Tradecraft: KILLING EVE Spawns a Cold War Spin-off

On the eve of Killing Eve's series finale (airing this weekend), Deadline reports that "producer Sid Gentle Films is in early stage development on [a] spin-off, though it hasn’t got a greenlight yet." The spin-off (for BBC America and AMC Networks) would focus on Fiona Shaw's character, Carolyn Martens... but not as the cool, commanding spymaster we met in the show's first season. Instead, the potential spin-off would focus on her early days with MI6. From what we know of her history on the show, that could be incredibly compelling! Presumably such a series would focus on her time on Russia Desk and in Moscow during the waning days of the Cold War, when she recruited a crucial asset. I'm not so interested in this potential series because of its Killing Eve connection (though I do love that show's wit and tone and performances, and it would be nice to see them continue), but because of its setting. We don't see many Cold War era series, and when they do come along, I'll always be watching! It would be particularly cool to see one set in the late 80s with that focus. The Americans of course reveled in its 80s setting, but that was focused on Soviet agents undercover in America. A show about a British agent operating in Moscow at that time would be very different! 

Third Jean Dujardin OSS 117 Spy Comedy Begins Filming!

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A whole decade after the release of his second OSS 117 spy spoof, Lost in Rio (review here), Jean Dujardin (who picked up an Oscar for Best Actor in the interim) has at long last stepped back into the role that brought him international fame. Cameras began rolling this week on a third OSS 117 comedy, as announced by director Nicolas Bedos via video of a clapperboard on Instagram. OSS 117: Alerte rouge en Afrique noire (literally translated as OSS 117: Red Alert in Black Africa, which very much has the ring of a Jean Bruce novel title, but the ultimate English title is unlikely to be a direct translation of the French one) is scheduled to film in Paris and Kenya, with Bedos (La belle époque) taking the reins from Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), who helmed the first two. Hazanavicius and Bedos both contributed to the controversial 2012 sex comedy portmanteau The Players, which also starred Dujardin. Jean-François Halin, who co-wrote the first two OSS 117 comedies with Hazanavicius and went on to create the very funny, Sixties-set comedic spy series Au service de la France (known as A Very Secret Service in America, where it streams on Netflix) handles solo scripting duties on this one. Pierre Niney (Yves Saint Laurent), Fatou N'Diaye (Spiral), and Wladimir Yordanoff (currently appearing with Dujardin in An Officer and a Spy) are also among the cast.

Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, code name OSS 117, began life long before Dujardin. The redoubtable secret agent was the brainchild of French author Jean Bruce, and starred in a series of 234 novels (of which only a handful have ever been translated into English) beginning in 1949 (and thus predating Ian Fleming's more famous superspy). The books are serious spy stories, and the character was initially treated seriously on screen, too, beginning in the 1950s, but most famously in a series of five exceptional Eurospy movies directed or produced by André Hunebelle (Fantomas) between 1963 and 1968. (Read my review of my favorite, OSS 117: Terror in Tokyo, which presaged many James Bond moments, here.) Once notoriously hard to track down in English-friendly versions, Kino Lorber has now, happily, released a set of those five films on DVD and Blu-ray. For a more in-depth history of the character and links to my reviews of all the films, see my post OSS 117: An Introduction.

In 2006, Michel Hazanavicius revived the character in the hilarious send-up OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (review here). That first spoof was set in the Fifties and brilliantly parodied the early Bond films (with Dujardin partly channeling young Sean Connery) and Alfred Hitchcock movies... along with the prevalent casual racism and sexism of that era. The 2009 sequel was set in the late Sixties, spoofing the Sixties Bond movies and Eurospy movies.

A third film has been mooted ever since, always intended to be set in Africa. At one point it was supposed to be set in the Seventies and parody blaxploitation movies, Jason King, and Jean-Paul Belmondo action flicks, as well as the Roger Moore Bond movies (and fashions) of that period. Now, presumably since so much time has passed, Premiere reports that OSS 117: Alerte roughe en Afrique noire will be set in the 1980s. While I'm sorry we won't see Dujardin sporting Peter Wyngarde-style fashions, the Eighties setting will still provide ample opportunity to spoof the Moore Bond films and Belmondo, whose own African spy epic The Professional was made in 1981.
Thanks to Jack for the red alert on this one!

