He published over 50 novels as Elleston Trevor alone. These include another superior soundtrack by John Barry, if perhaps a little too much son-of "The Ipcress File", some fine real-life (West) Berlin exteriors, particularly of the Olympic Stadium with its evocation of 1936 and all that and Harold Pinter's typically rhythmic, if at times inscrutable screenplay. Or was she simply a lonely Samaritan who altruistically beds the socially awkward American spy to help prevent a Fourth Reich? The Quiller Memorandum was based on a novel by Elleston Trevor (under the name Adam Hall). The setting is Cold War-divided Berlin where Quiller tackles a threat from a group of neo-Nazis who call themselves Phoenix. Variety and the Flying V logos are trademarks of Variety Media, LLC. [3], In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "Clearly, 'The Quiller Memorandum' is claptrap done up in a style and with a musical score by John Barry that might lead you to think it is Art. Lindt (Berger) is a school teacher who meets Quiller to translate for him. Slow-moving Cold War era thriller in the mode of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," "The Quiller Memorandum" lacks thrills and fails to match the quality of that Richard Burton classic. Sort of a mixed effect clouds this novel. The Quiller Memorandum came near the peak of the craze for spy movies in the Sixties, but its dry, oddly sardonic tone sets it apart from both the James Bond-type sex-and-gadget thrillers and the more somber, "adult" spy dramas such as Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965). I liked that the main character was ornery and tired and smart and still made mistakes and tried to see all possible outcomes at once and fought more against jumping to conclusions and staying alert and clear-headed than he did directly against the villains themselves. And of course, no spy-spoof conversation would be complete without mentioning 1967s David Niven-led piss-take on the Bond films, Casino Royale. His romantic interest is Senta Berger, whose understated and laconic dialog provides the perfect counterpoint to Segal's character. 2 decades after the collapse of Nazi Germany, several old guard are planning to (slowly) rebuild. Quiller is eventually kidnapped and tortured by Oktober (Max von Sydow), the leader of Phoenix. I can see where some might find it more exhausting than anything else, though--he does get tired :). Quiller befriends a teacher, Inge Lindt, whose predecessor at the school had been arrested for being a Neo-Nazi. The casting of George Segal in the lead was a catastrophe, as he is so brash and annoying that one wants to scream. The screenwriter, Harold Pinter, no less, received an Edgar nomination. Oktober also wants to know the location of the British base in Germany and uses drugs in Quiller to get the information but the skilled agent resists. The Chief of the Secret Service Pol (Alec Guinness) summons the efficient agent Quiller (George Segal) to investigate the location of organization's headquarter. The Quiller Memorandum subtitles. After a pair of their agents are murdered in West Berlin, the British Secret Service for some unknown reason send in an American to investigate and find the location of a neo-Nazi group's headquarters. When a spy film is made in the James Bond vein then close analysis is superfluous, but when the movie has a pretense of seriousness then it'd better make sense. The British Secret Service sends agent Quiller to investigate. Dril several holes in it, the size of a pin, one the size of a small coin. The Quiller Memorandum - Rotten Tomatoes He was the author of. The only redeeming features of The Quiller Memorandum are the scenes of Berlin with its old U-Bahn train and wonderful Mercedes automobiles, and the presence of two beautiful German women, Senta Berger and Edith Schneider; those two females epitomize Teutonic womanhood for me. The mind of the spy The West had sent a couple of agents to find out their headquarters, but both are killed. In West Berlin, George Segal's Quiller struggles through a near- existential battle with Neo-Nazi swine more soulless than his own cold-fish handlers. American agent Quiller (George Segal) arrives in Berlin and meets with his British handler Pol (Alec Guinness). Quilleris a code name. If Quiller isnt the most dramatically pleasing of the anti-Bond subgenre, its certainly not for lack of ambition, originality, or undistinguished crew or cast members. Without knowing where they have taken him, and even if it is indeed their base of operations, Quiller is playing an even more dangerous game as in the process he met schoolteacher Inge Lindt, who he starts to fall for, and as such may be used as a pawn by the Nazis to get the upper hand on Quiller. A