- [Woody] Welcome to GammaRay!
These are our top 10 favorite Spy Films.
We walked into a room to make a list
and we ended up asking,
what even is a spy?
Exotic locations, gadgets, fisticuffs,
femme fatales, cars, no.
The spy film is deeply
tied to a notably bleak
and paranoid part of real
history: the Cold War.
A time where double agents, murder,
and betrayal felt like the norm.
The inherent tension on
a local and global scale
has attracted filmmakers ever since.
So, we went at it.
And there's only one
rule we gave the room:
One per franchise or director to avoid
a ton of Bonds or Hitchcock's.
This resulted in a lot of
things being thrown and broken,
but we all walked out
alive with the following.
At Number 10, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
with no honorable mentions.
That's right the film stands on its own
in the spy genre and we found it to be one
of the most grounded in actual espionage.
Based on John le Carré's classic novel,
the movie focuses on
MI6 leader George Smiley
as he hunts for a mole within the agency.
Director Tomas Alfredson throws gadgets
and high-speed chases out the window
and instead focuses on tense
hand-wringing sequences
of manipulation and battles of wit.
It beautifully captures a
time before modern technology
when our most intimate
secrets could still be kept.
Underneath the complex
plot, the film is about
the dehumanizing cost of
bureaucratic espionage,
the desperate loneliness that comes
with a deceitful life lived
under constant scrutiny.
Many former and existing spies relate
to the inner conflict
between being patriotic
and capable without ego
and that nagging suspicion
that defending democracy
can be a thankless job and,
in the end, you will almost certainly be
the last victim in the saga.
The film is delivered with
an uncompromising grayness,
which lends it a perpetual melancholy
that perfectly suits the
themes of the original book.
Plus, Gary Oldman, Toby
Jones, Colin Firth,
Tom Hardy and Mark Strong all deliver
memorable, complex performances.
- Look, the minister's very pleased
with your progress so far.
- [Woody] At number nine
we talked a lot about how,
as we've stepped deeper
into the present day,
films have pushed the spy genre to balance
honoring the roots of a
classic espionage thriller,
while layering in more intense action
to satisfy the requirements of
a modern action Blockbuster.
We can give a lot of credit
for this move to 1998's Ronin,
when Robert de Niro,
Jean Reno and Sean Bean
led us not only through a gripping plot
full of twists and turns but some
of the best car chases ever
to be captured on film.
But, any list of the best modern spy films
would be remiss without
mention of the first three
Bourne films, which excel at the balance
between brutal combat,
paranoid conspiracies
and a traceable character arc for a man
who doesn't even know who he is.
They redefined and influenced peers
before becoming clear
inspiration for the reshaping
of Bond in Daniel Craig's
run as well as the re-tolling
of Batman by Christopher Nolan.
Really, the first three Bourne flicks
have all collectively
earned a spot on this list,
but since rules are rules
and we had to chose,
we went with The Bourne Ultimatum.
Why?
Well, Doug Liman's The
Bourne Identity paved the way
for the franchise, but it was arguably
subsequent director Paul
Greengrass who really consolidated
the new action aesthetic
of docu-influenced
hand-held camerawork that lent a nervy,
realist immediacy to even the
most tortuous of plot turns.
In both of his Bourne
films, Greengrass achieved
a rare symbiosis with the
material and with lead
Damon as the amnesiac spy, and delivered
some brilliantly tense filmmaking.
Most importantly for this list though,
Ultimatum is chock full
of the actual spying shit
that makes its plot
twist-filled and compelling,
with Tony Gilroy's taut,
intelligent scripts
bringing Robert Ludlum's books to life.
At Number eight, we talked
about Robert Redford
and the price of a life
of secrecy and deceit.
Usually, at the top of people's lists
is 2001's Spy Game.
The movie may be billed as
a two-hander with Brad Pitt,
but it's really Redford's show.
It's an entirely respectable spy thriller
and is helped by Tony Scott's trademark
explosive action sequences
and unrelenting editing style,
It's a strong pick for those who go there,
but to us, the stronger
pick for a Redford spy
is 1975's Three Days of The Condor.
The 70s saw the release of
quite a few conspiracy thrillers
in large part due to
the Watergate scandal.
Films like The Parallax
View and The Conversation
were popularly poking at with people's
heightened sense of paranoia.
In the middle of all that,
Sidney Pollack came in
with one of the most entertaining
espionage actioners of its time.
Redford plays bookish CIA
pencil pusher Joe Turner,
codename: Condor, who comes
back from lunch one day
to find entire team murdered.