Movie Review: SAIGON: YEAR OF THE CAT (1983)

UK TV movie Saigon: Year of the Cat might be most notable today for what many of its key personnel went on to do, but it’s worth a watch as a sad historical spy movie, and does a good job conveying a strong sense of its titular time and place on a low budget. Frederick Forrest (The Conversation) plays CIA officer Bob Chesneau, stationed at the U.S. embassy in Saigon during the final weeks before the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Judi Dench (a decade before GoldenEye) plays the English bank employee, Barbara Dean, who falls in love with him at this inopportune time. The versatile Stephen Frears (who has a strange Bond connection, in that he was attached to direct the Die Another Day spinoff movie, Jinx, that ultimately fell apart) directs, from a script by playwright David Hare (who went on to write the excellent Page Eight spy thrillers). Frears frames the film as a star-crossed love story, opening with a retro-style title card and dramatic music that seem intended to evoke Casablanca, but the spy plot is far more interesting.

Chesneau receives intelligence from a good local asset, whose past record is unblemished, that the North will invade the city within three weeks. He tries desperately to convince his boss of the intel’s validity, but the station chief toes the line of official U.S. policy, insisting that an invasion is not imminent and refusing to make obvious evacuation preparations for fear of setting off a panic in the city. When the invasion does, inevitably, come, the evacuation is rushed and haphazard. Chesneau tries desperately to arrange to get all of his assets out of the country, which he had promised in good faith to do. Since the evacuation is a matter of historical record, it doesn’t seem too much of a spoiler to say that that doesn’t happen, and scenes of file cards with agents’ photos on them left in the embassy for North Vietnamese soldiers to discover, or bands of loyal South Vietnamese assets waiting nervously at their pre-appointed rendezvous points for American helicopters that will never come carry a heartbreaking, le Carré-esque sense of doom. 

The love story, of course, is similarly doomed, as Barbara does what she can to get her own local bank employees out before the Communist influx, even attempting to offer up her own spot on a helicopter. While the movie is mainly talky and stagey (not totally surprising, coming from a playwright and made for Thames Television), it becomes surprisingly exciting in its final act. Hundreds of extras swarm the streets as Vietnamese refugees try in vain to gain access to the U.S. embassy, escaping personnel pack themselves onto helicopters, and embassy staff furiously push as many documents as they can into industrial shredders and furnaces. There is nothing groundbreaking in Saigon: Year of the Cat, but it’s still a fairly compelling drama set against a fairly unique historical backdrop. Roger Rees (If Looks Could Kill), Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride), and E.G. Marshall (The Poppy is Also a Flower) round out the impressive cast.

Saigon: Year of the Cat is available on a quality DVD from Network in the UK, and in America, where it seems to be in the public domain, on various budget DVDs and compilations, as well as streaming on Amazon (free for Prime members).

Movie Review: ANNA (2019)

French director Luc Besson single-handedly revived the latent Eurospy genre, so prominent in the 1960s, for this century with popular series he produced like the Taken and Transporter movies. Now he finally turns his hand to directing a neo-Eurospy movie himself (his first outright spy movie since the one that put him on the map, 1990’s seminal La Femme Nikita—one of the very best action movies of its decade)… and the results are spectacular. Anna is a slick, sexy, action movie, as the trailers lead you to believe (a twist, in fact, on La Femme Nikita—though more of a “remix” than a remake), but it’s also so much more than that. And it’s a movie very specifically targeted at spy fans. The more you know about the genre, the more you’re likely to appreciate its surprising number of layers.

Like the matryoshka dolls the title character starts out selling in a Moscow market, Anna is a spy movie inside a spy movie inside a spy movie. We tend to divide the genre into the action-packed fantasy school of James Bond and Mission: Impossible and the gritty, more realistic tales of double- and triple-crosses like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Homeland. Anna is both at once. Like you might see a novel that amounts to a le Carré-esque spy tail set in a sci-fi setting (like an intergalactic war), or in a historical setting (on the high seas or what have you), Anna is such a twisty spy tail set in the heightened world of fantasy spy movies. It’s Tinker Tailor set inside of Mission: Impossible, or, more appropriately, John Wick. Anna’s reality is a heightened one. This is a world where a skinny model can take on hordes of armed KGB troops in hand to hand combat… and firmly within that world, this is a gritty, twisty, “realistic” tale of double- and triple-crosses. “Realistic,” obviously, being a relative term.

Anna does not exist in a recognizable real world. It ostensibly occupies a historical setting—the late Cold War, specifically 1985-1990. But this isn’t a late Eighties or early Nineties that anyone who lived through those decades would recognize. Rather, it’s a deliberately inaccurate simulacrum. We might recognize fashions and music of the era, but in this alternate 1980s, we also see technology that did not exist then. Characters constantly use cell phones and pagers that behave like modern smart phones. They are not the obscenely chunky cell phones of the era, but the Nokias of the early 2000s—only chunky in comparison to today’s phones. There are laptops, too, and they, also, are chunkier than those we are used to… but again, the chunkiness of the early 2000s, not the early 1990s. Yet, while this technology didn’t exist in the real period, it might have existed in spy movies of that period, had they been thinking ahead along realistic lines. Other forms of tech—ones that never actually came to be—certainly litter Cold War spy movies. It’s artifice, and intentional artifice. But that’s only one layer—only the outermost matryoshka doll.

