8/10 · 20 December 2011]

Les Espions or "Spies" as it was released here in the US in '58 is both a crazy film and a crazily efficient film. Its one of these movies that somehow manages to work as both a genre spy film AND a parody of the genre spy film at the same time. Oh don't get me wrong--it is NOT a comedy, but again both a straightforward and at times (especially in the second half) circular ride about the various secret agents, double agent spies, and possibly murderous triple agents that suddenly start to wreck havoc on the everyday life of this doctor/manager of a local mental hospital. This poor guy is getting drunk in his local pub one night and rather groggily moaning about how local politics are ruining the lives of his honest poor working countrymen but nobody's got enough common sense to either set the politicians straight or are too corrupt themselves to do anything for anyone else---somehow this is enough for this one other guy there to make the drunk doctor an offer he can't refuse---see he's a secret agent with a secret division and he will pay the good doctor a million dollars to shelter this east German defector who's got some sort of nuclear secret weapon or something that will change the fate of their country, blah, blah, blah but he's got to protect him from everyone who will come after him--the doctor more or less agrees when he sees the million dollars stuffed into his pocket and more or less stops listening, goes home, passes out, and wakes up to find....his staff has been replaced by two henchmen and a very intimidating woman who all insist they're working for the secret agent.

Doctor soon finds patients who all insist they're working for the secret agent, barflies in his favorite bar who all insist they're working for the secret agent, neighboors wandering around the grounds of the hospital who all insist they're working for the secret agent...and well an entire community seemingly made out of nothing but professional "spies" all set on inserting themselves into the life of this good doctor. Before too long the actual German guy himself turns up and who of course will turn out to be...well i'm not going to say.

Who can the poor doctor trust? Nobody but the mute woman who seems to have a rather large crush on our good doctor and the heavily sedated gastric patient who were both there before the night the secret agent made him this million dollar propisition it seems. This doesn't stop hefty, overly friendly, and creepily passive aggressive Russian Peter Ustinov--and a constantly rationalizing and fear mongering older professor from constantly turning up and explaining to the good doctor just what is what and whom is whom, and generally causing confusion. When the German man does turn up and the doctor does do his best to shelter him amidst the serious chaos. (even tho the German man can very much take care of himself--way way better then the well meaning but completely over his head good doctor can) and well things just spiral more and more out of control plot wise from there. Suffice it to say that the three people i just mentioned in addition to the fake receptionist are all serving cross purposes and are constantly leaving red herrings and massive doublespeak in their wake causing the good doctor to have a hard time trying to keep up with what the latest info is that he needs to know.

This is all actually fun for a good hour or so but then the film more or less descends into a little bit of confusion as too many things the various people are telling the good doctor are taken to be the truth or taken to be lies. I realize the fun is supposed to be in figuring out the truth alongside the good doctor but when he eventually does and tries to do everything he can about it---it all starts to seem rather pointless. Also the longer this goes on the more you want to ask yourself exactly why is he still trying to get this all straight again? the money is already in your pocket bro--just take it and run! (which is of course exactly why the first secet agent picked him in the bar back in the beginning) Questions about motivation aside--the ending leaves you with a good nasty jolt, and that queasy expression you see on the good doctor's face will definitely mirror your own as the deeper implications of the doctor's position at the end of the movie sink in. Of course I don't actually know if that will be as true for you as it was for me, i thought it was a really effective ending---but I also really like ironic Twilight Zone style endings in which the hero doesn't exactly get what he wants but sort of achieves his goals even if they're far different then the way he'd imagined it to be. Its not exactly a realistic ending cause i doubt anything in this movie is realistic but i feel like its a smarter ending then most of the espionage movies of this era usually get, its an ending that's actually quite worthy of the best of Hitchcock himself (of whose work this movie truly and seriously resembles) (on a side note this movie also more or less reminds me as a whole of the long forgotten 1980's Donald Sutherland spy caper "The Trouble With Spies" which while played for laughs does in fact echo this plot in several key ways.)

So ahead of its time it remains indecipherable today.

[dbdumonteil · 8/10 · 13 May 2002]

This is HG Clouzot's most ambitious work ,one of the most demanding and complex movie of a soon-to-be -nouvelle-vague France.Let's put it straight:although modern to a fault,"les espions" has nothing to do with the nouvelle vague:no ""free" camera here",a bunch of "old actors", a very elaborate screenplay.The problem is that it has nothing to do with the "old guard" either.The "story" flouts conventions,and HGC does not give a damn if his audience cannot catch up with it.The film was bound to be a commercial failure,particularly with an audience who got enthusiastic over "le salaire de la peur'(wages of fear) and "les diaboliques" .

