STUDIO: Acorn Media | DIRECTOR: Michael Ferguson / Ian Toynton | CAST: Rod Steiger, Anthony Perkins, Joanna Lumley / Kevin McNally, Bernard Hepton, James Faulkner
RELEASE DATE: 5/25/2010 | PRICE: DVD$29.96
BONUSES: cast and author bios
SPECS: NR | 308 min. | Thriller | 4:3 fullscreen | Dolby Digital | no subtitlesRATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie
| Audio
| Video
Gerald Seymour
The 1980s revival was in full swing in 2010 — The A-Team movie, for example — and Acorn Media contributed to the wave by culling the best from Britain’s television archives, including a pair of solid movies based on the Cold War-themed spy novels of journalist-turned-novelist Gerald Seymour
Broadcast in three parts in the U.S. a year or so after its British premiere, The Glory Boys stars Rod Steiger (In the Heat of the Night) as a Israeli nuclear scientist visiting London and Anthony Perkins (Psycho) as a former British agent brought out of retirement to protect Steiger from the joint Palestinian-IRA hit squad that wants him dead. The more well-known and action-oriented film of the two, The Glory Boys offers a pair of fine performances by its leading men and some genuine excitement after some initial slow-going.
There’s more of a “Cold War” feel in The Contract. This movie finds a retired British intelligence officer (Kevin McNally) called back into service to assist in the defection of a Soviet missile designer (Hans Canineberg) to the West after the Brits accidentally help the wrong man escape. Ultimately involving the defection of an entire family — the members of which aren’t entirely sure they want to betray their country — The Contract is the more tense and emotionally driven of the two films.
Both The Contract and The Glory Boys were broadcast as mini-series in their native England, but they play adequately as slightly overlong movies about a time that was on the verge of crumbling — just as the Berlin Wall did in the fall of 1989.
|
Buy or Rent A Cold War Spy Collection: The Glory Boys & The Contract
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
 DVD |
 |
 DVD |
 |
Leave a Reply