The Looking Glass War

J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay is one major basis, Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain another.

The Blitz and the Cold War, the swinging and the unswinging, are a few of the explicit themes.

A compromised agent is one seen going in, he can be fed disinformation, the facts stand as they are, which was the point in the first place.

Variety found “some superior dialog and structuring.” Tom Milne of Time Out Film Guide took the opposite view, “totally tedious as the sense of authenticity is dissipated on a welter of incredibly silly dialogue spoken by incredibly silly characters.”

Jones as the Polish sailor is highly hoked up from Buchholz to effect, the death of the homosexual truck driver in East Germany is a complex allusion.

According to Halliwell’s Film Guide, “merely verbose and irritating.”

Citizen Cohn

The hatchet-job biography, regardless of its subject, considered as a mode pure and simple, akin to the plain smear and the “dark side” biography, is typically an exhibition of blood lust and naïveté, as here. The very point of the film is to exacerbate the characteristics of the genre until it becomes an Indian massacre that only stops short of buggering the corpse, or cannibalism.

If every word and frame were true, and paid back Cohn in kind on top of that, it would still be the hatchet job par excellence, the hatchet job to end all hatchet jobs.

The performers are heroic after a fashion, but one deserves to be singled out for mention, Fritz Weaver as Senator Dirksen.