In that outer layer dwell recognizable characters from the fantasy spy genre. Foremost among them is Anna herself (Sasha Luss), the “female James Bond”/Modesty Blaise/Nikita archetype—the sexy, asskicking female superspy. (But she proves to have layers of her own.) In the movie’s middle layer lies a more complex, twistier narrative derived from the le Carré school. Here dwells a different kind of spy archetype—one based very obviously on George Smiley. But this archetype, too, has undergone a sex change. Helen Mirren plays the KGB spymaster Olga, and seems to be basing her performance on Alec Guinness’ BBC Smiley portrayal, right down to the distinctive, thick-framed glasses she wears.

All of the characters have inner lives—or inner layers. Most attention is paid to Anna’s—revealing, finally, the film’s innermost matryoshka doll—a cat-and-mouse character study hidden beneath the shoot ‘em up action. Because even within this heightened world of spy fantasy, people are complicated. No one is the simple “cardboard booby” Ian Fleming reductively described James Bond as being. But all three of Anna’s love interests over the course of the movie—Maude (Lera Abova), Alex (Luke Evans), and Lenny (Cillian Murphy)—also have inner lives. Maude’s is dealt with the least, but when a late scene between her and Lenny could cut away as he walks out, instead we dwell on her for several long moments as she cries. This is the classic innocent whose life is inevitably torn apart upon contact with the secret world, and it’s somewhat unusual for a neo-Eurospy-type movie to dwell on such a character at all. Lenny and Alex, both macho genre archetypes on the surface, are also allowed more introspective moments than we might expect. But they are very clearly supporting players in Anna’s story. “Never put your faith in men, Anna. Put faith in yourself,” Alex tells Anna early on. And from there, hers is a journey of female empowerment, with a very rewarding payoff.

In her most revealing speech (which Luss, until recently a model and not an actress, handles impressively), Anna admits, “When I was a kid I used to play with matryoshka dolls, way before I pretended to sell them on the street corner. I loved putting them up and looking at their beautiful faces. It’s a woman inside of a woman inside of a woman. If there would be a doll made of me, what would she be? A daughter? A girlfriend? Russian spy? Model? An American spy? If you go to the very smallest doll buried deep inside and say, ‘what is she?’… I never knew, and I would like to find out.”

But the matryoshka concept is not merely thematic. It’s also structural. Besson’s remarkable script is carefully constructed of different layers. It’s nearly (but not quite) palindromic, treating us to scenes that we think are complete the first time we see them, but later revisiting them and showing another half that reveals far more information, significantly altering the plot. If I’m being cryptic, it’s only because I don’t wish to spoil the actual plot elements revealed as Besson peels away layers; there’s a lot of satisfaction in watching that play out.

Lest I spend too much time on the fascinating inner dolls, however (which become clearer and clearer on multiple viewings), I should make it clear that that flashy outer layer is also terrific. And that may be the only layer some audience members choose to see… and that would be fine. They will still be satisfied. The action is spectacular.

For its first act, Anna plays like a fairly straight remake of La Femme Nikita, relocated from France to Soviet Russia (one setting not yet explored by previous remakes of the original concept, including American, Canadian, and Hong Kong versions of the story). On my first viewing, I thought that was what I was watching, and I was surprised it hadn’t been sold up front as a remake of that endlessly fruitful tale. It’s an interesting idea for a director to take another pass thirty years later at the film that put him on the map. What would he do differently? As it happens, Besson is telling a whole different story. But he makes the most of the Nikita foundation from which to do so. The basic concept is replicated intact: a woman involved with crime and drugs leading a seemingly dead-end life is taken off the streets by a secret government agency and given a new lease on life as a spy... but not given a choice. There are familiar characters (Alex is a version of Tcheky Karyo’s Pygmalion-like spy mentor figure Bob; Maude a gender-flipped variation on the innocent boyfriend Marco), and familiar situations, including the restaurant at which first Nikita and now Anna is given her first assignment—with a duplicitous catch. The catch in Anna is even more devious than the one in Nikita (where the exit she’d been briefed on turns out to be bricked up), and appropriate for the more heightened world in which this movie is set. The scenario escalates into a bloodbath, and it’s the most deliriously cinematic bloodbath I’ve seen in Western cinema in years. (And that includes the expertly choreographed action scenes of the John Wick franchise!) It's hyper violent, yet balletic in its execution.