man walks along a deserted Berlin street at night and enters an internally lit phone box. It was nominated for three BAFTA Awards,[2] while Pinter was nominated for an Edgar Award for the script. To do his job George Segal's hapless Quiller must set himself out as bait in the middle of a pressure play in West Berlin. before he started doing "genial" and reminds us that his previous part was in the heavyweight "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". On the other hand, the female lead is played by the charming Senta Berger, then aged 25, who does very well, and manages to be enigmatic, and gets just the right tone for the story. Hall (also known as Elleston Trevor and several other pseudonyms) seemed really to hate the Germans, or at least his character did. Directed by Michael Anderson; produced by Ivan Stockwell; screenplay by Harold Pinter; cinematography by Erwin Hiller; edited by Frederick Wilson; art direction by Maurice Carter; music by John Barry; starring George Segal, Max Von Sydow, Alec Guinness, Senta Berger, and guest stars George Stevens and Robert Helpmann. It's not often that one wishes so much for a main character to get killed, especially by NAZI's. The only really interesting thing is the way we're left spoiler: click to read in the end. The Quiller Memorandum: Directed by Michael Anderson. This is the first in the series, and it seems to have a reputation for being a little different from what would become the typical Quiller novel. Its there to tackle the dirty jobs, and Quiller is the Bureaus go-to guy. In the relationship between Quiller and Inge, Pinter casts just enough ambiguity over the proceedings to allow us plebian moviegoers our small participatory role in the production of meaning. Be the first to contribute. Guinness appears as Segal's superior and offers a great deal of presence and class. Von Sydow (one of the few actors to have recovered from playing Jesus Christ and gone on to a varied and lengthy career) is excellent. As for the rest of the movie, the plot, acting, and dialog are absolutely atrocious; even the footsteps are dubbed - click, click, click. The third to try is Quiller, an unassuming man, who knows he's being put into a deadly game. Drama. Neo-Nazi plot She states that she "was lucky, they let me go" and claims she then called the phone number but it did not work. The intense first person narration which is the defining characteristic of the Quiller books comes into its own during this interrogation scene, and also during the latter chapters of the books as events begin to come to a head. Your email address will not be published. At lunch in an exclusive club in London, close to Buckingham Palace, the directors of an unnamed agency, Gibbs and Rushington, decide to send American agent Quiller to continue the assignment, which has now killed two agents. Your email address will not be published. In a clever subversion of genre expectations, the plot and storyline ignore contemporary East versus West Cold War themes altogether (East Berlin is, in fact, never mentioned in the film). In this first book in the QUILLER series, undercover agent Quiller is asked to take the place of a fellow spy who has recently been murdered in Berlin, in identifying the headquarters of an underground but powerful Nazi organization, Phnix, twenty years . Quiller continues his subtle accusations, and Inge continues her denial of ever meeting Jones. But his accent was all wrongtaking the viewer out of the moment. The Quiller Memorandum is a 1966 British neo noir eurospy film filmed in Deluxe Color and Panavision, adapted from the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum, by Elleston Trevor under the name "Adam Hall", screenplay by Harold Pinter, directed by Michael Anderson, featuring George Segal, Alec Guinness, Max von Sydow and Senta Berger. The scene shot in the gallery of London's Reform Club is particularly odious. Agent Quiller is relaxing in a Berlin theater the night before returning to London and rest after a difficult assignment when he is accosted by Pol, another British agent, with a new, very important assignment. They don't know how to play it, it's neither enjoyable make-believe like the James Bond movies, nor is it played for real like "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." I read it in two evenings. The Quiller Memorandum 1966, directed by Michael Anderson | Film review The Quiller Memorandum Film Time Out says The thinking man's spy thriller, in as much as Harold Pinter wrote the script. There are a number of unique elements in the Quiller series that make it stand out. Our hero delivers a running dialogue with his own unconscious mind, assessing the threats, his potential responses, his plans. After two British