The starting point may recall "the diaboliques": in this latter work,a seedy boarding-school;in "les espions" ,a doctor short of the readies,whose clinic is sinking.So why not gladly agreeing a mysterious man's proposal?One million francs,if he puts "them" up?Who are "they"?That's how the doctor's(Gerard Sety) nightmare begins.He is caught up in the system,and a lot of threatening characters (played by topnotch international actors:Curd Jurgens,Martita Hunt,Sam Jaffe)begin to show up:every time he thinks he begins to understand,the truth eludes him-Gérard Séty 's character predates Laurence Harvey's in "the Mandchourian candidate" and even Michael Douglas's in "the game".HGC watched the spies as if they were microbes under a microscope.It's a rather unpleasant view. Vera Clouzot-the unforgettable heroine of "les diaboliques" - appears in the role of a deaf and dumb neurotic woman(She was to die of an heart attack three years later).

Clouzot 's health began to deteriorate during the sixties.After "les espions" he was to make only two works "la vérité"(the truth) one of Brigitte Bardot's best parts and "la prisonnière".He made only 11 movies in all,which may not seem much,but most of them are among the best works French cinema has produced.

Cold War Spy Paranoia with a Sense of the Absurd

[k_t_t2001 · 8/10 · 25 May 2008]

In 1957 the Cold War was in full swing, "The Bomb" was a thing of terror, the arms race was still a brand new concept and international paranoia was running rampant. It was the perfect atmosphere for Henri-Georges Clouzot to release LES ESPIONS (THE SPIES) upon the world. A less celebrated film than the director's other films of the period, THE SPIES nevertheless wages a war of nerves upon a level equal to that in THE WAGES OF FEAR or DIABOLIQUE, and keeps its sense of humour as well.

Running out of patients, money and hope, psychiatrist Dr. Malik (Gérard Séty) makes a deal with the devil. In this case the devil presents himself as an American Intelligence Officer (Paul Carpenter) who offers five million francs if Malik will keep a special guest, identified only as "Alex", for a few days at his rundown sanitarium. Malik is told that this person is of interest to foreign powers and that there may be strangers looking for him. The desperate Malik accepts one million francs as a deposit, a bundle of bills that grows increasingly heavy as he awakes the next morning to find that his staff has been enigmatically replaced during the night and that the strangers he was forewarned of have begun popping up even before the arrival of the mysterious "Alex".

From this point on neither Malik, nor the audience, know what is true or who to believe. Both the friendly American, Mr. Cooper, (Sam Jaffe) and the affable Eastern European, Kiminsky, (Peter Ustinov) ooze menace from the chinks in their veneer of civility, and nothing and no one can be trusted - not the child playing in the road, the bartender across the street and certainly not the mysterious Alex (Curd Jürgens) hiding his identity behind dark glasses and leather gloves. Yet, for everyone involved except Malik, all of this is business as usual, and the sheer ridiculousness of this contrast brings a dark humour to the proceedings.

In fact the greatest weakness of THE SPIES comes in the film's last fifteen minutes, when Clouzot unwisely lifts the veil of uncertainty and makes all clear. There is no great revelation that stuns the audience, only explanation which washes away the wonderfully absurd grays that have fuelled the film up to this point, in favour of a black and white clarity that weakens the film. Clouzot attempts in the film's final two scenes to recover what he imprudently surrendered a dozen minutes earlier, but THE SPIES would have been a far finer film if the last reel had never existed.

Less easily seen than some of Clouzot's other work, THE SPIES has been given a respectable release on DVD in the UK.

Suspense and surveillance

[Camera-Obscura · 8 April 2007]

A somewhat over-plotted spy thriller by the French master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot, that features spies from different countries converging on a psychiatric clinic, run by doctor Malik (Gerard Sety), who is offered a substantial sum of money to shelter a new patient that happens to be an atomic scientist. Soon, the hospital beds are filled with international spies all desperate after the information the patient holds.

Just about everything in this espionage tale is open to question, with its wildly imaginative insinuations of nuclear devices, Amerian and Soviet secret agents and crackpot taxi drivers, doctors and patients. This film certainly has its moments, but is a little uneven and anyone familiar with Clouzot's work, knows this one is not strictly for laughs. It's all meticulously scripted, but is just a taut long (137 minutes) and soon becomes such an impenetrable puzzle, it's hard to keep track of the proceedings, but the film benefits from a good international cast, including Peter Ustinov (SPARTACUS, TOPKAPI, DEATH ON THE NILE), Curd Jürgens (THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, THE LONGEST DAY), Sam Jaffe (BEN HUR) and Vera Clouzot (LES DIABOLIQUES).

