Customer Reviews

The Quiller Memorandum

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Based on the best selling 1965 novel by Adam Hall, this movie starring the likes of George Segal, Alec Guinness, Max Von Sydow and Senta Berger remains fairly faithful to the source novel except in the miscasting of Segal in the lead role. In the novel Quiller is British, but here Segal plays him as an American agent - and it doesn't work as well as it might. There is for example no explanation given as to why Quiller is working for the British and reporting to a British handler. Still, the movie is an intelligent and tautly constructed thriller as Segal scours through Berlin looking for the ringleaders of a shadowy neo-Nazi organization.
The lead special feature for "The Quiller Memorandum" is an audio commentary conducted by film historians Eddie Friedfeld and Lee Pfeiffer. The two are obviously good friends (both being professors at NYU) and the commentary is very academic in tone, but still engaging. They begin by framing the movie in the context of the Cold War. Other key points in the commentary include discussions on the symbolism in the movie and standards of the spy genre. They go on to discuss how "The Quiller Memorandum" fits in perfectly with a rash of espionage movies of the mid- to late-sixties. At that time a series of "anti-Bond" movies were being released from the Harry Palmer series through to "Quiller." They featured a reluctant, cynical hero with even more reluctant, cynical bosses. This allowed these movies to capitalize on the 007 phenomenon, but with a more realistic view of the world.
An interesting collectible booklet accompanies the DVD, which is actually quite in-depth. It includes discussion on the development of the story; the adaptation by acclaimed Harold Pinter, the tremendous cast, the help afforded the production during its German shoot and how the villains were changed from Neo-Nazis to communists when the feature was released in Germany.
Both "Quiller" and "The Chairman" (also being released by Fox on Nov. 7) contains trailers for several other movies, of varying quality. The trailers for "The Quiller Memorandum" for example include not just the one for the feature, but also for "Our Man Flint," "In Like Flint," "The Chairman," "Deadfall," "The Magus" and "Peeper." As might be expected however the trailers do show their age, and not always gracefully.

"The Quiller memorandum" is an unfortunately often overlooked Cold War-era spy thriller that is an excellent example of the genre. Set in a divided Berlin, it pits our hero, Quiller of MI-6 (played with world-weary, casual aplomb by the wonderful George Segal) against an evil underground cell of resurgent neo-Nazis, led by Max von Sydow. The beautiful German actress Senta Berger literally glows on the screen and features in an interesting plot twist made all the more disturbing by her on-screen job as a school teacher. The incredible Alec Guiness, in a small but critical role as Pol, epitomizes the faintly creepy, ever-inscrutable British spymaster that one never knows is friend or foe. Elegantly directed on location by Michael Anderson, it stands with "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" as one of the two best 'non-James Bondish" spy films of the late 60's. STRONGLY recommended!!

If your idea of an exciting spy thriller involves boobs, blondes and exploding baguettes, then The Quiller Memorandum is probably not for you. With a screenplay by Harold Pinter and careful direction by Michael Anderson, the movie is more a violent-edged tale of probable, cynical betrayal by everyone we meet, with the main character, Quiller (George Segal), squeezed by those he works for, those he works against and even by the delectable German teacher, Inge Lendt (Senta Berger) he meets.

Quiller has arrived in Berlin for an assignment under the control of Pol (Alec Guinness). He is to infiltrate and locate the headquarters of a neo-Nazi organization headed by Oktober (Max Von Sydow). And, by the way, Pol tells Quiller, the two men who had the assignment before you were both killed. It's not long before Quiller realizes, as he's captured, drugged and questioned by Oktober, that Oktober's organization is just as interested in locating and wiping out Pol's group. Quiller managers to escape, but was it too easily done? Pol points out to Quiller that he's now a piece between two players who cannot see each other. Only Quiller can see them. If he gets too close to one player, the other player will follow him and know how to take action. Both Pol and Oktober, each in his own way, would be perfectly content to sacrifice one agent in order to catch the bigger game. Quiller is on his own. He's crafty, careful and resourceful. He doesn't carry a gun. The one thing he has going for him is that he knows he dare not take anything at face value. The resolution may see the bad guys finally taken...but not all of the bad guys. The Quiller Memorandum, while exciting in its own way, has a distinctly bittersweet air to it. The film doesn't leave you with world-weary angst, just the knowledge that if you want to trust anyone you'd better find another line of work.

