It is our great pleasure to participate in the San Francisco premiere of this first feature film produced by Lynda Myles, Film Curator at the Pacific Film Archive from 1980 to 1982. British critics have hailed Defence of the Realm as the return of the political thriller-that most entertaining and disturbing of film genres-to its proper home, the British cinema. "You have only to look at Hitchcock's British movies to see that this country once made the finest conspiracy thrillers in the world," David Pirie writes, "and now Defence of the Realm revives that tradition.... This is cinema of paranoia at its sharpest, a labyrinth of shadows leading to an entirely credible horror. In Gabriel Byrne, it also boasts a leading man with the kind of brooding physical presence too rarely found in Britain." Byrne portrays a rookie reporter on a Fleet Street rag who rushes in, like the proverbial fool, to expose a major government scandal involving call girls, allegations of KGB connections, the resignation of an MP-the whole package, or so he thinks. But the body of a young man found at a nuclear site, then the murder of a respected senior reporter, hint none-too-subtly that this young hack has stumbled into far more dangerous territory: the secret state at work. It is a story to die for...literally. The ubiquitous Denholm Elliott is marvelous, as usual, as the older reporter who finds messages in the bottle-the last refuge of journalistic integrity. Nor does David Drury's skilled direction hedge on the frightening questions of nuclear secrets and media responsibility while delivering an assured and engrossing thriller.