The guy only avoids
being killed at the start
because it's his turn to fetch lunch.
He goes digging for the truth and uncovers
a deep conspiracy within the CIA
while simultaneously fleeing the assassins
who murdered his colleagues.
The film is both a love letter
to the high-paced attitude
of New York City and a thrillingly intense
and beautiful maze of
counter-intelligence.
Three Days of The Condor still remains
one of the better
examples of the price paid
by an average man when he's
forced to become a spy.
- Everybody is dead.
- [Woody] That felt super
serious, so lets' take a moment
to talk about the fun side of things.
There's Burn After Reading which we know
isn't what you might
strictly call a spy movie
but it does have elements of the genre
and even directly involves
the CIA as a part of the plot,
the Cohen Bros' movie is a
combination of witty dialogue
and almost slapstick dark
comedy that's worth a watch.
There's OSS 117, Spies Like Us, and,
probably the quintessential
character spoof
of the spy film hero, Austin Powers!
We debated over choosing the
entertaining guilty pleasure
mashup of family action
comedy and spy flick
that is True Lies, but in
the end, we decided to go
with George Clooney's directorial debut.
At number seven is 2002's spy comedy
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
The film, like the book it's based on,
claims to be biographical.
Okay, allegedly, Chuck Barris,
the creator of The Dating
Game and The Gong Show
would accompany his lucky winners
on trips to romantic spots and kill
for the CIA while he was on the trip.
Barris, himself, claims
to have killed 33 people
while working as a spy.
While we'll never really know
if Barris is full of shit,
simply re-writing a life
he feels needs a reboot,
or whether he is being as
purely honest as he can be,
the film's story, penned by
the quirky and esoteric mind
of Charlie Kaufman, strikes
an interesting balance
between far-fetched absurdist dark comedy
and the psychological drama
of Chuck Barris' extensive paranoia.
It's a fun flick and, like
all the choices in this pick,
a good palate cleanser
from all the gritty,
brutal action of most
modern takes on the genre.
- Attaching firmly on the genitalia.
- [Woody] At number six, fine.
It's time to pick a Bond.
Look we argued about this for longer
than we should ever have.
First someone made a long,
impassioned argument for Casino Royale.
In short, the film is
entertaining, emotional,
and endlessly rewatchable
that blows its competition
right out of the water.
The film features
phenomenal actions scenes,
a classy story that gives
Bond a heart and soul back,
and a pitch perfect pace and tone,
and a surprising debut in
the role by Daniel Craig
who made his version of
007 a proper human being
without losing any of the playfulness.
On top of all of that,
the film maintains a careful restraint
on franchise tropes such
as one-liners and gadgets
that had started to go overboard,
past camp and into ridiculous
by Die Another Day.
That said, that was
followed up by an even more
impassioned plea for 2012's
Skyfall as a more mature
and evolved version of
the escapist male fantasy.
She also made some great
points, between the epic
and cinematically stunning
globe-trotting visuals,
to the interesting and
genuinely menacing take
on a villain with ornamented
pathology from Javier Bardem,
to the almost complete
abandoning of any romancing
to focus on Bond's relationship with M,
the film is very distinct in the series,
and definitely deserving of being called
one of the all-time great Bond flicks.
And it's easily one of
the top three Bond songs
ever sang, if not number one.
Adele's is instantly iconic.
She was born to do that.
They told me I couldn't improv,
but we're talking about it.
There was an almost one-hour conversation
over the one asshole
who put George Lazenby
as the representative
of the Bond Franchise
which devolved into a
fight about Goldfinger.
That said, he made some great points
about Director Peter
Hunt's veer away from camp
despite the plot, the great action scenes,
probably the best Bond score ever,
and the first real emotional
connection for 007 on screen,
and those are few and far between.
But after everyone basically demanded
their favorite Bond film be the pick,
with very valid points and solid backing,
for this specific list we made a call
and went with 1964's
From Russia With Love.
Now, we're in no way
waying that Sean Connery's
second stint at the secret
agent is the best Bond film
of all time, but it is the one
that has the strongest through lines
of good old fashion espionage.
Bond's battles with SMERSH
and the super Soviet Red Grant
are full of poisoned spikes and rifles
cobbled together from
briefcases that set a tone
for the Bond films to come.
While there's definitely some
points that don't hold up
to modern scrutiny, it's
a fun, ridiculous romp
through fantasy before we all
got so serious about it all.
Let's be honest here.
Despite some people
having a weird obsession
with criticizing Tom
Cruise's height, which like,
get over it dude, Mission: Impossible
might be the only film
franchise in existence that,
with the exception of the
flick-that-must-not-be-named
John Woo Dove-filled
motorcycle super-sequel,
has gotten better with every film.