I have no idea how many writers who wrote popular screenplays went on to become Nobel laureates, but at least one did. Harold Pinter, who won the Nobel for literature in 2005, brings some of the supposedly enigmatic Pinter style to the movie. There are stretches of dialogue that may make you wonder what on earth the point is, but then you realize the point is to let you think about what these people are up to and what they are really like. The scene in a sports stadium when Quiller first meets Pol is quite funny because it seems so irrelevant. Guinness and Segal play it straight, which makes it even better. But in between the mannered irrelevancies of Pol's observations about Nazi rallies, acoustics, how hungry he is and how good one of his sandwiches looks, we begin to think about how ruthless a man Pol probably is. Pinter uses the same approach with Max Von Sydow's gentlemanly questioning of a tied-up Segal. While John Barry's music score is, to me, often too Sixtyishly obvious, the quiet, thoughtful theme he uses under the credits gives fair warning that this is not going to be a rock 'em, sock 'em spy thriller. All the actors do fine jobs, including George Sanders and Robert Flemyng as two London spy mandarins at their club, who are as much concerned about the quality of the pheasant Flemyng is having for lunch as they are about the situation in Berlin.

I suspect that many people will be intrigued by the film, but that others will find it slow, too cynical or too complicated. Give the movie a chance; even cynicism at times can warm an empty heart. The DVD transfer looks just fine to me. There is a printed insert in the case which gives background on the film. The only extra is a commentary by Eddie Friedfeld and Len Pfeiffer, identified as film historians. I didn't take the time to listen to it.

I recently viewed this film when it was broadcast on television, and I must say that it was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. Part of the spy genre, Quiller travels to Berlin to investigate the resurgence of a group of Nazis and it is necessary for him to uncover where their base is located. As with any spy thriller, it is difficult at times to differentiate between a supposed friend and and an enemy. One keeps wondering if Quiller is indeed placing his trust on the right people, particularly those who claim to be on his side. Quiller is a spy who doesn't carry a gun, noting that he is less likely to be killed if he is not armed. Despite his intelligence and wit, he still gets caught in precarious situations. Impeccable acting accompanied by astute dialogue make this a compelling piece to watch over and over again.

Finally, this fine motion picture survives on DVD. George Segal, Max Von Sydow, and Senta Berger round out a fine cast in this British outing filmed in Berlin. The song "Wednesday's Child" is prominent throughout - even referenced by name in the dialog.

Quiller (George Segal) is sent in by his lead contact, played with "tea-time" elegance by Alec Guinness, to infiltrate a neo-Nazi organisation - despite the fact that two agents' lives have already been sacrificed in their respective attempts. Quiller's tenacity is tempered by his belief that the enemy may be saturated all around him - including his own "side".

The genre of the Cold War spy was significant in the 1960's when this film was released. Classic spy films like "The Ipcress File", "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", and "The Quiller Memorandum" were offset by the campy spy spoofs like "In Like Flint", "Our Man Flint", and the Matt Helm films. Of course, there were many more popular spy pictures. A list of spy movies from this decade - including the James Bond movies - would be lengthy indeed. The difference, of course, are the gags, the gals, and the gimmicks. Real intelligence work, depending on the application and the operation, is not glitzy or glamorous - it's tedious, numbing, painstaking, and quite boring in most instances. And, like in "Quiller", the operative may not know those people that can be trusted.

One can't help but identify with Quiller - if anything, he's resourceful and clever. This is one worth checking out - great scenery, great locations, and Senta Berger.

The Quiller Memorandum is a breath of fresh air that rises above many in the claustrophobic, cookie cutter spy genre of the late 60's. Make no mistake: all the spy flick elements are present in Quiller. There is the villian bent on world domination, the east vs. west theatrics, and the demure dame caught in the middle. Luckily though, the director doesn't play to the lowest denomenator. Instead of relying on guns and gadgets, George Segal's Quiller bags the bad guys and beds the girl (a very sensual girl in Senta Berger) with his brains only. If you don't like a deliberately-paced, believable spy story, don't watch Quiller. On the other hand, if you don't, you're missing a rare gem of the spy flick genre.

