"The secret of this movie is that nobody has to act in it. And it's a good thing, too...What comes out of this silly little Red Scare spy drama from the smack-dab middle of the 1950s is an almost perfect, semitrashy set piece; everybody has a good time. The setting is a beanery near the missile base owned by (Keenan) Wynn. (Lee) Marvin is the short-order cook, (Terry) Moore is the Tomato, and (Frank) Lovejoy, as usual, is the humorless Fed out to uncover the spy...It doesn't matter who the spy really is: everyone sits around on stools and makes comments not unlike the characters in the Arizona cafe in The Petrified Forest. People going through life half-awake, half-aware, unfinished, unsure of how to handle destiny's nagging reminders. They poke at one another, spook away, there's an occasional shove. The government guy is always the stupid one, the real pawn, the one who follows orders...This movie is a dead-on minimalist portrait of America at its most paranoid. It's the one to show the history class." --Barry Gifford