Not without interest, but ultimately, the elements just don't glue together that well, with rather unsatisfactory results.

Camera Obscura --- 6/10

Offbeat, yet uneven, spy film from HG Clouzot

[Red-Barracuda · 6/10 · 17 April 2017]

The head doctor of a failing sanatorium accepts a million francs from a mysterious government agent to harbour a new fake patient. This new inmate is said to be an inventor of a new devastating nuclear device, as a consequence, a swarm of international spies are drawn to the hospital.

Les Espions is a film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot who was tagged as the French Hitchcock before that term was applied later to Claude Chabrol. He rose to prominence with films such as the suspense classic Les Diaboliques (1955). Les Espions is a much less well-known film, in fairness this is probably partially as a result of it being a less successful end product. It has a much more ambiguous tone to it, with it starting out for the most part as a black comedy, which by the end turns deadly serious. It's an unusual combination and one which I'm not sure entirely works, with the sillier story elements working against the more serious undertones. I actually thought the ending was very good and the darker aspects more successful but I felt they were lessened a little by the more light-hearted comic tone that made up much of the earlier part of the film, which was a sort of spies vs. spies scenario with the hapless doctor in the middle constantly wondering who can be trusted? I think this is one of those movies which would be improved on a re-watch, given that once you know what it isn't as much as what it is, I expect it will be much easier to get into its rhythm and get on board with its unusual tone. On first viewing I found this to be somewhat uneven, yet aspects of it definitely left me intrigued. Even if the whole doesn't fit together perfectly, this is still certainly a film with a bit of originality.

A walk on the dark side.

[brogmiller · 7/10 · 4 February 2021]

Following the commercial failure of 'Mystere Picasso', director Henri-Georges Clouzot turned to a cold war thriller by Czech writer Egon Hoskovsky. I have not read the novel so cannot judge just how loose an adaptation it is. According to Stanislas Steeman with whom he worked twice, Clouzot ''would build something having demolished any resemblance to the original.''

This is not great Clouzot to be sure but still has touches of a master film-maker with his grasp of 'light' and pacing. There is of course the blacker-than-black humour and the usual collection of colourful but morally vacuous characters played here by some of the best in the business.

Into Dr. Malic's delapidated psychiatric clinic come Peter Ustinov as Kaminsky and Sam Jaffe as Cooper, both of them spies posing as patients and Martita Hunt, another spy, posing as a replacement nurse. There are two genuine patients in residence one of whom is a morphine addict and the other a deaf-mute. Curd Jurgens turns up as Alex but he might actually be Vogel, a nuclear scientist whose dreadful new formula is the 'Macguffin' everyone is after. The real Vogel turns up towards the end in the person of the excellent 0. E. Hasse.

I am impressed with the excellent French of Sam Jaffe and Martita Hunt who are mercifully not 'dubbed'. Miss Hunt's portrayal is outrageous and utterly riveting. The performance that lingers longest is that of Clouzot's then wife Vera who is simply stunning as Lucie the deaf-mute.

One does not really know whether the changes of tone from satire to dark drama here are intentional or accidental and although they can be somewhat disorientating, this bizarre film still succeeds as a piece of entertainment.

Following the excellent 'La Verité' nothing would ever be the same for Clouzot after the sudden death of Vera in 1960 and the totally unjustified criticisms of his work from the arrogant New Ripple brigade.

It is said that a work of art reflects its creator. What that says about Henri-Georges Clouzot the man I shudder to think but let us be grateful for the films this complex individual has given us.

"But how will I distinguish between the friends and the enemies?"

[morrison-dylan-fan · 8/10 · 2 July 2016]

Getting set to watch a number of French films over the next few months,I decided to ask fellow IMDbers about what their top movies from France are. Talking to a fellow IMDber,I found out about a title from auteur film maker Henri-Georges Clouzot which gets regularly overlooked,which led to me getting ready to go spying with Clouzot.

The plot:

Struggling to cover the running costs of his mental hospital, psychiatrist Dr Malik is taken aback when a strange called Howard offers Malik a million francs. Finding a quiet corner of the bar,Howard reveals that he is a secret agent,and that he wants to pay Malik,so that a mysterious person called Alex can stay as a patient.In desperate need of cash,Malik accepts the offer.

Before he leaves,Howard tells Malik that he should get ready for run ins with a number of strangers,some of whom are on Howard's side,and others who want to get their hands on Alex.Hitting a brick wall in his attempts to get more info from Howard,Malik goes back to the hospital.Returning to the hospital,Malik finds that his old staff have been replaced with a new gang,who are keen to learn about where Alex is.