It won’t be a spoiler to anyone familiar with La Femme Nikita that Anna does, indeed, survive her trial by violence, and impresses the not easily impressed doyenne of Moscow Centre, Olga (a frumped down Mirren channeling Guinness). Because of her beauty, she is assigned the cover of a model and sent to Paris. From there, Anna embarks on a dual career as rising supermodel and secret KGB assassin… and parts ways with Nikita’s path as the film’s further layers start to reveal themselves.

One interesting byproduct of making the movie a period piece is that, with the U.S.S.R. securely relegated to Trotsky’s “dustbin of history,” Western audiences can actually root for a character working for the KGB. Because the Cold War is an old enough conflict now that the specific ideologies no longer matter, we can accept a heroine with shifting loyalties without identifying too strongly with any single one. Call it The Americans Effect.

Of course, Anna has enemies within her own organization as well (including the fearsome director, Vassiliev (Eric Godon), who informs her at the wrong end of a pistol that there is only one way to leave the KGB), and that final layer of the film—the character layer—turns out to typify another favorite spy subgenre of mine, the internecine office politics thriller. Until the last frame of film, you’re never sure who Anna can trust and who she is betraying to achieve her ultimate desire (in fact, there may be just one twist too many)—to break free of the various intelligence services that have control of her, and take the time to get to that very smallest doll buried within herself. This is the story of an asset breaking free and becoming master of her own destiny—learning to put her faith in herself.

Anna is a gritty spy movie within a fantasy one, and a character-focused thriller within a flashy, surface, action picture. It’s a more mature work than many audiences will realize upon first viewing, and rewards repeat watching. It’s the crowning achievement of Luc Besson’s career, and one of the best spy films of this century.

Trailer for Luc Besson's LA FEMME NIKITA Remix ANNA

Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment have finally set a release date for Luc Besson's latest neo-Eurospy spectacle, Anna. It will open June 21. And the director's latest take on his oft-trod La Femme Nikita territory looks spectacular! It's got a late Cold War setting, a sexy leading lady, an impressive fight in a restaurant... and apparently Helen Mirren as George Smiley! (Check out those Guinness glasses!) Seriously, this looks utterly awesome. I can't wait!


There's no U.S. or international 1-sheet yet, but here's the French advance poster.

La La Land Announces 2-Disc Soundtrack for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE 1988 TELEVISION SERIES

Here's some fantastic news for Mission: Impossible Week! In 2015, coinciding with the release of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, La-La Land Records brought us the utterly fantastic 6-disc set Mission: Impossible - The Television Scores. (Which is still available from their site.) This had long been a Holy Grail for fans of the series, and completely lived up to (and exceeded!) our wildest expectations. Every single episode of the original 1966-73 TV series that had an original score was represented... but the 1988-90 revival series was not. (Which was entirely appropriate, as the Eighties music had a different vibe and would have felt out of place.) But now, to coincide with the release of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, La La Land is doing it again!

Next week they'll release a 2-disc collection of music by Lalo Schifrin and Ron Jones from Mission: Impossible - The 1988 Television Series! I was really hoping they'd do this, but didn't dare actually expect it. As with just about any score incorporating Schifrin's iconic theme, this series featured some great music. Some of it was included on GNP Crescendo's release The Best of Mission: Impossible Then and Now, but that was really just the tip of the iceberg, and didn't feature any Jones music. (It did include John E. Davis's score work, however.) La-La Land has released very little information about this title so far (basically just a teaser to whet our appetites), so I'm not sure if this release will feature music from both seasons of the revival series or just the 1988 one. (If it's the latter, hopefully that means we'll see another volume around the time the next Mission movie hits screens!) Here's what we do know:

It's a limited edition of 1988 units. The album is produced by Lukas Kendall, with liner notes by Jon Burlingame (whose extensive spy music expertise has also graced his own productions, like the aforementioned 6-disc original series set, FSM's Man from U.N.C.L.E. discs, as well as his book The Music of James Bond) and art direction by Dan Goldwasser. The price point will be $29.98, and the set goes on sale through the La-La Land website on July 31, 2018 at 12 pm Pacific. That's next week! I can't wait.

La-La Land will also be releasing the physical CD of Lorne Balfe's score for Mission: Impossible - Fallout, due out on August 3. (They also put out the soundtrack for Rogue Nation.)

Tradecraft: Amma Assante to Direct Tolkachev Movie BILLION DOLLAR SPY

Variety reports that British director Amma Asante (Belle) will helm a movie about legendary Cold War spy Adolf Tolkachev, based on David E. Hoffman’s book The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal. Tolkachev was the chief designer at the USSR’s Research Institute of Radio Engineering and became one of the CIA's top assets, delivering to the Agency tens of thousands of pages of highly classified documents about Soviet radar and other technologies between 1979 and 1985. Asante's most recent film, A United Kingdom, starred David Olyelowo (Spooks/MI-5) and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day). Benjamin August, who penned Atom Egoyan's 2015 holocaust revenge drama Remember, starring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau, will write the script. Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) will produce with Walden Media and Weed Road Pictures.

