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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
So ahead of its time it remains indecipherable today., 13 May 2002
8/10
Author: dbdumonteil

This is HG Clouzot's most ambitious work ,one of the most demanding and complex movie of a soon-to-be -nouvelle-vague France.Let's put it straight:although modern to a fault,"les espions" has nothing to do with the nouvelle vague:no ""free" camera here",a bunch of "old actors", a very elaborate screenplay.The problem is that it has nothing to do with the "old guard" either.The "story" flouts conventions,and HGC does not give a damn if his audience cannot catch up with it.The film was bound to be a commercial failure,particularly with an audience who got enthusiastic over "le salaire de la peur'(wages of fear) and "les diaboliques" .

The starting point may recall "the diaboliques": in this latter work,a seedy boarding-school;in "les espions" ,a doctor short of the readies,whose clinic is sinking.So why not gladly agreeing a mysterious man's proposal?One million francs,if he puts "them" up?Who are "they"?That's how the doctor's(Gerard Sety) nightmare begins.He is caught up in the system,and a lot of threatening characters (played by topnotch international actors:Curd Jurgens,Martita Hunt,Sam Jaffe)begin to show up:every time he thinks he begins to understand,the truth eludes him-Gérard Séty 's character predates Laurence Harvey's in "the Mandchourian candidate" and even Michael Douglas's in "the game".HGC watched the spies as if they were microbes under a microscope.It's a rather unpleasant view. Vera Clouzot-the unforgettable heroine of "les diaboliques" - appears in the role of a deaf and dumb neurotic woman(She was to die of an heart attack three years later).

Clouzot 's health began to deteriorate during the sixties.After "les espions" he was to make only two works "la vérité"(the truth) one of Brigitte Bardot's best parts and "la prisonnière".He made only 11 movies in all,which may not seem much,but most of them are among the best works French cinema has produced.

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7 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
An intriguing disappointment, 16 September 2004
Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

From the director of the superb 'Wages of Fear,' 'Les Diaboliques,' 'Le Corbeau/the Raven' and 'Quai des Orfevres,' this is definitely something of a disappointment, albeit certainly a fascinating one. Entertaining and interesting, yes, but more Clouseau than Clouzot, after a good start it turns into a remarkably broad and at times joyously unsubtle parody of espionage and political ideology set in a nursing home. There's no suspense, merely an increasingly absurd succession of twists and outrageous characters, from Martita Hunt's vicious spy/nursing sister to Peter Ustinov's kleptomaniac/Russian spy via Sam Jaffe's paranoid Shakespeare teacher/CIA man, all after the mystery patient (Curd Jurgens in pajamas and sunglasses in a shuttered room) who may be a key scientist. And that's not mentioning the convention of ocarina players, the Germanic bartender or the garbage men who make no secret of spying on the establishment, or Vera Clouzot's mute mental patient…

More theatre of the Absurd than thriller, this must have mystified and confounded Clouzot's fans when it originally came out. It is full of ridiculously funny moments, at times seeming almost a forerunner of The Prisoner, but it does ultimately overstay its welcome. Not exactly a failure but certainly not a success, file under interesting curiosity.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Magnificent bizarre suspense film by the French Hitchcock, 24 May 2008
10/10
Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom

This intense study of suspicion and intrigue is devoted to the theme of 'whom can you trust?', with the answer being 'no one'. Henri-Georges Clouzot was a true master of suspense, known as 'the French Hitchcock', and he decided here to study spies in the way that an entomologist studies beetles, watching them scurry and turn over on their backs and die. Here, numerous people lie sweating in bed, many of them die, and all are betraying one another. They scurry around as if they smell something, and maybe they do, but often it is poison. One fires bullets through a door at an unknown enemy, several kill their deputies or assistants or proteges, and everyone is nervous. The Russians and the Americans both want to kill a physicist who knows too much. All of this comes to roost in a dilapidated rotting psychiatric asylum with only two patients, one mute woman played by Clouzot's wife Vera, giving one of the most powerful performances in the film without saying anything. The central character, superbly harried and worried and greedily noble, is played by Gerard Sety, to perfection. One minute he is grabbing a million, the next he is giving it away to save the world. Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham in David Lean's 'Great Expectations') is so creepy you will have no hair left on the back of your neck at the end of the film. O. E. Hasse is wonderful in a small but crucial part. Kurt Jurgens is powerful, massive, behind his sunglasses which he wears indoors as either a prisoner or a patient, one is for long not sure which. Peter Ustinov is sinister and menacing, not to be trifled with, always in an overcoat and greasily bearded. Sam Jaffe and Paul Carpenter are eerie and menacing, while vacillating between being heroes and villains: which is trying to kill which? Who is good? Who is bad? What is really going on? The complexities are so intricate, and the betrayals so compulsive that one realizes this is not just a thriller, it is a scientific study of just what its title says: 'spies', those deeply psychologically disturbed people whose sole restless compulsion is to search and betray. What a dark, fascinating, eerily photographed film, absolutely glistening with deceit in a kind of perennial dusk.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Suspense and surveillance, 8 April 2007
6/10
Author: Camera Obscura from Leiden, The Dutch Mountains

A somewhat over-plotted spy thriller by the French master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot, that features spies from different countries converging on a psychiatric clinic, run by doctor Malik (Gerard Sety), who is offered a substantial sum of money to shelter a new patient that happens to be an atomic scientist. Soon, the hospital beds are filled with international spies all desperate after the information the patient holds.