View on the film:

Finding spies in every corner,co-writer/(along with Jérôme Géronimi) director Henri-Georges Clouzot & cinematographer Christian Matras brilliantly find confined spaces by every hospital bed,with Clouzot and Matras stylishly cornering Malik and allowing the smell of Film Noir unease to steam across the screen.Placing Malik in a headlock of paranoia,Clouzot superbly gives the spy activities a depth of field by making even the smallest glance from someone in the background be a thread of mistrust which surrounds Malik.

Spied from the novel by Egon Hostovsky,the screenplay by Clouzot & Géronimi dices the Film Noir espionage with quirky Comedy peeling away the identify of each spy,until it corkscrews into their mysterious shadows.Keeping Malik away from knowing the full deal of everything Alex and Howard are involved in,the writers brilliantly stoke Malik's Film Noir anxiety with deliciously shady characters from a battle axe agent to a businessman who put his hands too close to the flames.Ending on a chillingly open note,the writers water down some of the impact by making the various spy double crossings too tangled,that causes Malik's doubts to occasionally be put on the side-lines.

Leaving Malik in a daze,Paul Carpenter gives a whip-smart performance as fast talking Howard,whilst Peter Ustinov gives a great,playful performance as Michel Kiminsky.Joined by a delicate Véra Clouzot as patient Lucie, Gérard Séty gives an excellent performance as Malik,whose frustrations of being completely out of the comfort zone Séty grinds to the brittle Film Noir bones,as the spies spy on the spy.

A low 7

[adverts · 7/10 · 30 June 2023]

A confusing film that resolves itself by the end, although I wasn't sure what "side" all the characters were on (or even if they were all spies). It starts out strong, but the (black) comedy angle bugged me. I was simultaneously annoyed and confused in the middle of the film. The acting and direction is great, but I wouldn't NOT want to see it again.

An issue that I haven't seen brought up by other reviewers is the doctor's questionable methods. I guess it's done for comedic value, but it's not a real COMEDY....so it's hard to view as funny. He's a bad doctor! I actually thought in the end he might not even be a real doctor.

Magnificent bizarre suspense film by the French Hitchcock

[robert-temple-1 · 10/10 · 24 May 2008]

This intense study of suspicion and intrigue is devoted to the theme of 'whom can you trust?', with the answer being 'no one'. Henri-Georges Clouzot was a true master of suspense, known as 'the French Hitchcock', and he decided here to study spies in the way that an entomologist studies beetles, watching them scurry and turn over on their backs and die. Here, numerous people lie sweating in bed, many of them die, and all are betraying one another. They scurry around as if they smell something, and maybe they do, but often it is poison. One fires bullets through a door at an unknown enemy, several kill their deputies or assistants or proteges, and everyone is nervous. The Russians and the Americans both want to kill a physicist who knows too much. All of this comes to roost in a dilapidated rotting psychiatric asylum with only two patients, one mute woman played by Clouzot's wife Vera, giving one of the most powerful performances in the film without saying anything. The central character, superbly harried and worried and greedily noble, is played by Gerard Sety, to perfection. One minute he is grabbing a million, the next he is giving it away to save the world. Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham in David Lean's 'Great Expectations') is so creepy you will have no hair left on the back of your neck at the end of the film. O. E. Hasse is wonderful in a small but crucial part. Kurt Jurgens is powerful, massive, behind his sunglasses which he wears indoors as either a prisoner or a patient, one is for long not sure which. Peter Ustinov is sinister and menacing, not to be trifled with, always in an overcoat and greasily bearded. Sam Jaffe and Paul Carpenter are eerie and menacing, while vacillating between being heroes and villains: which is trying to kill which? Who is good? Who is bad? What is really going on? The complexities are so intricate, and the betrayals so compulsive that one realizes this is not just a thriller, it is a scientific study of just what its title says: 'spies', those deeply psychologically disturbed people whose sole restless compulsion is to search and betray. What a dark, fascinating, eerily photographed film, absolutely glistening with deceit in a kind of perennial dusk.

Cluedo a la Clouzot

[writers_reign · 5/10 · 19 December 2004]

In common, I would guess, with anyone who had seen and admired the earlier work of Clouzot beginning with Le Corbeau and culminating in Les Diaboliques, I approached this with taste buds primed for major salivation only to be disappointed. This has to be a one-off, a thriller sans thrills. At times it resembles one of those creaky British B-pictures of the thirties and forties so that you almost expect Wilfrid Lawson to emerge out of a pea-souper and stare meaningfully at Kynaston Reeves. For reasons best known to himself Clouzot even finds work for Paul Carpenter, surely the most inept and wooden actor on either side of the Channel, matched only by Laurence Harvey and Alan Lake. Having bought it on DVD I shall, I suppose, watch it again on the off chance that there really is something I'm missing besides a few brain cells shed in the time it took to unspool.

