The Whistle Blower (Simon Langton, 1986)

 

Simon Langton’s The Whistle Blower plays rather flatly for a film that involves several state-orchestrated murders and cites pending apocalypse as a key part of its motivation, but still provides adequate diversion and stimulation overall. Michael Caine plays Frank, father of Bob (Nigel Havers), a Russian expert toiling away for British intelligence, toying with quitting but then finding something that renews his interest, that is before he’s found dead in what may or may not be a suicide. The film is a periodically interesting time capsule, bookended by a London Remembrance Day ceremony providing glimpses of Margaret Thatcher and other dignitaries; there are several references to hard economic times, with Frank counseling his son on the folly of quitting a steady job, and to Britain’s utter dependence on the United States, given that (as one high ranking functionary puts it) a nuclear war with Russia is assessed to be a pending near-certainty. There’s not much razzle-dazzle to how things unwind though: Frank gets the name of one key contact through the mildest outburst of aggression, then in turn extracts the necessary information from that contact simply by filling him up with booze, and reaches his ultimate object (John Gielgud) by turning up on the doorstep and being welcomed in. Caine gives one of those performances where you’re not sure how hard he cares or is trying (I mean that as a compliment); the rest of the cast mostly only briefly registers, although Barry Foster gives the drunk scene his all. But for a film in which a journalist and other innocent individuals are cold-bloodedly eliminated for the sake of political calculation (and the perpetrators calmly express their willingness to throw in a young woman and her child, if that's what it takes for Frank to yield), while guilty but well-connected men are shielded from consequences, the narrative and moral sophistication fall short of what should have been required.