Trailer and Poster for Final Season of FX's THE AMERICANS

FX has released a trailer for the sixth and final season of The Americans, which premieres on March 28th at 10pm EST. They've also released a typically stunning poster promoting the season. This series about Russian KGB spies living undercover as "illegals" in 1980s America started strong and went from strength to strength. In a word, it's been utterly fantastic throughout its run. Although a period drama set during the waning days of the Cold War, it's also become surprisingly more topical in recent years. The original plan was to see Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) through the fall of the Berlin wall. Unless the final season spans multiple years, I don't see how they'll get to that point in history, but there are plenty of other burning questions to keep us on the edges of our seats until the finale. When I interviewed producer Graham Yost on the eve of The Americans' debut back in 2013, he concluded the session by quoting the FX Networks President. "John Landgraf said something that I thought perfectly sums it up: 'We know who won the Cold War. We don't know if Phillip and Elizabeth will survive. And that's the story. Will the marriage survive? Will the children survive?'" Five years later, we're on the verge of those answers. I can't wait to find out! Get a taste from the trailer below:

Read my 2013 review of The Americans pilot episode here.
Read my 2013 interview with executive producer Graham Yost here.

Trailer: Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike in BEIRUT

Bleecker Street has released the first trailer for Beirut, a movie set in one of my favorite spy locations that we first heard about in 2015 under the better title of High Wire Act. No matter what they're calling it, this spy movie has a rich pedigree. It's written by Bourne franchise veteran Tony Gilroy, and directed by the always interesting indie auteur Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian). And it stars the very appealing duo of Jon Hamm (Keeping Up With the Joneses) and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day), along with Shea Whigham (Agent Carter) and Dean Norris (Death Wish). Hamm plays a former American diplomat who fled his old Lebanon stomping ground in 1972 after a tragic incident at his home. A decade later, when he's a washed-up drunk working in the private sector, he is called back to war-torn Beirut by CIA operative Pike to negotiate for the life of a friend he left behind.

Beirut opens April 13. Before that, it premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, January 22.

Upcoming Spy Blu-Rays: Entertaining '80s Obscurities

Two cult Eighties spy flicks never officially available on Region 1 DVD are, in both cases rather surprisingly, making their way to Blu-ray early next year.

1982's The Soldier (tagline: "You don't assign him. You unleash him.") was among the first of the blisteringly gung-ho 1980s Cold War spy movies that made a resurgence with Reagan's presidency after all the paranoid, anti-CIA films of the scandal-ridden Seventies. Ken Wahl (Wiseguy) stars as the titularly code-named CIA super-agent tasked with thwarting KGB-backed terrorists threatening to unleash chaos in the middle-east by detonating a nuclear bomb in a Saudi oil field. The ultra-Eighties action jumps from West Berlin to Washington to Saudi Arabia as The Soldier teams up with the Mossad. The cast also includes Alberta Watson (La Femme Nikita, 24), Joaquim de Almeida (Clear and Present Danger), Jeffrey Jones (The Hunt for Red October), and Klaus Kinski(!) (Our Man in Marrakesh) as a KGB assassin. While it's never had a North American DVD release, Kino Lorber will release a Blu-ray on February 27, 2018, generously including trailers and an audio commentary by film historian Jim Hemphill... along with awesome cover art! Retail is $29.95, but that will likely go down on Amazon nearer the release date.

Maybe it should be classified as a guilty pleasure, but I really enjoy the early Jean-Claude Van Damme flick Black Eagle (1988). Coming on the heels of Bloodsport by only a month, Black Eagle hit theaters just on the cusp of JCVD's stardom. Van Damme (Maximum Risk, Jean-Claude Van Johnson) isn't the hero, but the antagonist, a brutal KGB agent. Japanese martial arts star Sho Kosugi (Ninja Assassin) plays the hero, a CIA agent deployed (against his will) to recover a laser weapon from an F-111 downed in the Mediterranean. Good fights and excellent Maltese scenery (as well as some underwater action) make the movie worth watching. For a movie that's never even had a regular DVD release in North America (that I'm aware of), Black Eagle is surprisingly getting the full 2-disc Special Edition treatment from the MVD Rewind Collection! The Blu-ray/DVD combo will, happily, include both the 93-minute theatrical version and the superior 104-minute uncut, extended version of the film. It also boasts a slew of special features, including deleted scenes, the original theatrical trailer (which was awesome), the featurettes "Sho Kosugi: Martial Arts Legend" (HD, 21:26) (featuring new 2017 interviews with Sho Kosugi and Shane Kosugi and more), "The Making of Black Eagle" (HD, 35:50) (featuring new 2017 interviews with Director/Producer Eric Karson, Screenwriter Michael Gonzalez and stars Sho Kosugi, Doran Clark, Shane Kosugi and Dorota Puzio), "Tales of Jean-Claude Van Damme" (HD, 19:20) (Brand new 2017 interviews with cast and crew tell stories about working with the legendary action star), and "The Script and the Screenwriters (HD, 27:14) (new 2017 interviews featuring Michael Gonzales, Eric Karson and more)... as well as a "collectible poster." Whew!