The Quiller Memorandum is one of many spy movies from the sixties, and it is unique. For example, there is a chase, but it takes place on foot...walking. Something blows up, but it is an empty car in a garage...sitting in a garage. It is a cerebral rather than visceral film, and, though it is strictly an entertainment rather than a thought piece, it keeps you under the stress that a good, suspenseful plot does from beginning to end. Add the engaging personality of George Segal's portrayal of the iconoclastic, recalcitrant protagonist, Alec Guinness's detached spymaster depiction and the beauty of Sental Berger along with terrific scenary and dialogue that is provacative and you have a great spy film that is still great today.

I have watched The Quiller Memorandum twice, very recently. Once, for the first time--and now I've had another go-round with the film historians' commentary clicked ON.

This is a 60's spy movie that, if it sacrifices any realism along the way, doesn't lose it to big explosions, over-the-moon action sequences, or gimmicks and gadgets, but rather in its attempt to be somewhat surreal, even nightmarish in its effect. I thought film historians Lee Pfeiffer and Eddie Friedfeld might have been more willing to focus on the slightly cyclical nature of the film: our hero, Quiller, in an attempt to pinpoint the headquarters of a neo-Nazi group in Berlin, seems to go in circles no matter how hard he tries to outwit a legion of sinister villains who are closing in on him. There is a key moment in the film, quite late, where Quiller, played by George Segal, is walking towards a phone booth along a creepy Berlin street in the dead of night, peeking up at darkened windows looking for possible snipers. In fact, this scene is exactly the same as the opening of the film, where Quiller's predecessor, the spy sent earlier to root out neo-Nazis who didn't quite live up to the job, is in exactly the same predicament. By the time Quiller is wondering if he's going to reach that phone booth alive, the viewer can only wonder if Quiller has gone through EXACTLY the same circumstances, despite all his efforts to win the day, that his predecessor went through. This kind of thing gives the film a delicious sense of innate hopelessness; the small army of villains as supreme puppetmasters, leading the small, lone hero along an inescapable trail to a preprogrammed doom that nobody seems able to escape.

This theme of Quiller being just clever enough to stay alive and show a few tricks, but caught in a hopeless circle is reinforced in some smaller, subtler ways: the lead villain, Oktober, played splendidly by the amazing Max Von Sydow, flicks a dropcloth off a misleadingly inviting-looking red chair, so that Quiller can sit down and be tortured...be tortured in the same chair, in the same classy-dungeon setting, by the same smooth-talking Sydow, as he was earlier in the film. Also, when Quiller is given a time limit by Von Sydow to make a key decision that would mean betrayal of his mission and his boss, Pol, played amazingly by the splendid Alec Guinness, Quiller is ordered by Oktober to "go for a walk" to think it over, and his numerous attempts to shake off the thugs following him around lead to repeated failures.

These sequences, which at first glance suggest a film with a largely ineffectual--perhaps even an incompetent--hero, tie in well with the main disagreement that erupts throughout the commentary by Pfeiffer and Friedfeld; Pfeiffer does not like the Quiller character as much as Friedfeld does (or as much as I do), suggesting that Quiller is a "hollow man", not fully fleshed out or explained when it comes to his motives, his past, his commitment to the Berlin mission, or even why he's an American guy working for British Intelligence. I was expecting the film historians to start arguing about whether George Segal is, frankly, miscast--but the argument is never couched in those terms. They argue mainly about Quiller's effectiveness, not Segal's, and this leads to a lot of discussion about Harold Pinter's somewhat inscrutable script, when they are not unconditionally praising Von Sydow or Guinness or the entire filmography of either one (fair enough).

To my mind, Pfeiffer and Friedfeld fail to make a crucial "mental leap", although Friedfeld--my chatterbox of preference, here--skirts around the edges a bit. My take on Quiller being too mysterious or undefined is this: if Quiller is hard to fathom because we don't get enough info...what about Von Sydow's character, Oktober? And what about the bossman, played by Alec Guinness? For that matter, what about the pretty Berlin schoolteacher who befriends Quiller, admittedly under false pretences (Quiller lies to her--spies will be spies)? We don't know anything about anybody! It's fair to say that nobody in this film seems to know anything about anybody else; they're just working together, or working against each other. So if you start picking on Quiller as underwritten, where does it stop?