The inmates take over the asylum.

[philipdavies · 8/10 · 9 August 2005]

This absurdist satire of a world gone mad is a creepy delight.

SPOILER ALERT! The final scene is a real chiller, with the asylum keeper suddenly realising that, in an utterly insane world, the sane man is regarded as mad - and indeed is so, to all intents and purposes.

Like Kubrick's later 'Dr. Strangelove' the terrors of the H bomb are effectively used to create an uneasy comedy that finally lurches into horror, as the increasingly eccentric pursuit of the secret of the 'H3' super-weapon spins out of control, distorting reality itself in the process.

The twitterings of the Ocarina Players' Convention, the storm of feathers bursting (as it were) out of the frustration of a mute female patient, a mystery man called 'Vogel' (bird), and the harsh squawking of the insistent and threatening telephone: All these are memorable elements in a film as darkly humorous as anything by Hitchcock.

Curiously, I was often reminded of the quiet lunacy which threatens to engulf the two main characters in Alan Plater's TV trilogy, that begins with 'The Beiderbecke Affair'! Both film and TV series no doubt owe much to the inheritance of Kafka, showing as they each do the spectacle of people struggling to make sense out of their irrational and arbitrary fates.

The lack of any innovation in the cinematic technique of 'Les Espions' should not blind us to Clouzot's masterly creation, therein, of a world of ultimately inescapable horror.

This is a great film, and one to be viewed repeatedly.

Terribly bad

[slabihoud · 3/10 · 21 November 2009]

I really don't enjoy writing this review and I only do it because some of the other texts here give a very misleading picture. Clouzot was a great director, but even the best were not prone to make ridiculous movies. This film proves that genius and frenzy are really that close. He made some of my favorite film, The Raven, Wages of Fear, Le Diabolique.

Therefore I was very much looking forward to see this film. Although I had known that Peter Ustinov found it stupid, I hoped he had a run-in with the director and the film is quite okay. It is not. After a few minutes so many idiotic things happen, it is hard to believe.

Many famous actors appear in the film, but the main story is carried by someone completely incompetent. The plot is so stupid that I don't want to mention it as it sounds like being written by an inmate of a lunatic asylum. It was not only boring but aggravating! This should warn you not to buy the DVD as I have done after reading the other comments.

Eventually coalesces into a sharp vision of pervasive threat and anxiety

[philosopherjack · 5 February 2021]

It may seem strange that the actor with by far the biggest role in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les espions, Gerard Sety, appears way down the cast list, whereas top-billed Curd Jurgens doesn't appear until almost halfway through, and is gone long before the end. But it's an oddity that rather suits the up-is-down nature of the movie, one in which an initial feeling of clutter and peculiarity eventually coalesces into a sharp vision of pervasive threat and anxiety. In a set-up as seemingly loosely sprawling as Clouzot's preceding fiction feature, Diabolique, was tightly-wound, Sety's Dr. Malic, owner of a failing psychiatric clinic, accepts a large sum of money from an American agent to take in a mysterious patient, a decision that soon has the clinic overwhelmed by suspicious characters forcing their way onto the staff, or purporting to be patients, or crowding into the bar across the street, or watching from trees and rooftops; Peter Ustinov and Sam Jaffe play senior operatives of the Eastern and Western blocs respectively. The scheme turns out to involve a missing scientist who's discovered a breakthrough in atomic energy that threatens to destabilize the Cold War equilibrium, so that the quasi-comic portrayal of the spy game, one in which players may not even try to keep track of what side they're on, yields to real existential stakes. The ruthless ending finds both sides collaborating to preserve the status quo, leaving Malic feverishly trying to tell a truth that no one will ever hear; no one, that is, except the people on the other side of the surveillance embedded in his house, making themselves known through a coldly ringing telephone. The only sign of hope is in how a long-mute patient finds her voice in the film's closing moments, but even that's undermined by her fear of the consequences, if she should try to make it heard.

Wonderful work deserves a DVD or VHS copy

[nmalagardis · 21 January 2003]

Master Clouzot strikes again as in le Corbeau, another master piece which is invisible today. During some good old days French TV was showing these master pieces. Now, these master pieces are worth of a sacrifice from the all mighty editing firms and should be availiable to connoisseurs!