Funeral in Berlin (1966)

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About Funeral in Berlin (1966)

A Group Dedicated to the aesthetics of Classic Cold War Spy Films......................

The ennui of threats, bluffs and constant stand-offs.............


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Key Films

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
Director: Martin Ritt

By Marilyn Ferdinand

"What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?"
-- Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold


The Genre<
Wiki Blah......
The genre of spy fiction—sometimes called political thriller or spy thriller or sometimes shortened simply to spy-fi—arose before World War I at about the same time that the first modern intelligence agencies were formed. The Dreyfus Affair contributed to public interest in the subject. For a whole decade, an affair involving the operations of spies and counter-spies held center stage in the politics of a major European country, and was widely and continually reported all over the world. The details of German Intelligence having an agent in the French Army's General Staff and getting through him important military secrets, and of French counter-intelligence riposting by getting a charwoman to go through the wastebaskets of the German Embassy in Paris, were the stuff of daily news - and natually inspired fictional tales involving similar themes.

Seldom has this literary field met with critical acclaim, although insightful, literate, and politically important works have been published in it. At the same time, it has enjoyed great popular success.

Readership waned only in the lull following the end of the Cold War (the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989). The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States reignited interest and have reversed that trend. Some pundits are referring to the current era as the Decade of the Spy and pointing to the renaissance in spy fiction and film as two of the indicators of this

The Cold War that followed hard upon World War II was a great impetus to the genre. In the early 1950s, authors such as Desmond Cory introduced fictional "licensed to kill" agents, while Graham Greene drew on his real-life experience with British Intelligence to create a number of left-wing, anti-imperialist spy novels, including The Quiet American (1955), set in southeast Asia, A Burnt-out Case (1961), about the Belgian Congo, The Comedians (1966), set in Haiti, The Honorary Consul (1973), in the Argentine town of Corrientes, near the Paraguay border, and The Human Factor (1978), about spies in London. His most popular novel was Our Man in Havana (1959), a seriocomedy about British intelligence bumbling in pre-Castro Cuba.

An early literary phenomenon of the Cold War was Ian Fleming's counter-intelligence agent, James Bond–007, who became and remains the most famous fictional spy. Yet despite Fleming's enormous commercial success, other authors quickly developed heroes with anti-Bond traits. Notable examples are John le Carré and Len Deighton, who modeled their novels on those 1930s authors who were dubious about the morality of espionage. For example, in contrast to Bond, Le Carré's George Smiley, is a middle-aged intelligence officer whose wife has had several public love affairs. Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal) and Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle) approached the subject journalistically, and were praised for their dramatic use of historic events. "Adam Hall", one of the pseudonyms of Trevor Dudley-Smith, created a popular series about British spy Quiller, beginning with The Berlin Memorandum (U.S. title: The Quiller Memorandum), which has a different tack; it is both literary and focused upon tradecraft. Also notable are the novels of Joseph Hone, with the hero Marlow, beginning with The Private Sector.

During this era, American authors for the first time rose to sufficient prominence to break British dominance of the genre. Edward S. Aarons published his "Assignment" series starting in 1955. In 1960 Donald Hamilton published Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew, the debut novels in his long-running series featuring the grim counterspy/assassin Matt Helm. The books inspired a series of comic, popular movies starring Dean Martin as Matt Helm. Robert Ludlum's first book, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), sold modestly in hardcover, but was a bestseller in paperback, launching Ludlum's career. Generally considered the inventor of the modern spy thriller, Ludlum has been criticized, praised, and widely imitated. The Hunt for Red October (1984), the first novel of Tom Clancy, was a major publishing sensation and also made into a film. The Welsh writer Craig Thomas is generally credited with creating the techno-thriller genre with the publication of Firefox in 1977; however, it was Clancy who took this to new heights.

Outside USA and UK, Julian Semenov was one of the most influential spy fiction writers of the Socialist bloc. His novels covered a wide range of Soviet Russian intelligence history, from the Russian Civil war to espionage in World War II and during the Cold War. TV Series "Seventeen Moments of Spring" and "TASS is Authorised to Announce..." were filmed after his books.

The 1960s saw an abundance of spy films, many based on works of literature. They covered a wide range, from the fantastical James Bond superspy films to the grainy, monochrome realism of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (based on the Le Carré novel of that title), to the cool commercialism of The Quiller Memorandum (screenplay for the film first released in the UK as The Berlin Memorandum is by Harold Pinter, adapted from "Adam Hall"'s eponymous novel).

The Glienicke bridge The Soviet Union and the United States used it three times to exchange captured spies during the Cold War, and the Bridge was referred to as the Bridge of Spies by reporters.[2]

The first prisoner exchange between the superpowers took place on February 10, 1962. The U.S. released noted Russian spy Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel in exchange for pilot Francis Gary Powers captured by the USSR following the U-2 Crisis of 1960. Annette von Broecker claims that a lucky guess resulted in her being the only eyewitness to this exchange. [3]

The second exchange on June 12, 1985 was a hurriedly arranged swap of 23 American agents held in Eastern Europe for Polish agent Marian Zacharski and other three Soviet agents arrested in the West.

The final exchange was also the most public. On February 11, 1986 the human rights campaigner and political prisoner Anatoly Sharansky and three Western agents were exchanged for Karl Koecher and four other Eastern agents.

The Glienicke bridge as a venue for prisoner exchange has also appeared in fiction, most notably in the 1966 Harry Palmer film, Funeral in Berlin, starring Michael Caine, based on the novel of the same name.

The Websites

www.newstatesman.com/arts-and-culture/2008/09/cold-war-mo...

members.tripod.com/keesstam/harrypalmer.html

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/422812...

The Graphic











The Dialogue

Colonel Stok: If there is a mistake, the KRAPOs will be shooting at me.
Harry Palmer: That'll be nice: you'll find out what it's like to be an East German.
Colonel Stok: You are insolent! Do you think this job, this loathsome Wall, is all I've done for Communism? Does Smolensk mean anything to you, or Stalingrad?
[chuckles]
Colonel Stok: I look at your stupid face and I think you mean what you say. I like you, you're good at your job. You need only one thing.
Harry Palmer: What's that?
Colonel Stok: A reason for doing it.
Harry Palmer: I get paid.
Colonel Stok: £30 a week? Is it worth it - to be a tool of the generals? A tool for making trouble? Trouble makes arms, arms make money...
Harry Palmer: When you get to England, we'll give you a soapbox. You sure you want to defect tomorrow?
Colonel Stok: I told you, I'm still a good Communist. When a man leaves his wife, he remembers his wedding night. Communism was the love of my youth, and I've been faithful... until now. I was with Antomikov Sanko at the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. Do you know what that means in Russia?
Harry Palmer: Yes, I think so. It means you're an expendable hero.



The Boring Stuff