The characters in this film are subservient to the dangerous games they play, and to the cyclical nightmare reality that they fight it out in. Quiller makes mistakes due to recklessness, and gets outwitted by his enemies--and they are everywhere, as this quickly becomes a film where you wonder if you should trust anyone who is within a five mile radius of Quiller, even if they are blurry in the background, never mind the shady-looking guy at the bowling alley where Quiller asks too many questions!--but Quiller, if you watch carefully, fights like a wildcat to break the hopeless circles he wanders in, whenever he can. The film seems to take its most interesting turns at those key moments when Quiller is finally able to make a move that his enemies don't anticipate. But then Oktober and his minions stay on his trail, closing in, waiting for Quiller to get reckless again. There is kind of a surreal openness to the proceedings by the time Quiller has been sent off by Oktober to think about his fate and make a difficult decision, to walk around and mull it over "in freedom" while a group of nasty henchman simply follow Quiller around, right out in plain sight, to keep him from doing anything, y'know, heroic. This is a weird, fascinating spy movie, which the film historians doing the commentary describe as an "anti-Bond" approach. The truth is, if you liked the recent Bond film Casino Royale, but Die Another Day doesn't work anymore as a follow-up so you went back to Connery's 007 outings and now you need something beyond, you might give this a spin. There is some action: car chase, Quiller trying to punch his way past numerous bad guys, torture, big menacing villain, twists you may not see coming, deathtrap, explosion, some exciting scenery.

But, yeah, some of the cool stuff is "anti-Bond", including Segal's Quiller, whose strange mistakes and inefficiences just mean that the character is subservient to the film's real intent...in the same way that Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard, in Blade Runner, sometimes makes you think "is this guy any good at his job at all?". (Actually, Quiller comes off as more competent than Rick Deckard, in my opinion.) The Quiller Memorandum is a spy film with its own subtle maneuvers serving a secret agenda: it wants to feel slightly like a nightmare. I'm reminded of some other creepy films I like, with sinister puppermasters: The Parallax View, Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate. The Quiller Memorandum is a pleasure to watch, as the mysterious-stranger of spy films. And thank you Eddie Friedfeld, for interrupting Lee Pfeiffer's Cold War lectures and other long speeches enough to get the commentary back onto scenes actually occurring.

Maybe the most subtle spy film ever made, certainly one of the most artful. You really need to pay attention to the undercurrents. Watch the very first scene. Pay attention when the same scene recurs. Everything you need to know is there. This could have been a marvelous series. (They made two Flint films and four Matt Helms and they couldn't make a second Quiller?)

The Profs on the commentary track think this is a classic example of cold war cinema. Odd, as it concerns an American agent hunting Neo-Nazis for the British in West Germany and includes not one Communist or Soviet. One of them then goes on to lampoon the scriptwriter, Harold Pinter's political views asserting that he blames the U.S. for 9-11, which as we know from the same academic's earlier pronouncement was Bill Clinton's fault. Please stick to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Flint references, guys -- leave the McCarthy defenses to Ann Coulter.

Well, almost....

I had never seen this before yesterday, and having lived in Berlin in the 1990s, I love seeing that town on film in any period. It's mostly West Berlin here, and it's a treat to see; few films use this much of their home city, and if you like that incomparable town you'll love watching it in Quiller.

I found Segal to be better than usual, less glib and more appealingly serious at points, and Senta Berger a fine romantic foil (and just plain fine). Guinness is superb as always, as is Max Von Sydow (what a great bad guy he was!), the direction is unforced, and the story itself is a refreshingly low-key spy tale, pointing out that Bond was the anomaly/fantasy in a world of cold war info gathering and slogging leg work. But what I really loved here was Pinter's script.

In typically Pinteresque fashion, we are given little backstory on the characters, which lends a slightly odd feel to the proceedings, and it works to perfection in this anti-Bond vehicle. The rather bad narration on the dvd by two NYC film school profs misses Pinter's genius almost entirely; are these the best guys the studio could find?

Pinter was brought in to be Pinter, no doubt, and the idea of letting him loose on Trevor Dudley-Smith's novel works splendidly. There's an off-kilter menacing vibe throughout and it meshes perfectly with the plot itself. The dialogue is also oft classic, notably the British upper caste asides; few were ever as quietly withering in their social critiques as Mr. Pinter.

Not a shoot-'em-up at all, and that's one of Quiller's main strengths.
All brains and no guns make for a most interesting and unique thriller indeed.