Accomplished and consistently compelling as it is, Blake Edwards hurt himself on this spy-trimmed romance, getting off on the wrong foot with an overproduced credit sequence (John Barry score; glossy Maurice Binder graphics) that sets up James Bond expectations of action he had no intention of pursuing. Sure enough, commercially & critically the film was D.O.A.; its rep still an on-going recovery project. What is going on is an opening bid for romance on a Barbados vacation from Omar Sharif (Russian agent/Soviet #2 man in London) to Julie Andrews (British Home Office assistant still processing grief from a husband’s death and emotional debris from a misguided affair). The question: Is he flirting or recruiting? A date or apostasy? The early scenes have a slightly ‘off’ tone to them, the dialogue too direct, while behind the scenes each side closely monitors the situation for possible East vs. West motives. And with good cause as somebody’s defecting . . . da? Edward’s script just keeps taking smart turns with all the talk of love, commitment & politics turning out to be self-directed, Sharif desperate to convince himself he’s falling in love, not falling away from core beliefs; Andrews confronting a tragic relationship based on lies. And all the while, the eternal game of Spy vs Spy is playing out behind the reticent lovers by their agency superiors, wonderfully characterized by Anthony Quayle for the Brits, and the always alarming Oscar Homolka, a visual reminder of Leonid Brezhnev, USSR chairman at the time. Even these nefarious doings upended by another spy master, Dan O’Herlihy as a ‘Cambridge Five’ turncoat (Kim Philby?, Guy Burgess?*). Flawed, yet surprisingly moving & memorable, it also gets better as it goes along. With snazzy location shooting from Freddie Young (though the DVD image needs a bit of taming to do it justice); he also does wonders for Mrs. Edwards.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Alan Bates had a stunning turn as Gus Burgess in Russian exile (one of the real Cambridge Five) in Alan Bennett/John Schlesinger’s AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD/’83 https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-englishman-abroad-1983-question-of.html
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