Master Spy (1963) Online

I saw this film yesterday morning. I like British low budget, (usually) black and white films from the 1950s and 1960s so I made the effort to ensure that I was available to watch it. Not only was I not disappointed; it turned out to be one of the best of its type.

The plot was very full, with plenty of twists and turns. I will not say what these are, but suffice it to say that they make for a very satisfying concept when one reflects on the film.

The conceptual basis for the story is interesting. It shows how two elements of life in the 1960s had come to the fore. One is the concept of spying and the other is the prominence of science and scientific research. "The white heat of the technological revolution", in Harold Wilson's phrase from that year's General Election campaign. One may conclude that the film was up to date in that sense. (The film "Ring Of Spies", made in the previous year, dealt with these themes from a different aspect.)

A few points arise from the milieu and setting. One is that, in contrast to what was to become a common suggestion/complaint a few years later, there is no sense that it is unusual to have women in senior positions in the research team; indeed, quite the contrary. The other is that several of the characters are shown smoking, regularly. Should there ever be a film suggested that would deal with this subject and this period, the makers will need to bite this particular bullet in the interests of accuracy.

An incidental fact, but one which identifies the film as very much of its period, is the style of spectacles worn by both June Thorburn and the senior civil servant's secretary. This "fashion" style, with prominent rims, belongs almost exclusively to the early and mid-1960s.

Turning to the cast, there is a good collection of British "second rank" character actors. I particularly noted Peter Gilmore's portrayal and of course Stephen Murray, who was completely unrecognisable from the (voice of the) Commander in the long-running radio series "The Navy Lark".

There is also the, to my mind, most attractive player in the film, the charming (and ultimately tragic) figure of June Thorburn. I am always pleased to see her name in the cast list of films made during the decade which began in the first half of the 1950s. That this film was in fact her final one, despite her death not occurring for another three years, shows that her time as a leading actress was over. This, I am sure, will have to been due to a combination of personal reasons and the change in the British film industry, which saw the decline and largely the end of the lower budget films from the mid-1960s onwards.

Had things continued, I am sure that she would still have been cast, as she always makes her mark, playing leading roles in films that do not have an obvious appeal to female members of the audience and making her mark in them. "Fury At Smuggler's Bay" (1961) and her penultimate film, 1963's "The Scarlet Blade", are the films which I have most in mind here.

All told, then, this is a film which has much to recommend it. If you like this type of film, it will be worth making the effort to see it, should it be shown again.

I have just seen this film, and I thought it was rather sad that it got such a low vote score (3.9 as a "weighted average", at the time of writing) and a negative review as the only review it has on IMDb.

The film is obviously low budget and no classic. Having said that it has many plus points. It is well plotted and clever, with twists and turns (especially towards the end) and it sustains the interest well. It makes all the characters interesting, even the supporting ones, such as Peter Gilmore's flippant scientist. It makes a wise move in having June Thorburn - much underused by the British cinema - as its leading lady. There is also a surprisingly good supporting cast considering it is so low budget. And so on...

At an hour and ten minutes, the film is long enough to tell a proper story well, and short enough not to outstay its welcome. It provided me with an enjoyable time viewing it.

As noted by the other reviewers, Master Spy is no classic, but it is a must-see for fans of British B movies of the era. The story is fairly routine, but is much enlivened by the cast - Alan Wheatley (excellent as always), John Carson (with his James Mason-sound-alike voice!), Peter Gimore playing his role to perfection, and most interestingly the tragic June Thorburn cast against type as a scientist who becomes dangerously involved in the espionage plot. With her shorter, blonder hair, Miss Thorburn here is a dead ringer for Angela Douglas, a likeness I had never noticed before, and she is totally credible and brings much to what could have been a nothing part. Very sadly she died in a plane crash a couple of years after completing this, her final film.

It's always a bit saddening to see a film such as Master Spy fall by the wayside. It is not the most brilliant movie that you will ever see, but it has its compensations, and is never offensive.

The shot over the opening credits is quite good if you have an inkling of how chess is played, black's position is squeezed as if by a boa constrictor. I thought it set the film up quite well, but if one is not being attentive it will pass you by quite easily.

I enjoyed seeing Victor Beaumont at the start, a German character actor, typecast as the snarling Nazi officer through most of his career trying here to put on a Russian accent.

The plot basically is about a Russian defector called Turganev who goes to work on his 'neutron ray' at a nuclear experimentation laboratory in England. It's quite clear from the start that his agenda is not so straight forward as is made out. In fact if you haven't worked out he is a spy, it's probably because you were too busy washing up the breakfast dishes whilst you watched this (the most likely time and place you will see this film is as a TV matinée).

But the spy plot is not really the whole point. The film does in fact have a nice late 50s early 60s atmosphere, very reminiscent in more than one way of Kingsley Amis' novel the Anti-Death League. A chap on Wikipedia said it better than I ever could, Amis, "championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness – in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure – against the demands of any cosmological scheme." Well through the character of Leila (June Thorburn) that's exactly what we have here.

In the movie she is assigned as Turganev's assistant and it is clear that she humanises the man, turns him from a calculating double-agent into someone who is loathe to use his research to further human agony. It's not laid out on a platter like that for us, and there is no foolish melodrama, but that's the general sentiment. It's clear that Leila is disturbed by her own colleagues' lack of interest in the uses that their research is put to, so you can't really put Master Spy down as just another Cold War propaganda movie.

