Funeral In Berlin

Overview

Colonel Stok, a Soviet intelligence officer responsible for security at the Berlin Wall, appears to want to defect but the evidence is contradictory. Stok wants the British to handle his defection and asks for one of their agents, Harry Palmer, to smuggle him out of East Germany.

Product Details

Release Date:	10/08/2013
UPC:	0883316885512
Original Release:	0000
Source:	WARNER BROS.DIGITAL DIST
Language:	English

Editorial Reviews

Guy Hamilton's Funeral in Berlin (1966) was a groundbreaking thriller in its time. From World War II until the mid-'60s, the nature of politics and paranoia in the West had rendered just about every depiction of the Cold War into a relentlessly grim exercise in entertainment. The James Bond movies got past this by totally ignoring the Cold War in most of its scripts (with the notable exception of From Russia With Love), preferring to deal with villains other than the Soviets. The mere fact that Paramount had made Funeral in Berlin indicated a new feeling in the land. In contrast to the Bond movies, the story here was steeped in the minutiae of the Cold War, and it wasted no time in having fun at the expense of the official seriousness with which it was pursued and prosecuted. Hamilton, photographer Otto Heller, and editor John Bloom all went to town on this production, with quick editing, unusual camera angles, and a subtly wry, sardonic tone throughout the script, making this movie a lot more complex and demanding (and ultimately rewarding) than a film such as Goldfinger. This movie proved to be one of the more underrated thrillers of its period, and though most viewers shied away from its use of such plot devices as unrepentant Nazis and money stolen from Holocaust victims, those same attributes make it a movie not only worth discovering but also seeing again. The extraordinary cinematography with its images of Berlin and London during the '60s also makes this film worth watching (and owning) on that basis alone.