To recap, someone made a 35-minute documentary about the making of Black Eagle. Did you ever expect to see that? I didn't, but I can't wait to watch it! Retail is a steep $39.95, but hopefully that price will drop on Amazon as we near its February 13 release date.

If you're interested in movies I blog about, please consider ordering or pre-ordering from the Amazon links included in the articles to support the Double O Section. Thank you!

Tradecraft: Bleecker Street Walks a High Wire With Jon Hamm

Spy fans have been eagerly anticipating the Brad Anderson-directed, Tony Gilroy-penned High Wire Act ever since Anderson (claimed in May 2015 that veteran Bourne series scripter Gilroy "may have been channeling John le Carré when he wrote this." And now the 1980s Beirut-set spy movie starring Jon Hamm (Keeping Up With the Joneses) and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day) at last has a U.S. distributor! Deadline reports that Bleecker Street will release the picture here. No date has been set yet. According to the trade, Hamm plays a U.S. diplomat who, having fled Lebanon after the death of his wife in the Seventies, is recruited by CIA agents PIke and Dean Norris (The Book of Henry) to go back a decade later for a mission only he can accomplish. The script is said to be more in the vein of Gilroy's smart, adult thrillers like Michael Clayton and Nightcrawler than his Bourne movies. Anderson's directing credits include Session 9 and The Machinist.

Tradecraft: Aldrich Ames Movie CIRCLE OF TREASON Moves Forward with Director

It's been a while since we heard of any progress on the movie version of CIA counterintelligence officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille's book Circle Of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, which was already filmed (quite effectively, I thought) as a 2014 ABC miniseries called The Assets. But the movie still lives! Yesterday, Deadline reported that Focus Features has set Massy Tadjedin to direct the film, working from a script by Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel, the writers currently penning the Edge of Tomorrow sequel for Doug Liman and Tom Cruise. Tadjedin is best known as a screenwriter (whose credits include the Daniel Craig movie The Jacket), but she also directed the 2010 Keira Knightley movie Last Night. Hopefully in the wake of Wonder Woman's success, we'll see even more female directors like Tadjedin given the opportunity to tell strong female-centered stories like this one. Circle of Treason tells the true story of how real-life female Smileys Grimes and Vertefeuille uncovered one of the most damaging moles in the history of the CIA, Aldrich Ames. Hindering their investigation more than Ames' Soviet handlers is the Agency's institutional chauvinism. It's a great book that already made a compelling (if notoriously under-watched) miniseries, and should make a terrific movie as well. I'll be interested to see who signs on to play Grimes and Vertefeuille, as they are both juicy roles that should attract top-caliber actresses. And, depending on how much screen time he ends up with, Ames himself should be a great role for a top-tier actor as well.

Trailer and Poster for Doug Liman's Iran-Contra Movie AMERICAN MADE

Universal has released the first trailer for the Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Fair Game)/Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Knight and Day) reunion (following their successful sci-fi collaboration Edge of Tomorrow), the Iran-Contra story American Made. This is the one that we first heard about two years ago, when it was called Mena, in which Cruise plays the infamous CIA pilot Barry Seale. Seale ended up at the epicenter of an intricate conspiracy involving the Agency, the White House, the Medellin Cartel, the Nicaraguan factions the Sandinistas (the government) and the Contras, Manuel Noriega, Pablo Escobar, Vice President George Bush, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and Oliver North, to name-check just a few strands of the web. Liman has a very personal connection to the material, as his father, Arthur Liman, was Chief Counsel in the Senate's investigation of the Iran-Contra Scandal and conducted the televised hearings that fascinated the nation in the summer of 1987 and made household names out of people like North and CIA Director William Casey. It's clear from the trailer that he has chosen to take a somewhat light-hearted approach to the subject matter (which makes sense when you focuse on someone involved at a ground-level, as opposed to North or Casey), possibly focusing more on the criminal aspects of Seale's career than the espionage aspects (not that there was any clear delineation between the two!). I can't wait to see the results!