agents are assassinated in Berlin by a group of Neo-Nazis, the British Secret Service assign Quiller to locate and identify the culprits. Berger is luminous and exceedingly solid in a complicated role. I'm generally pretty forgiving of film adaptations of novels, but the changes that were made just do not make sense. Quiller's assignment is to take over where Jones left off. All Rights Reserved. February 27, 2023 new bill passed in nj for inmates 2022 No Comments . Quiller goes back to the school and confronts Inge in her classroom. From the latest Scandinavian serial killer to Golden Age detective stories, we love our crime novels! Hall's truncated writing style contributes to this effect. The British Secret Service sends agent Quiller to investigate. Special guests Sanders and Helpmann bring their special brand of haughty authority to their roles as members of British Intelligence. In a feint to see if Quiller will reveal more by oversight, Oktober decides to spare his life. George Segal was good at digging for information without gadgets. Watched by Rui Alves de Sousa 04 Jun 2022. Required fields are marked *. The film's screenplay (by noted playwright Pinter) reuses to spoon feed the audience, rather requiring that they rely on their instinct and attention span to pick up the threads of the plot. That way theres no-one to betray him to the other side. A satisfyingly cynical spy thriller with George Segal, Alec Guinness and Max Von Sydow; and a script by Harold Pinter, Decent and interesting spy thriller with great cast and impressive musical score by John Barry in his usual style. Max Van Sydow is better as the neo-Nazi leader, veiled by the veneer of respectability as he cracks his knuckles and swings a golf club all the time he's injecting Segal with massive doses of truth serum, while Senta Berger is pleasant, but slight, as the pretty young teacher who apparently leads our man initially to the "other side", but whose escape at the end from capture and certain death at the hands of the "baddies" might lead one to suspect her true proclivities. Quiller meets his controller for this mission, Pol, at Berlin's Olympia Stadium, and learns that he must find the headquarters of Phoenix, a neo-Nazi organization. Although the situations are often deadly serious, Segal seems to take them lightly; perhaps in the decade that spawned James Bond, he was confused and thought he was in a spy spoof. With what little information the British operatives are able to provide him especially in his most recent predecessor, Kenneth Lindsay Jones, working alone without backup against advice, Quiller decides to take a different but potentially more dangerous tact than those predecessors in showing himself at three places Jones was known to be investigating, albeit in coded terms, as the person who has now taken over the mission from Jones in the probability that the Nazis will try to abduct him for questioning to discover what exactly their opponents know or don't know, and to discover in turn their base of operations in West Berlin. Which is to say that in Quillers world, death is dispensed via relatively banal means like bombs and bullets instead of, say, dagger shoes and radioactive lint. In the mid-Sixties, the subgenre of the James Bond backlash film was becoming a crowded market. What a difference to the ludicrous James Helm/Matt Bond (or is it the other way round?) The Berlin Memorandum, renamed The Quiller Memorandum, was published in 1965 by Elleston Trevor, who used the pseudonym Adam Hall. Quiller, an agent working for British Intelligence, is sent to Berlin to meet with Pol, another operative. Inge tells him she loves him, and he tells her a phone number to call if he is not back in 20 minutes. His virtual army of nearly silent, oddball henchmen add to the flavor of paranoia and nervousness. It's not my intention to be obnoxious and list every point in the movie that strays from the book, but it's truly a shame that such well-crafted material--intriguing back stories, superior spy tactics--is wasted here. Because the books were written in the first person the reader learns very little about him, beyond his mission capability. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) - Michael Anderson | Review | AllMovie The Quiller Memorandum : definition of The Quiller Memorandum and First isthe protagonist himself. Despite an Oscar nomination for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Segal's strength lies in light comedy, and both his demeanor and physical build made him an unlikely pick for an action role, even if the film is short on action. This isachievedviaQuillers first person perspective. Two British agents are murdered by a mysterious Neo-Nazi organization in West Berlin. I recall being duly impressed by the menacing atmospherics, if much of it went over my head. Released at a time when the larger-than-life type of spy movie (the James Bond series) was in full swing and splashy, satirical ones (such as "Our Man Flynt" and "The Silencers") were about to take off, this is a quieter, more down-to-earth and realistic effort. