Foreign Intrigue (1956)

When, in 1959, Hitchcock made North By Northwest, he had to have been aware of this 1956 thriller which features a suave hero - here, it's Robert Mitchum with a suit and slicked hair playing a personal secretary to one of the world's richest men - who becomes embroiled in an foreign intrigue after the death of his employer, and like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Robert Mitchum's Dave Bishop ends up in exotic locations around the world romancing a mysterious blonde, encountering mysterious trenchcoats, in a plot involving identity mix-ups and duplicitous femme fatales (and their mothers), all presented in a richly-detailed, unhurried technicolour - a solid romantic suspense movie, albeit one that flags a little at the two-third mark unlike the rivetting from start to finish North By Northwest.

★★★★☆

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Black Bag (2025)

Don't think too hard about the plot, which is full of outlandish extraneous details and relies on an impossible amount of inter-agent bedhopping (some of it blurring professional boundaries in very unlikely ways) and just enjoy the sleek, sexy spy thrills as Michael Fassbender's mild-mannered spy, George Wodehouse, learns his wife's name is on a list of five potential traitor agents.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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The Ghost of St. Michael's (1941)

The comedy is of a bawdy music hall variety and a young Charles Hawtrey appears, so this 1941 comedy thriller feels like an early entry in the Carry On series with the students and staff, including bumbling science teacher Will Lamb, relocated to a haunted church in Scotland during World War II where a plot involving a ghost and murder plays out in mildly entertaining fashion.

★★★☆☆

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All the Old Knives (2022)

 

Chris Pine's CIA agent, Harry Pelham meets up with a former romantic interest, Thandiwe Newton's CIA agent, Celia Harrison, over dinner in a swanky restaurant and just like that scene with George Clooney and J-Lo in the carboot in Out Of Sight, the talk is smooth and there is sexual chemistry bathed in a golden light, but they can't simply jump each other's bones because time has passed, Celia has a husband and child now, and Harry is in town on assignment to find out if Celia is the member of their old spy gang who leaked top secret data to a gang of airplane hijackers, and it all almost makes sense in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Johnny English Reborn (2011)

My attention strayed and then irritation set in as this British spy spoof, the second in a series of three Johnny English movies but the first I've tried to watch, went on and on and on in such cookie-cutter fashion that it doesn't really ask to be watched at all - a glance at the poster tells you everything you already knew about the James Bond-style opening sequence, the ho-hum scene at the hi-tech spy tools development facility, the repetitive car and boat chases, and the unpsychedelic Austin Powers, a rubbery-faced Pink Panther, at the centre of all the, er, action.

★★☆☆☆

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You Only Live Twice (1967)

A shuttlejacking creates tension between world superpowers and unfortunately Sean Connery's James Bond has been shot dead, bundled up like an Egyptian mummy and buried at sea, but his death is all just a cunning ruse to allow the spy to secretly follow up leads in Japan where for the first time Blofeld shows his face and, thanks to an especially sleazy screenplay by Roald Dahl, 007 experiences all of the oriental delights the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer, including betrothal to a woman, Kissy Suzuki, who spends most of her time in a wet bikini.

★★☆☆☆

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Red Sparrow (2018)

A Russian ballerina is trained in a sex school to tolerate brutal public sex with a stony face, and then, ready for secret agent work, she is entrusted to substitute top-secret floppy disks with dummy replacement ones - quickly, while no-one is looking, take real ones from a top shelf and swap them with fake ones from the bottom shelf - but is she performing these exciting spy feats for the Russians, is she working for the Americans, does anybody care, and what do the answers to these dull questions mean for romantic lead, the American spy agent played by Joel Edgerton with whom the ballerina shares zero chemistry at all?

★☆☆☆☆

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The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

There's a long stretch in the middle of this ninth James Bond movie, the second starring Roger Moore, that plays out like the Dukes of Hazzard with a car doing a loop-the-loop over a bridge complete with zany popwhistle sound effects while a Boss Hog character gets hot and bothered in the back seat, and other stretches of the movie, which features Nick-Nack the "midget" butler, Miss Goodnight the Bond Girl and Mr Scaramonga the assassin with a superfluous nipple and a golden gun, resemble Fantasy Island and the old tv The Avengers, but not much of it feels like quality James Bond with the movie erring on the side of camp parody.

★★☆☆☆

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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Allied (2016)

The second half of the second act becomes momentarily clumsy as the film rushes some necessary information while at the same time Brad Pitt's stoic intelligence officer, faced with the idea his wife is a double agent, starts making emotional rather than cool-headed-agent decisions - and Brad Pitt's woodenness is appropriate for the stoic stuff but doesn't quite support the emotional - but otherwise this is a ripping, well-acted romantic spy yarn told in a really very sumptuously presented wartime Morocco and London.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Years after its release in 2013, this M:I entry - the better-than-usual fourth in the series - happened to come on TV while I was sitting with the person I'd gone to see it with in the cinema, and neither of us could recall a single plot detail - only that Simon Pegg returns as Benji, that seemingly constipated comic-relief tech guy who bungles every part of the mission (Ethan, does Benji need to be trained up before going into the field?), that Ethan Hunt suction-cups up a Dubai skyscraper, races through a sandstorm, and that there is a stunt in a hotel involving diamonds and Mission: Impossible's clunkiest spy tool yet - a fake arm on a white man in a Chinese waiter uniform (guess who) - which all just goes to show how little bearing plot has on how enjoyable an M:I episode is.

★★★★☆

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