A Gem of a Film
This is a film that satisfies on so many levels that it's amazing to me that it is still so underestimated. Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Michelle Pfeiffer create wonderful, humanly flawed characters you can relate to and care about. It's so delightful to see Sean Connery play a real, fully fleshed, anti-heroic human being, good-naturedly tweaking the noses of all of the chillingly earnest and/or tragically cynical spies who keep trying to intimidate him into serving their political cause rather than his own sense of honor and commitment to human life and love. As he says during the party of artists where his sincerity first strikes a chord with Dante and sets the plot in motion, "If there is ever to be any hope, we must all betray our countries." Betray the grey men's self-serving ideology on behalf of full-blooded, open-hearted humanity, yes. Absolutely. Every time. And it's so satisfying to watch him pull it off.
The supporting actors are a treat to watch too: James Fox as the thoughtful, reserved and intuitive British agent Ned, Roy Scheider as irascible CIA agent Russell with his relentlessly "scatalogical" rhetoric, and a perfect turn by J. T. Walsh as the Colonel who is "Army from the anus up" (as Russell ruefully but accurately describes him). And Ken Russell as British agent Walter, well I guess "colorful" would be a good adjective, though of all of the "intelligence" group, his character is clearly the one whose humanity has been most subverted by ideology and some of the cold-blooded things he says just make you want to shake him.
Anyway, to those of you who may have passed on this film because it didn't "measure up" by the standards of the stereotypical "spy flick" of the time, I encourage you to take another look. It's a multi-faceted gem of a movie that still resonates with our times, today possibly more than ever: "These days it's necessary to be a hero, just to behave like an ordinary, decent human being."
For better or worse, that still sums it up pretty well, I think.