Funeral in Berlin

The second of the three films in which Michael Caine plays Harry Palmer. Palmer is sent to Berlin. The job: a Soviet colonel wants to come across, and the escape is planned under the wall, disguised as a funeral. Whether the colonel actually wants to come across is not clear, and working out who wants what is Palmer's job in the first place. The source is Len Deighton's novel. Deighton's idea of espionage is the opposite of Bond's: the hero is on a civil servant's salary, hates the paperwork, has to fill the forms in and trusts nobody. Guy Hamilton directs. He had made Goldfinger the year before, and putting the two films side by side is the shortest way to see the period's two competing notions of the spy. It was shot in the real Berlin and the footage of the wall is not a set. Oskar Homolka plays Colonel Stok, a character who recurs across Deighton's books. An important example of the genre for anyone who likes Cold War espionage and a dry, sardonic English register. For a viewer wanting action, the film proceeds almost entirely through conversation, surveillance and paperwork.