It may seem strange that the actor with by far the biggest
role in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les espions, Gerard Sety, appears way
down the cast list, whereas top-billed Curd Jurgens doesn’t appear until almost
halfway through, and is gone long before the end. But it’s an oddity that
rather suits the up-is-down nature of the movie, one in which an initial
feeling of clutter and peculiarity eventually coalesces into a sharp vision of
pervasive threat and anxiety. In a set-up as seemingly loosely sprawling as Clouzot’s
preceding fiction feature, Diabolique, was tightly-wound, Sety’s Dr.
Malic, owner of a failing psychiatric clinic, accepts a large sum of money from
an American agent to take in a mysterious patient, a decision that soon has the
clinic overwhelmed by suspicious characters forcing their way onto the staff,
or purporting to be patients, or crowding into the bar across the street, or
watching from trees and rooftops; Peter Ustinov and Sam Jaffe play senior operatives
of the Eastern and Western blocs respectively. The scheme turns out to involve
a missing scientist who’s discovered a breakthrough in atomic energy that
threatens to destabilize the Cold War equilibrium, so that the quasi-comic portrayal
of the spy game, one in which players may not even try to keep track of what
side they’re on, yields to real existential stakes. The ruthless ending finds
both sides collaborating to preserve the status quo, leaving Malic feverishly
trying to tell a truth that no one will ever hear; no one, that is, except the
people on the other side of the surveillance embedded in his house, making
themselves known through a coldly ringing telephone. The only sign of hope is
in how a long-mute patient finds her voice in the film’s closing moments, but
even that’s undermined by her fear of the consequences, if she should try to
make it heard.
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