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) - Trivia - IMDb Nimble, sharp-toothed and sometimes they have to bite and claw their way out of a dark hole. The cast is full of familiar faces: Alec Guinness, who doesn't have much of a role, George Sanders, who has even less of one, Max von Sydow in what was to become a very familiar part for him, Robert Helpmann, Robert Flemyng, and the beautiful, enigmatic Senta Berger. Quiller asks after Jones at the bowling alley without success and the swimming pool manager Hassler tells him spectating is not allowed. Quiller works for the Bureau, an arm of the British Secret Service so clandestinethat no-one knows itexists. Michael Anderson directs with his usual leaden touch. On the surface, we get at least some satisfying closure to the case of the clandestine neo-Nazi gang. The Quiller Memorandum, British-American spy film, released in 1966, that was especially noted for the deliberately paced but engrossing script by playwright Harold Pinter. I feel this film much more typified real counter espionage in the 60's as opposed to the early Bond flicks (which I love, by the way). Alec Guinness gets to play a Smiley prototype but brings too much Noel Coward to the table. Much quieter and understated than most spy flicks. The Quiller character is constantly making terrible decisions, and refuses to use a gun, and he's certainly no John Steed. The friend proves to be Hassler, who is now much more friendly. I enjoyed the book. And he sustains the same high level of quality over the course of nineteen books. Although the situations are often deadly serious, Segal seems to take them lightly; perhaps in the decade that spawned James Bond, he was confused and thought he was in a spy spoof. The newspaper clipping that Hengel gives to Quiller, in the cafe when they first meet, shows that a schoolteacher called Hans Heinrich Steiner has been arrested for war crimes committed in WW2. The Quiller Memorandum - Wikipedia With George Segal, Alec Guinness, Max von Sydow, Senta Berger. Corrections? Quiller has a love affair with Inge and they seek out the location of Oktober. ago Just watched it. Alec Guiness and George Sanders have brief roles as Segal's Control and Home Office head, respectively, and both rather coldly and matter-of-factly pooh-pooh over the grisly death of Segal's agent predecessor. No doubt Quiller initially seems like a slow-witted stumblebum, but his competence as an agent begins to reveal itself in due course: for instance, we find out he speaks fluent German; in a late scene, he successfully uses a car bomb to fake his own death and fool his adversaries; and along the way he exhibits surprisingly competent hand-to-hand combat skills in beating up a few Nazi bullyboys. It is the first book in the 20-volume Quiller series. When their backs against the wall, its him they turn to. In the process, he discovers a complex and malevolent plot, more dangerous to the world than any crime committed during the war. The Quiller Memorandum - Trailers From Hell - BH. Studios: The Rank Organisation and Ivan Foxwell Productions, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Quiller-Memorandum, BFI Screenonline - The Quiller Memorandum (1966), Britmovie.co.uk - "The Quiller Memorandum", The Quiller Memorandum - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). But Quiller is an equal to a James Bond, or a George Smiley. The Phoenix group descend and take Quiller, torturing him to find out what he knows. I had to resist the temptation to fast forward on several occasions. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) - Plot Summary - IMDb Quiller drives off, managing to shake Hengel, then notices men in another car following him. After all, his characters social unease and affectless personality are presumably components of the movies contra-Bond commitment. This movie belongs to the long list of the spy features of the sixties, and not even James Bond like movies, rather John Le Carr oriented ones, in the line of IPCRESS or ODESSA FILE, very interesting films for movie buffs in search of a kind of nostalgia and also for those who try to understand this period. The brawny headmistress points Quiller in the direction of Inge (Senta Berger), who happens to be the only English-speaking teacher at the school. Oktober demands Quiller reveal the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) base by dawn or Inge will be