The Quiller Memorandum (1966)

George Segal Alec Guinness and Max von Sydow square off against each other in this espionage thriller adapted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Adam Hall aka for writer Elleston Trevor.Ace spy Quiller is lured away from holiday to replace a British agent who died while essaying a most challenging assignment: infiltrating the Neo-Nazi ranks.Now Quiller must find the group's station in Germany. Along the way however he is abducted tortured reprogrammed doped and almost blown up.The resilient prober though will show the evil Neo-Nazi leader Oktober that he has more lives than a cat and more tricks up his sleeve than anyone this side of James Bond.System Requirements:Running Time 105 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 024543381440 Manufacturer No: 2238144 Product Description

very poor

I bought this based on the actors. This is early in their careers and they do a poor performance. The audio commentary is equally poor. I am an amateur historian of this period and found the commentators very ill informed. I agree with the commentators that this should have been in black and white.

As far as the quality of the script, it is no where near that of The Third Man or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

It is one of many poor me toos cashing in on the success of early spy movies. Many professional critics also think that this is a poor movie. May 15, 2008

Do You Know This Brand?

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.
October 2, 2007

Great movie, OK DVD

There's enough written here by others on the merits of this film, which has been sadly neglected over the years, so I won't waste time with that except to say that it's one of my favorites. I just want to add that I thought the picture transfer very disappointing. They obviously didn't spend much time doing the kind of restoration work they could have. I doubt if even much of a digital teak here and there was done. The image looks generally soft, with muted color and often unstable blacks. So, the DVD isn't terrible, but it should have been much better. September 16, 2007

The Quiller Memorandum

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. September 10, 2007

Respectable Cold War spy flick

That the "Quiller Memorandum" was filmed in part on location in West Berlin certainly enhanced the authenticity of this very decent spy flick. George Segal, a curious choice for a leading man, starring as American espionage agent Quiller, has been assigned to British controller Pol played by the venerable Alec Guiness. He been given the assignment of locating the base of operations of a cabal of neo-Nazis causing trouble in Berlin. His two British predecessors had been liquidated on the same assignment. Segal more of a cerebral and obnoxious personnae than sexy and macho as a spy, disdains carrying a weapon.

During his investigation he meets gorgeous but mysterious flame haired schoolteacher Inge Lindt played by Senta Berger. She helps connect him with the right people to set him on the path to discovering the Nazis. He is eventually captured by the group lead by aristocratic German Max von Sydow playing Oktober and drugged to coax him to divulge secrets.

Playing a game of cat and mouse with von Sydow and his gang, Segal traverses the streets of picturesque Berlin with Berger, who is now his love interest, trying to complete his assignment and not get killed for his trouble.

The espionage thriller was an extremely popular genre back in the 1960's, the height of the Cold War. While "Quiller Memorandum" was not at the pinnacle of these films it certainly was a noteworthy offering with a solid international cast. August 29, 2007

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