For Your Eyes Only: Operatives, Surveillants, and Saboteurs in Cinema

7/1/05 to 8/31/05

  • The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, July 1

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The President's Analyst

    • Wednesday, August 31 19:30

    James Coburn is the psychoanalyst with the dream job: peering into the head of state. Then the president's paranoia begins to rub off. "Coburn becomes a picaresque hero [in] an America whose psychological landscape is every bit as absurd as Hunter Thompson's Las Vegas."-Time Out

  • 13 Frightened Girls

    • Wednesday, August 24 19:30

    A Thrillville Presentation, Hosted by Will the Thrill, Monica Tiki Goddess, and Special Guest Doktor Goulfinger. Exploitation-guru William Castle effortlessly blends those two otherwise unmixable genres, the spy film and the Gidget-style girl comedy, when the cutie daughter of an American diplomat in London turns teenage spybuster.

  • The Whip Hand

    • Wednesday, August 17 19:30

    Introduced by Doktor Goulfinger, Spy Master. A big-city reporter stumbles across a very, very odd town in Wisconsin; are the people just unfriendly, or are they developing WMDs? This rarely shown Cold War oddity from the director of Invaders from Mars began a wave of 1950s Red Menace movies.

  • Our Man in Havana

    • Wednesday, August 10 19:30

    A vacuum-cleaner salesman in steamy Cuba becomes the intelligence source for the British Secret Service in this droll spy spoof from a quartet of formidable Englishmen: actors Alec Guinness and Noel Coward, writer Graham Greene, and director Carol Reed.

  • The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover

    • Wednesday, August 3 19:30

    The cult director of It's Alive dredges up this entertainingly tawdry biopic of our nation's former "top cop," focusing on his disguised sexual proclivities as well as the puritanical anti-Communist ones. Merging tabloid-style excess with authentic location shooting, this is "probably the best movie ever made about American politics."-Robin Wood

  • The House on 92nd Street

    • Friday, July 29 19:30

    Nazis are at work in NYC, acting a lot like Commies, and it's up to a just-graduated collegian to find 'em! This semi-documentary thriller made in cooperation with the FBI was the first in a postwar wave.

  • Pickup on South Street

    • Friday, July 29 21:15

    Pickpockets and cheap whores battle Commie provocateurs along the seedy New York waterfront in Sam Fuller's noirish potboiler of gutter-level loyalties, both personal and political. With Richard Widmark.

  • Billion Dollar Brain

    • Wednesday, July 27 19:30

    Michael Caine's reluctant spy Harry Palmer is back, this time working for Ken Russell, who demonstrates his signature flair for excess in the third in a series based on Len Deighton's novels.

  • The Spy in Black

    • Friday, July 22 19:30

    "The Spy in Black was the most erotically charged espionage thriller of its day and the beginning of the Powell-Pressburger partnership. The fierce love-hate-deception relationship of its two leads, both spies (but for whom?), prefigures Vertigo and Eye of the Needle."-Village Voice

  • Q Planes

    • Friday, July 22 21:10

    British aircraft go missing from a secret factory, and it's up to debonair Scotland Yard man Ralph Richardson and callow flyboy Larry Olivier to find out what happened in this "delightful pre-Bond tongue-in-cheek spy melodrama."-William K. Everson

  • Darling Lili

    • Wednesday, July 20 19:30

    Julie Andrews is a British stage star working undercover for the Germans during WWI, singing songs and seducing flyboy Rock Hudson for the good of the Kaiser. This director's cut is shorter and tighter than the release version, with the Henry Mancini score, Julie's striptease moment, and Rock's leather-jacketed charm left in.

  • Spies

    • Friday, July 15 19:30

    Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Fritz Lang's epic, shown in its full 3 hours! "Spies is a forerunner of Hitchcock's dense English thrillers and the guilt-ridden espionage of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler novels. Granddaddy of decades of intrigue epics, Spies, in its rigorous austerity, remains the most modern of the bunch."-Village Voice

  • Saboteur

    • Wednesday, July 13 19:30

    Love that Bob Cummings as a factory worker framed for espionage, battling time and the law to uncover the real saboteur in Hitchcock's wartime thriller. The script, co-written by Dorothy Parker, keeps things moving from coast to coast, and is considered a practice run for North by Northwest.

  • Black Sunday

    • Friday, July 8 19:30

    John Frankenheimer ratchets up the suspense in this '70s fantasia involving (get ready) Palestinian terrorists recruiting an unhinged Vietnam War veteran (Bruce Dern) to bomb the Super Bowl. "Intelligent and meticulous depiction of an act of outlandish terrorism…handled with unusual dramatic depth."-Variety

  • Ministry of Fear

    • Wednesday, July 6 19:30

    Nazi saboteurs in wartime London; Fritz Lang directing a Graham Greene thriller-it just doesn't get better than this. "A tour de force of paranoia."-Cinematheque Ontario

  • The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

    • Friday, July 1 19:00

    Richard Burton is John le Carré's jaded Cold War spy in this masterpiece in black-and-white and shades of gray-a film that looks more remarkable with the years, by now a documentary of disillusionment.

  • Dr. No

    • Friday, July 1 21:10

    The screen debut of James Bond, complete with double agents, double martinis, and of course Sean Connery as the suave 007, who gives the word "undercover" new meaning. The plot? Jamaica, weird energy waves, and the scowling Dr. No.