Cruise will next be on screens in Universal's Mummy reboot, and is currently filming the next Mission: Impossible movie with returning director Christopher McQuarrie. American Made hits theaters September 29, coming in the same a spy-saturated month that also sees the releases of Kingsman: The Golden Circle and American Assassin.

Another Trailer for ATOMIC BLONDE

Last week Universal released a second trailer for the Cold Ware Berlin-set Atomic Blonde, and it's even more action-packed than the first one. Based on Antony Johnston's graphic novel The Coldest City and directed by John Wick co-helmer David Leitch, Atomic Blonde is clearly the spy movie to beat this year! Charlize Theron (Fate of the Furious) stars, alongside Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service), James McAvoy (State of Play), John Goodman (Argo), and Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).

Trailer for SAS Drama 6 DAYS

The first trailer is out for 6 Days, an SAS thriller about the same 1980 hostage standoff in the Iranian Embassy in London that inspired the action classic Who Dares Wins (aka The Final Option). Mark Strong (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kingsman), Jamie Bell (TURN: Washington's Spies) and Abbie Cornish (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) star, along with the late Tim Pigott-Smith (Quantum of Solace) in one of his final performances and, in a nice touch, Who Dares Wins star Lewis Collins' old Professionals cohort, Martin Shaw. While there's still no release date officially set, Deadline recently reported that Vertical Entertainment "is eyeing a fall theatrical bow in the U.S. for the pic." Netflix is distributing in a number of international territories.

Two Teasers for the Trailer of Atomic Blonde

Universal has released two short, tantalizing teasers for a longer, red-band trailer set to drop tomorrow for Atomic Blonde, which I've said before will be the spy movie of the summer. Seriously, everyone is going to be talking about David (John Wick) Leitch's film version of Antony Johnston and Sam Hart's Cold War Berlin-set Oni graphic novel The Coldest City (even despite the unfortunate title change). Why? Well, take a look at these micro-teasers and see for yourself! Charlize Theron (The Fate of the Furious), Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service), James McAvoy (State of Play), John Goodman (Argo), and Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) star.

You'll be hearing a lot more about Atomic Blonde once it premieres next week at SXSW! It opens nationwide in July.

The Coldest City Warms Up to Atomic Blonde, and Charlize Keeps Spying

The bad news is that, according to Deadline, Focus Features has changed the title of their Cold War Berlin comic book adaptation The Coldest City to Atomic Blonde. They had one of the coolest spy titles ever, and now they've got a Roller Derby competitor. (Nothing against Derby Dolls; they just aren't the same as spies.) They had a brand, and now they have a handicap. The good news, though, is that the movie looks awesome enough to overcome a title like that! (Perhaps it's just so damn cool that the studio thought it was only fair to handicap it?) Adding ammo to my suspicion of the movie's actual awesomeness and the studio's confidence in their product is the news that they will debut it at the hip South by Southwest film festival four and a half months before its July 28 opening, allowing plenty of time to build positive buzz. (And in another sign of confidence, they had previously moved up that opening from August to July, at the height of summer.)

Atomic Blonde is based on the Oni Press graphic novel The Coldest City, by Antony Johnston (Alex Rider, Queen & Country) and Sam Hart. While the moody, black and white comic (to which Johnston recently published a prequel, The Coldest Winter) played up the chilly, brooding Cold War paranoia of 1989 Berlin, it's clear from the (thankfully very cool) poster that the movie adaptation (penned by Kurt Jonstad and directed by David Leitch, half of the duo behind the ultra-stylish actionfest John Wick and the man tapped to direct Deadpool 2) instead plays up the neon MTV aspects of that decade. So perhaps it will be a little more Deutschland 83 than The Americans as 1980s-set spy entertainment goes. I think it's safe to say that we can expect a bit more action from the film, penned by Kurt Jonstad (Act of Valor), than the comic, which was more concerned with the treacherous internecine bureaucracy of Cold War espionage. Reigning action queen Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road) stars as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, dispatched to Berlin to unmask a mole on the eve of the fall of the Wall. James McAvoy (State of Play), Sofia Boutella (Kingsman), John Goodman (Argo), Til Schweiger (Inglourious Basterds) and Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) round out the impressive cast roster. Trust me, even with that title, this is going to be the coolest spy movie of 2017!

