An Englishman Abroad is premised on Australian actress Coral Browne's real-life meeting in Moscow, in 1958, with the exiled English spy and notorious gay bon vivant, Guy Burgess. The text, however, is pure Bennett, the execution pure Schlesinger, the combination a happily haunting rendition of There Will Always Be a Moscow. Alan Bates's disgraced, down-at-the-heels Burgess has "bags of charm" as he initiates Browne into the ways of being a gent provocateur in a town where everyone's spying on everyone else. (Even with that, the Comrades are a bitter disappointment in that they don't gossip.) It is almost too perfect that Browne, who plays herself in the film, had been in Moscow to play Gertrude in Hamlet. Forget about the Rosencranz and Guildenstern who staff the British embassy; it is on her return to London, where she sees to her new friend's haberdashery, that we find out what loyalty really means.