El espía

Future Mr and Mrs Bradford Dillman star in this lukewarm WW2 drama in which Dillman is enlisted by subterfuge to undertake a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Cracks appear in the plan when Parker develops feelings for the easygoing (and gullible) American soldier bringing her loyalty into question, her superior Andrews sympathetic to the ethical issues but more interested in the national interests.

Strong cast isn't given a lot of meaningful material to work with, a melodramatic, romantic B war movie in which the best role is played by Stephens as a ruthless German officer unable to break his prisoner despite increasingly brutal methods of interrogation.

Australian audiences might also be interested to see a young Norman Coburn (Mr Fisher from 'Home & Away') playing one of the innocuous British soldiers playfully ribbing Dillman at the RAF base early in the picture.

Not bad in any sense, mostly just mediocre with both the leads miscast in roles to which their apparent refinement doesn't seem well suited (Parker is perhaps too elegant to play a bland WAAF whilst Dillman too genial/ intellectual for such a dirty mission despite the mischaracterisation being central to the plot), although it is endearing to see the film which ultimately forged their lifelong union which lasted forty years.

This is a very late noir and very noir indeed, dealing with the aftermath of the war in 1946, when an earlier woman officer of intelligence tries to trace a lost war hero and finds him drinking in Tangiers. He treats her badly although they became all but lovers and tells her to go home and leave him alone - he even returns his Victoria Cross (or some medal) to her, totally bitter and disillusioned. After his bravery as a spy in France, being tortured by the Gestapo and SS and surviving it without breaking, for which he got his medal, he was sent to Burma and then was lost. But as she reappears in his life as a total surprise he starts to remember and finds it worth while to make a clean breast of what actually happened, and it is a fearful story. This is not for sensitive hearts, as the film implies a heart-breaking risk. But the story is extremely interesting and impressing, it brings oceans of afterthoughts, - mind you, it was towards the very end of the war when enterprises like Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were carried through deliberately with planned fire storms and no regard for the lives of civilians, and that mentality dominates the film, which will shock you, as it shocks Suzy Parker from beginning to end, but she fights it, and ultimately wins.

When 20th Century Fox entered TV in the 1950s, one of the programs was an hour-long anthology series. This series took many Fox classics (THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR, HOUSE OF STRANGERS, MIRACLE ON 34th STREET, THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, et al) and reduced them to less-than-an-hour. One of the entries in that series was titled DECEPTION, and it starred Linda Darnell and Trevor Howard; it was about a woman intelligence officer in charge of a complicated spy mission: she has to pick a man who will turn out to be a coward, so that he can be given false information which he will divulge (under torture) to the Nazis. Unless i'm very much mistaken, this is one instance when the TV episode was embellished into a feature film (made in 1961). The movie provides a lot more exposition, but the story is the same, including the female intelligence officer seeking out the man after the war. This film stars Suzy Parker as the intelligence agent, and Bradford Dillman as the man; soon after this movie, they would marry and she would retire from acting. Though they don't have the same depth as Darnell (an exceptional performance) and Howard, Parker and Dillman are nevertheless quite a glamorous couple (as they were in real life).

(Though the film is well-done, the TV show, in this instance, packed more of a punch, and the performances of Linda Darnell and Trevor Howard were exceptional.)

"A Circle of Deception" is an unusual and good film...though I don't heartily recommend you see it. This is because the story has a portion where the lead is tortured. It's not as vivid and brutal as the Nazis would have been...but it's still darned unpleasant.

Captain Paul Raine (Bradford Dillman) has been selected for a spy mission behind enemy lines during WWII. They say it's because he speaks French...but it's really because they think he'll crack under pressure and they arrange for his mission to fail. Why? Because they've fed him false information and hope to convince the Nazis of this lie. However, they never tell Raine...and a woman who has fallen for him knows the truth but she's ordered not to tell. What's next? Well, he's captured and tortured....but what's next might just come as a surprise to everyone.

The acting is good, the film well made. I have no real complaints other than the story makes for unpleasant viewing...and the very end, the final scene, didn't seem very realistic to me.

Bradford Dillman is a soldier chosen for a dangerous mission in "A Circle of Deception," a 1960 film also starring Suzy Parker, Harry Andrews and Robert Stephens. The story is told in flashback as Paul Raine (Dillman) remembers his assignment after a visit by his ex-lover, Lucy (Parker).

In order to divert German troops from an attack site, Paul is chosen because according to his psychological profile, he will break under torture and give the Germans the information the Allies want them to have.

Paul knows his mission is risky, but Lucy, an assistant to the captain (Andrews) who thought up this scheme, knows the entire story. She's enlisted to go out with Paul, since he seems interested, and evaluate if he's really the man for the job. She becomes a little more involved than planned.

Filmed in black and white, this isn't a big budget movie, but it's good. Dillman was a young star then under contract to 20th Century Fox, but despite being both attractive and a good actor, with the studio system abolished, he found most of his success in television.

Parker, one of the first supermodels, was a staggering beauty who was given several opportunities in Hollywood. She was lousy in every one of them.

Like Grace Kelly, she had a cool, sophisticated look, and also like Grace Kelly, in person she had a fantastic sense of humor and a wonderful personality - and like Grace Kelly, she never got one role to showcase them.

Though Dillman and Harry Andrew are both very good, it's Robert Stephens as the German captain who imprisons Paul that gives the most chilling performance. A brilliant stage actor, he's a knockout in this, and one wishes he had pursued more film work before his death in 1995. He could have had an Oscar-level career.

All in all, "A Circle of Deception" is very good, and the black and white helps to keep up the British wartime atmosphere. Dillman and Parker met during the making of this film, married in 1963, had 3 children, and stayed married until Parker's death in 2003.

Parker's last work on film was in a 1970 "Night Gallery" episode, in which she looked absolutely gorgeous, but through the '50s, '60s (and possibly into the '70s) she was on every magazine cover and in every fashion layout imaginable.

The torture scenes are not for the feint of heart - to be honest, I fast-forwarded through them. The rest of the movie is both interesting and suspenseful.