Theron, meanwhile, appears to be addicted to spying. In a separate story, Deadline reports that Universal has optioned Need to Know, a forthcoming spy novel from former CIA analyst Karen Cleveland, for her to star in and produce. (She also produces Atomic Blonde through her Denver & Delilah Films shingle.) According to the trade, the thriller follows "a wife and mother who works as a CIA analyst. One morning while digitally searching files in hopes of unmasking a Russian sleeper cell in the U.S., she makes a shocking discovery that threatens her job, her family and her life." There is no publisher yet set, but the manuscript apparently sparked an intense bidding war. Theron was also previously attached to star in a movie of the Mark Greaney novel The Gray Man, in which the book's generic male super-assassin hero was going to be changed to a woman, but we haven't heard any news on that project since 2015, so I'm not sure if she's still involved or not. The actress will next be seen in The Fate of the Furious, a project that reunites her with her Italian Job director and co-star, F. Gary Gray and Jason Statham. (The trailers make it look like this movie easily tops Die Another Day's car chase on ice.)

Tradecraft: Now There's a MacGyver Movie in the Works, Too

CBS just this week handed out a pilot order to Furious 7 director James Wan's TV reboot of the 1980s network staple MacGyver first announced last fall. And now, hot on the heels of that announcement, comes news from Deadline that Wan's Furious 7 producer Neal Moritz will team with the creator of the original series, Lee David Zlotoff, for a MacGyver movie at Lionsgate. The two projects are unrelated, though interestingly Wan's TV project began its life as a Young MacGyver feature set in the protagonist's college days. (A feature has been in the works in various iterations at various studios for years if not decades.) The TV show, which is produced by Henry Winkler, who executive produced the 1985-92 ABC series starring Richard Dean Anderson, will follow a twenty-something MacGyver through his early years with the clandestine spy agency DSX (Department of External Services). Little is known about the newly announced film version, including whether the hero will be an active government agent with DSX, a private contractor with The Phoenix Foundation, or something else.

So, to recap, yes, there are now two separate remakes of the Eighties series about the guy who always saved the world with a pipe cleaner and shaving cream in the works, if you can believe it, each one coincidentally involving a different veteran of the Fast and Furious franchise teamed with a member of the production team behind the original series.

Still no word on a follow-up to the highly amusing 2010 parody movie MacGruber (spun off from a long-running Saturday Night Live sketch spoofing the original MacGyver), but star Will Forte (The Last Man On Earth) has said many times that it remains a priority for him.

Tradecraft: The Nobistar Affair to Explore Little Known Attempted Coup

Deadline reports that Truth Entertainment (Dallas Buyers Club) and NoEgo Films will produce a movie about a little known chapter of (possible) American espionage activity. According to the trade, The Nobistor Affair will tell the story of a CIA-backed attempted coup d’état to overthrow the government of Ghana in the Eighties by a group of mercenaries. The film is based on the account of mercenary Tim Cormody, a Vietnam veteran who went on to work as a private soldier in Rhodesia in the late Seventies. Per the trade's synopsis, "In 1986, Carmody, a Vietnam veteran and co-founder of the Rhodesia Veterans Association, was recruited by the U.S. government for a top-secret mission to deliver six tons of weapons to the pro-U.S. rebels near Ghana, in an attempt to overthrow the government. While en route, their mission was compromised and aborted. Awaiting extraction in Brazil, their boat, The Nobistor, was overtaken by the ruthless Policia of Brazil. Ultimately, Carmody and his team were sent to one of the world’s most dangerous prisons. With the U.S. government and CIA abandoning them, their only mission now was survival. The Nobistor Affair is a chapter in American history many have never heard of." The Agency, of course, denied any involvement. The New York Times' account of Carmody's escape from the time is pretty fascinating. It seems equally possible that the mercs were duped into believing their arms deal was sanctioned by the U.S. government. No stranger to paranoia and conspiracies, Enemy of the State scribe David Marconi penned the script.

Tradecraft: Lietch to Direct Coldest City Solo

Variety reports that John Wick co-director David Leitch will tackle the Oni Comics adaptation The Coldest City solo after the project was originally announced last May as a joint venture between him and his Wick partner Chad Stahelski. It was recently announced that Leitch had left the Keanu Reeves sequel, and now we know why. John Wick 2 will begin shooting next month in Budapest and Berlin, and that would have conflicted with the schedule for The Coldest City, so the pair decided to divide and conquor. The Coldest City was written by Kurt Johnstad, adapted from the graphic novel by Antony Johnston (Queen & Country, Alex Rider). Charlize Theron, fresh off a riveting performance in Mad Max: Fury Road, will star in the spy story set at the close of the Cold War in late 1980s Berlin. I'll be curious to see if the Focus Features movie maintains the tone of the gritty, black and white comic, which owed more to the serpentine, double- and triple-cross-filled plots of Len Deighton and John le Carré than to the more action-packed side of the spy genre typified by Fleming and Ludlum, or if the movie will have more action, since that's exactly what Leitch proved himself to be a master of in John Wick.