In Hollywood, that is akin
to a true fucking miracle.
The first Mission: Impossible
gets a lot of credit
for setting a fun, action packed,
and yet still emotionally grounded tone.
But on top of all that
pushed Hunt's character
even deeper and delivered a
much more fleshed out person
than the original three installments,
made of flesh and blood
and sense of humor.
But in the end, for number five,
we had to go with Rogue Nation.
Displaying exceptional
feats of human endurance,
clever tricks of the trade,
along with abundant gadgetry
and subterfuge, the film
fantastically fulfills the beats
of the spy genre film.
On top of all that, director
Christopher McQuarrie
piggybacks chase sequences,
building a massive set piece
for the ages, the best
of which takes place
during an opera show and
could have easily been snagged
from a Hitchcock film,
it's just that brilliant
in both the editing and pacing.
Almost any of the films other than MI:2
could've ended up on
this list, because man,
these guys are really
willing to do what it takes
to make sure you never
stop having a good time.
- Oh hey, boys.
What did I miss?
- [Woody] Speaking of Hitchcock, we did.
For a while.
Making a choice coming
from the master of Suspense
himself was tough.
You can see the influence of the spy trade
in so much of his work, from Saboteur,
to The Lady Vanishes, Foreign
Correspondent, and even Topaz.
But there's really only three
classic official spy films
in his cannon and they
all seem to be building up
on each other, like stacking
masterpiece on masterpiece
to reach the best possible
version of a thing.
Probably the first truly
great Hitchcock picture,
1935's The 39 Steps is a
gripping, enormously entertaining
chase thriller adapted from the seminal
1915 spy novel by John Buchan.
More playful than some of
the director's other films
of the period, it establishes Hitchcock's
favorite themes and
biggest personal fears,
the tale of an innocent man on the run.
This was followed up by
his second spy masterpiece,
Notorious, in 1946, the film where critics
started to take notice
not just of the films,
but of the director behind them.
Combine Carey Grant's silky
smooth but devilish ploys
for Ingrid Bergman's affections
with Hitchcock's singular
talents for suspense
and intrigue and the result is one
of the most emotionally intricate
works in his entire canon.
Finally, though, in 1959 comes our pick.
North by Northwest is an
extension of themes and characters
first explored in The
39 Steps and Notorious,
which serves to make the
film a much richer narrative.
By this time, Hitchcock
was working at the height
of his powers, and he took
everything he'd learned so far
and put it into this.
It's an extremely
well-crafted suspense thriller
with a great cast and an
equally engaging story
about a spy who does not exist.
There's a lot to get excited about here,
from Thornhill's devotion to a good suit
to the epic finale atop a
soundstage Mount Rushmore,
not to mention to film's
fantastically hard-boiled dialogue.
Seriously, it's flawless filmmaking,
the economy of storytelling
in the final few shots
alone are staggering.
If Hitchcock invented
the wrong man sub-genre
with The 39 Steps, he perfected it
with North By Northwest, and
afterwards mostly abandoned
the trope, probably because he was aware
it wouldn't get any better than this,
and it really never has.
- Are you sure?
- Yes.
- [Woody] For number three,
we wanted to talk about
the based on a true story bunch.
We talked a lot about Zero Dark Thirty,
which brought the reality of torture,
military base bombings and
Al-Qaeda to a viewing public
that had only previously read about them
in limited published accounts.
While more manhunt than
spy movie necessarily,
it dispenses with the glamour to show us
that spy work is dirty
work and the chilling fact
that those searching for the truth
are often just as clueless
as the rest of us.
We fondly remembered Steven Spielberg's
2006 masterpiece, Munich.
Based on the true story
of the Munich massacre,
which took place in
1972 and saw 11 members
of the Israeli Olympic
team brutally murdered
by the Palestinian terrorist
group Black September.
Based on the true story
of the Munich massacre,
which took place in
1972 and saw 11 members
of the Israeli Olympic
team brutally murdered
by the Palestinian terrorist
group Black September.
Spielberg's spy thriller
is mostly interested
in what went down after the actual event,
when Mossad sent agents
on a revenge mission.
The film is an unashamed
epic, with moments
of long brooding and unease punctuated
with sudden bursts of violence.
It's this slowness,
however, that sets it apart.
We're shown the mistakes, method
and carefully gathered
intelligence of every kill.
Both films are circling back
to a classic spy film theme,
the price we pay, in this case
for obsession and vengeance,
and the moral cost of what
we do in the name of justice.