killed. In fact, he is derisory about agents who insist on being armed. The whole thing, including these two actors, is as hollow as a shell. Nobel prizes notwithstanding I think Harold Pinter's screenplay for this movie is pretty lame, or maybe it's the director's fault. A Twilight Time release. George Segal's Quiller isn't intense, smart, calculating--qualities Quiller is known for--instead he comes across as a doofus by comparison, better suited to sports-writing or boxing, completely lacking in cunning. Read our extensive list of rules for more information on other types of posts like fan-art and self-promotion, or message the moderators if you have any questions. Director Michael Anderson Writers Trevor Dudley Smith (based on the novel by) Harold Pinter (screenplay) Stars George Segal Alec Guinness Max von Sydow See production, box office & company info Hassler drives them to meet an old contact he says knows a lot more, who turns out to be Inge's headmistress. The setting is the most shadowy "post WWII Berlin" with the master players lined up against each other - The Brits and The Nazi Heirs. The Quiller Memorandum certainly couldnt compete on an aesthetic level with a film like Spy Who Came in from the Cold: No actor, certainly not George Segal, is going to one-up Richard Burton in the anti-Bond department. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) - IMDb George Sanders and others back in London play the stock roles of arch SIS mandarins who love putting people down, wearing black tie and being the snobs that they are. The quarry for all the work is old Nazi higher officials who are now hiding behind new names and plotting to return Germany to the glory days of the Third Reich, complete with a resurrected Fhrer twenty years after the end of WW II. The protagonist, Quiller, is not a superhuman, like the James Bond types, nor does he have a satchel full of fancy electronic tricks up his sleeve. effective, low key, intelligent, spy film, Attractive, thoughtful spy film with an excellent cast. Also the increasing descent into the minutiae of spycraft plays into the reveal, plot-wise as well as psychologically. It was time for kitchen-sink alternatives to the Bond films upper-crust Empire nostalgia, channeled as it was through a tuxedoed, priapic Anglo toff committing state-sponsored murder in service of Her Majestys postcolonial grudges. This demonstration using familiar breakfast food items serves to stimulate the American spys brainwaves into serious operative mode. Adam Hall's 1966 Edgar Winner: The Quiller Memorandum - Criminal Element 1966. Their aim is to bring back the Third Reich. Once Quiller becomes extra-friendly with Ingewhich happens preternaturally quicklyits clear someone on the other side is getting nervous. movies. Quiller investigates, but hes being followed and has been since the moment he entered Berlin. His book. In the West Berlin of the 1960s, two British agents are killed by a Nazi group, prompting British Intelligence to dispatch agent Quiller to investigate. When Quiller refuses to talk, Oktober orders his execution. Each reveal, in turn, provides a separate level of truth--or, as it may be, self-deception. This isn't your standard spy film with lots of gunplay, outrageous villains, and explosions. On its publication in 1966, THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM received the Edgar Award as best mystery of the year. The Quiller Memorandum (1966) - IMDb They wereso popularthat in 1966 a film was made the title waschanged to The Quiller Memorandum and from then on all future copies of the book were published under this title, rather than the original. Michael Anderson directs a classy slice of '60s spy-dom. The characters and dialog are well-written and most roles are nicely acted. When drug-induced questioning fails to produce results, Segal is booted to the river, but he isn't quite ready to give in yet. He brings graceful authority and steely determination to his role. Movie Info After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller (George Segal) is sent to Berlin to. In typically British mordant fashion, George Sanders and a fellow staffer in Britain are lunching in London on pheasant, more concerned with the quality of their repast than with the loss of their man in the field! (UK title). Max von Sydow plays the Nazi chief quietly but with high camp menace. This repackaging includes some worthwhile special features like an isolated score track and commentary by film historians Eddy Friedfeld and Lee Pfeiffer of Cinema Retro magazine to go with the new format. It was written by Harold Pinter, but despite his talent for writing plays, he certainly had no cinematic sense whatever.
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