Another commentator has said that there wasn't much effort put into this film, well I for one thought the sets were pretty well done, there were some nice sculptures and paintings on display. I was thinking Paolozzi, Epstein, Moore, lending a nice little post-war British intellectual atmosphere. I think it quite remiss to write this film off as easily as some viewers have. One might expect when watching a movie like this to see a lot of derring-do, suspense, and gun-fights, well fortunately the director steered clear of all that.

Have a nice time watching this movie, but don't expect the world.

Russian scientist Boris Turganev (Stephen Murray)defects to the British in order to steal nuclear secrets from a government research establishment. His contact man is local landowner and socialite Skelton (Alan Wheatley) who has cultivated the friendship of Turganev's superiors for the purpose. Both are experts at chess and stage regular matches as a cover for exchanging secrets. Coleman (John Carson), a fellow scientist, becomes jealous of Turganev because he believes he is muscling in on his girlfriend Leila (June Thorburn);herself a brilliant nuclear scientist who has been developing something of a friendship with him since being seconded as his assistant. One night, Turganev removes a top secret file from his laboratory which he passes on to Skelton, but Leila has left her glasses in the cabinet where the file was kept and when she goes to retrieve them she discovers it missing. She confides her suspicions in Coleman before heading off to Skelton's mansion to confront her boss and, in doing so puts her life in grave danger. Coleman, alarmed when she does not return hurries to the mansion but is Turganev really the traitor he seems to be?

Low budget b-pic spy yarn with a neat and unexpected twist in its tail. Unfortunately, the sixty-odd minutes that precede it seem like an eternity due to its lack of action and much chat in small rooms since the film never escapes its few small cramped sets. Directed and co- scripted by Montgomery Tully whose feature film career began well with the excellent thriller Murder In Reverse (1945), which starred future Dr Who star William Hartnell. Funnily enough, I attended a rare screening of that at the National Film Theatre back in 2010 to a full house! But, come the 1950's, Tully's career had declined into second features and he directed several installments of the popular featurette series Scotland Yard. Some of his work in b-pics produced excellent results - check out The Third Alibi (1960); but like Master Spy many were at the very moderate level and relied on odd piercing moments that briefly made poor films brilliant. If you've got the patience to sit through Master Spy, then the twist is well worth the wait but chances are you might either have fallen asleep or changed channels.

Master Spy has been issued on DVD video paired with an early Terence Fisher thriller Home To Danger which, compared with this, looks like an 'A' feature.

Other reviewers have given their decisions on the worthiness of this film, its plot & the character portrayals within. I am not going to go over the same ground but go into the on-screen motivations of the characters I saw.

The interesting standout thing I noted was that, it is revealed in the last scene at the end of the film, that Boris Turganev was a British agent - who after now being convicted of espionage, was to be allowed to escape and return back behind the iron curtain to continue working for the British. Stephen Murray's portrayal of the spy Turganev was that he seemed genuinely to detest what he was doing and actively wanted to prevent the deaths of anyone involved, good or bad.

So Turganev was a pacifist scientist in reality even though he was a spy. Even though she was brilliant and close to a scientific breakthrough, Turganev tried to persuade Leila (June Thorburn), a female scientist he became fond of, to leave her work and marry the man that loved her. Knowing like him, Leila might later to have to compromise her scientific ideals in order to continue to develop her work.

Talking Pictures TV - Freeview 81

This low budget British spy film is apparently based on the book 'They Also Serve', which I haven't read. The plot is thin and the screenplay bland - there seems to be little for the cast to do but read the words. The music is irritating and intrusive. The photography and lighting lacking in creativity. The result is just barely watchable.

It is impossible not to draw comparisons with Hitchcock's Torn Curtain which was made just two years later and deals with the same subject. Torn Curtain however has action and movement, characters you care about, suspense and humour. Master Spy unfortunately, has none of these.

Rather than being a James Bond rip-off, MASTER SPY is a slow and stately British Cold War drama that's so subtle it'll send you to sleep. The pace is glacial and the characters are equally cold; 99% of the running time involves a room full of scientists exchanging technical jargon as they work on a new project. Of course, there's a twist here and there in the plot, but nothing to justify the running time.

MASTER SPY has dated in the worst way and is only worth watching now as a curiosity piece; certainly the cheap, shot-in-a-single-room talky style of film-making will be offputting to all but the most patient of viewers. Still, there are some familiar faces worth seeing here, including a couple of Hammer stalwarts in support (John Carson and Marne Maitland) alongside tragic leading actress June Thorburn, who was to lose her life in a plane crash four years later.

One of the characters in this British "B" sums up the film very nicely when he remarks that it is "rather dull." It could have offered better entertainment, but the script makes the fatal mistake of revealing the identity of the master spy almost from the outset. And his agent is so palpable a plant, it is a source of wonderment that the characters in the movie could be so gullible as to fraternize with him.

In other respects, acting and direction are competent enough, and even the movie's "B"-grade production values will get by. But the aforesaid script is so weak that it's actually a considerable chore to sit through. Even the climax is not worth waiting for.