Just about everything in this espionage tale is open to question, with its wildly imaginative insinuations of nuclear devices, Amerian and Soviet secret agents and crackpot taxi drivers, doctors and patients. This film certainly has its moments, but is a little uneven and anyone familiar with Clouzot's work, knows this one is not strictly for laughs. It's all meticulously scripted, but is just a taut long (137 minutes) and soon becomes such an impenetrable puzzle, it's hard to keep track of the proceedings, but the film benefits from a good international cast, including Peter Ustinov (SPARTACUS, TOPKAPI, DEATH ON THE NILE), Curd Jürgens (THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, THE LONGEST DAY), Sam Jaffe (BEN HUR) and Vera Clouzot (LES DIABOLIQUES).

Not without interest, but ultimately, the elements just don't glue together that well, with rather unsatisfactory results.

Camera Obscura --- 6/10

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
The inmates take over the asylum., 9 August 2005
8/10
Author: philipdavies from United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This absurdist satire of a world gone mad is a creepy delight.

SPOILER ALERT! The final scene is a real chiller, with the asylum keeper suddenly realising that, in an utterly insane world, the sane man is regarded as mad - and indeed is so, to all intents and purposes.

Like Kubrick's later 'Dr. Strangelove' the terrors of the H bomb are effectively used to create an uneasy comedy that finally lurches into horror, as the increasingly eccentric pursuit of the secret of the 'H3' super-weapon spins out of control, distorting reality itself in the process.

The twitterings of the Ocarina Players' Convention, the storm of feathers bursting (as it were) out of the frustration of a mute female patient, a mystery man called 'Vogel' (bird), and the harsh squawking of the insistent and threatening telephone: All these are memorable elements in a film as darkly humorous as anything by Hitchcock.

Curiously, I was often reminded of the quiet lunacy which threatens to engulf the two main characters in Alan Plater's TV trilogy, that begins with 'The Beiderbecke Affair'! Both film and TV series no doubt owe much to the inheritance of Kafka, showing as they each do the spectacle of people struggling to make sense out of their irrational and arbitrary fates.

The lack of any innovation in the cinematic technique of 'Les Espions' should not blind us to Clouzot's masterly creation, therein, of a world of ultimately inescapable horror.

This is a great film, and one to be viewed repeatedly.

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Cold War Spy Paranoia with a Sense of the Absurd, 25 May 2008
8/10
Author: k_t_t2001 from Canada

In 1957 the Cold War was in full swing, "The Bomb" was a thing of terror, the arms race was still a brand new concept and international paranoia was running rampant. It was the perfect atmosphere for Henri-Georges Clouzot to release LES ESPIONS (THE SPIES) upon the world. A less celebrated film than the director's other films of the period, THE SPIES nevertheless wages a war of nerves upon a level equal to that in THE WAGES OF FEAR or DIABOLIQUE, and keeps its sense of humour as well.

Running out of patients, money and hope, psychiatrist Dr. Malik (Gérard Séty) makes a deal with the devil. In this case the devil presents himself as an American Intelligence Officer (Paul Carpenter) who offers five million francs if Malik will keep a special guest, identified only as "Alex", for a few days at his rundown sanitarium. Malik is told that this person is of interest to foreign powers and that there may be strangers looking for him. The desperate Malik accepts one million francs as a deposit, a bundle of bills that grows increasingly heavy as he awakes the next morning to find that his staff has been enigmatically replaced during the night and that the strangers he was forewarned of have begun popping up even before the arrival of the mysterious "Alex".

From this point on neither Malik, nor the audience, know what is true or who to believe. Both the friendly American, Mr. Cooper, (Sam Jaffe) and the affable Eastern European, Kiminsky, (Peter Ustinov) ooze menace from the chinks in their veneer of civility, and nothing and no one can be trusted - not the child playing in the road, the bartender across the street and certainly not the mysterious Alex (Curd Jürgens) hiding his identity behind dark glasses and leather gloves. Yet, for everyone involved except Malik, all of this is business as usual, and the sheer ridiculousness of this contrast brings a dark humour to the proceedings.

In fact the greatest weakness of THE SPIES comes in the film's last fifteen minutes, when Clouzot unwisely lifts the veil of uncertainty and makes all clear. There is no great revelation that stuns the audience, only explanation which washes away the wonderfully absurd grays that have fuelled the film up to this point, in favour of a black and white clarity that weakens the film. Clouzot attempts in the film's final two scenes to recover what he imprudently surrendered a dozen minutes earlier, but THE SPIES would have been a far finer film if the last reel had never existed.

Less easily seen than some of Clouzot's other work, THE SPIES has been given a respectable release on DVD in the UK.

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6 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Cluedo a la Clouzot, 19 December 2004
5/10
Author: writers_reign

In common, I would guess, with anyone who had seen and admired the earlier work of Clouzot beginning with Le Corbeau and culminating in Les Diaboliques, I approached this with taste buds primed for major salivation only to be disappointed. This has to be a one-off, a thriller sans thrills. At times it resembles one of those creaky British B-pictures of the thirties and forties so that you almost expect Wilfrid Lawson to emerge out of a pea-souper and stare meaningfully at Kynaston Reeves. For reasons best known to himself Clouzot even finds work for Paul Carpenter, surely the most inept and wooden actor on either side of the Channel, matched only by Laurence Harvey and Alan Lake. Having bought it on DVD I shall, I suppose, watch it again on the off chance that there really is something I'm missing besides a few brain cells shed in the time it took to unspool.

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1 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Wonderful work deserves a DVD or VHS copy, 21 January 2003
Author: (nmalagardis@bankofgreece.gr) from ATHENS & PARIS

Master Clouzot strikes again as in le Corbeau, another master piece which is invisible today. During some good old days French TV was showing these master pieces. Now, these master pieces are worth of a sacrifice from the all mighty editing firms and should be availiable to connoisseurs!

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