Spies aren't such a big secret. According to pop cinema, they're either bound to Bond-handsome and brash bachelors, saving the mother country from all manner of evil-or the burnt-out case, à la le Carré, broken and brought low by duplicity and the blur of too many doubles. Intriguing, yes, but spies are just the cover for the clandestine affairs of state and political exigencies that really deploy the dirty dealers and furtive folderol. We see this in Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear, in which menace seems to swell the air, or in the paranoia that pans out in Theodore Flicker's The President's Analyst; in Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, where treachery reaches down to the lowliest places, or riding high with the maniacal millionaire in Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain. For Your Eyes Only tracks the espionage game as it infiltrates the popular imagination, masking or mocking the machinations necessary to make the world safe for moviegoers. Though the films in our covert cinema were inspired by the past terror of real wars or the perceived dangers of a Cold one, they seem curiously current, as if nothing changes but the name on the license to kill. This document will now self-destruct.
Steve Seid