In the end, we picked 2012's Argo.
Based almost entirely
on actual happenings,
Ben Affleck further hones
his strong directorial skills
in a tale that follows a
top-secret rescue mission
conducted by the CIA in 1972.
In order to rescue a group
of US embassy workers
from Iran during an uprising,
a team masqueraded themselves
as a group of filmmakers
making a fake sci-fi film
called Argo, searching for
ideal shooting locations.
Argo is a spy flick that
is refreshingly free
from gunfire and explosions,
but clings to a story
based on keeping calm under pressure
and making swift decisions at key times
and the screenplay by Chris
Terrio is a masterclass
in economical, unsentimental writing.
- So you wanna come to Hollywood
and act like a big shot?
- Yeah.
- Without actually doing anything?
- No.
- You'll fit right in.
- [Woody] At number two
is Germany's 2006 film
The Lives of Others.
Five years before Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
the film gave us a glimpse
behind the Iron Curtain
and over the Berlin Wall into 1980s
Soviet-occupied East Berlin in a drama
that documented the Big
Brother-esque observations
carried out by the Stasi,
you know, the German Democratic
Republic's secret police.
It offers a truly grim
glimpse into what it was like
to be a spy during the Cold War,
particularly if you
didn't necessarily believe
in the cause you had devoted your life to.
The film does away with
Hollywood pretenses
at a happy ending or silver linings,
nothing cheerful happens here,
nor is any character entirely likable.
It's a film about espionage after all,
and dives deep into the gray moral ground
people are forced to
inhabit in order to survive.
The sense of paranoia that
hovers over every frame
allows us to feel as though we, too,
are being subjected to
the same oppressions
as the characters.
The Lives of Others is a spy
film that denies any aspects
of glamour associated with
the genre and presents us,
instead, with a cold, hard
portrait of a the bleak,
paranoid reality of a lifestyle
we've been romanticizing for decades.
For number one, I'm just gonna list movies
that you should watch.
I mean classics in the
genre that are above
and beyond that are just incredible films.
We'll pick one, but
they're all number one.
first off there's Harry Palmer.
Starting with 1965's The Ipcress Files
and known as the anti-007, a darker,
less suave anti-hero spy,
the Len Deighton spy novels,
adapted over the course of three films
by original Bond producer Harry Saltzman,
and immortalized by Michael Caine
as a roguish insubordinate,
but one who got the job done nonetheless.
The follow up films, Funeral at Berlin
and The Billion Dollar
Brain, can be a bit janky,
but the original is standout,
with style to spare.
There's the classic of 60s cinema
that doesn't get anywhere enough credit
on lists like these, Martin
Ritt's masterful adaptation
of John le Carré greatest novel,
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
At its heart, this is a
movie about the ethics
of the spy profession,
asking whether it's okay
to deceive and mislead
for the greater good.
Many a spy who has worked a long time
in the field encounters this dilemma,
the bad guys aren't so
bad and the good guys
aren't so good and you are
going to have to betray
a lot of good, decent people
to accomplish the mission.
There's 1976's Marathon Man,
1981's Eye of the Needle,
1973's The Day of the Jackal,
the original Manchurian
Candidate, Our Man in Havana.
God, internet, why are
you making us choose?
Is the world this dark and
bleak and full of betrayal
that we can't just enjoy all the movies
in no particular order?
Why?
Our pick, in the end, then
is 1949's The Third Man.
Originally written as novella
and then a screenplay by Graham Greene,
who occasionally worked as a
spy for the British Government,
the resulting film is
a fucking masterpiece.
Packed with more tension, more atmosphere,
and more lingering paranoia
than you could possibly
ever ask for, The Third
Man is set in Vienna
when the city had been divided up
between four allied countries.
After being offered a
job, Holly Martins arrives
in search of his friend, who
may or may not be missing,
or dead, or entangled in
a bewildering spy plot
that will take Martin
through hell and back again.
The film is a beautiful
mixture of noir and spy movie,
capturing a sense of
constant unease throughout
which is scaled up by the eerie
black and white photography.
Watch out for the famous
Swiss Cuckoo Speech sequence
at the Ferris wheel.
The Third Man is a film that
has often been imitated,
but never bettered.
I'll leave it with this:
Roger Ebert once wrote,
of all the movies that
I have seen, this one
most completely embodies the
romance of going to the movies.
Seriously, what else do you fucking want?
It's the best spy movie of all time.
Watch it and the rest of them.
That's it for us this week.
Make sure to like, subscribe,
comment, do all the things.
And remember, we're watching you.
Until next time!
