The Dead Drop

I watched The Ipcress File from 1965. It was based on an 1962 novel — Len Deighton’s first — and was released at the height of mid-60s “Bond-mania” as kind of an anti-Bond.

Michael Caine is Harry Palmer, an Army officer working for the Ministry of Defence. He’s insolent and insubordinate and has some criminal charges in his background. He’s assigned to a unit that’s trying to recover a missing scientist and discover why several other scientists have seemingly become incapable of doing critical research.

There are lots of Bond alumni here: Harry Saltzman produces, Ken Adams built the sets, and John Barry delivers one of the most classic 60s spy soundtracks you’re ever going to find (the sound you hear over and over is a cimbalom). The film direction is artistic — lots and lots of shots through some foreground object to the main action behind it.

Harry’s world is one of dreary offices, London streets, condescending bosses, and rote paperwork. There’s no glamour, just a good mystery with a solid climax.

There were a few more Harry Palmer films, both in theaters and on television, though none of them are considered as good as Ipcress. There was also a limited series in 2022 on British television which is streaming on multiple services.

I’ve always loved the opening scene of the original Mission Impossible. It was set in Prague, and it was the perfect mix of action and intrigue.

As luck would have it, I found myself in Prague a couple years ago, and I spent an entire day tracking down all the shooting locations I could find. (I thought this was novel and original, but it turns out a lot of people have done it.)

I put my pics, and the corresponding frame from the movie, into this Google Doc.

I picked up Red Storm Rising yesterday, and quickly got completely engrossed in it. I have read it, but I was in high school, close to 40 years ago. It was published in 1986.

The first section of the book (I’m 150 pages in) is an absolute masterclass of intelligence gathering. Bob Toland and others in the U.S. intelligence community put together a series of clues that indicate the Soviets are about to launch an attack on West Germany. The awareness comes about slowly and methodically, as they put the puzzle together, piece by piece.

Clancy does great job of zooming in and out, from huge geopolitical machinations down to very human stories. Soviet armies and navies assemble for a surprise attack… but then one man doesn’t look both ways before crossing the street, and a piece of paper he was carrying causes the U.S. to go to DEFCON 2.

I’m absolutely hooked, which is weird considering I know how the book plays out. It’s also inconvenient when the target of an addiction is a 638-page novel. There go my evenings for a while.

There’s a fan theory that says Gene Hackman was playing the same character in two espionage thrillers, released 24 years apart.

Hackman starred as Harry Caul in The Conversation in 1974. Then he played Edward “Brill” Lyle in Enemy of the State in 1998.

A theory has been floated that these two characters are the same person. From the Wikipedia page for The Conversation:

 Hackman's character Edward Lyle in Enemy of the State closely resembles Caul: he dons the same translucent raincoat, and his workshop is nearly identical to Caul's. Also, the photograph used for Lyle in his NSA file is actually a photograph of Caul. Enemy of the State also includes a scene which is very similar to The Conversation's opening surveillance scene in San Francisco's Union Square.

If this is unintended as an actual plot device, then it has to be an Easter Egg or an inside joke — using the photo of Caul from the first movie for the photo of Lyle in the second movie is hard to deny.

This is a funny, 24-second video published by Ryan Reynolds where he’s reflecting on what’s great about filming with Michael Bay. It’s funny because the opening car chase scene from 6 Underground is filming in the background, and Reynolds just nails the timing (it could be an homage to The Greatest Shot in Television History).

Magnum P.I. was always spy-adjacent. Magnum was an intelligence officer (…or a Navy SEAL?…or both?), and multiple episodes had a espionage angle to them, usually related to Magnum’s somewhat-murky service during the Vietnam War. He even gets called back to Naval Intelligence a couple of times.

Here’s a 22-second video of one of the most infamous moments in the series. In Nam, Magnum and T.C. were captured and tortured by a KGB agent named Ivan. When Ivan reappears in Hawaii looking for them, it results in a pretty shocking ending for primetime in 1982.

Spoiler: Magnum just plain shoots him in cold blood. The episode ends on a freeze-frame which was omitted from some international broadcasts, as it was problematic. There are no details given about how Magnum gets away with the murder.

This was the ending of a two-parter (actually a two-hour TV movie back in 1982), and the next episode in the series just picks up like nothing happened, innocently guest-starring the zany brothers from Simon and Simon, even.

(I’m still really salty that Robin’s Nest was torn down. You can see it here on Google Maps — it’s never been re-developed. It would have made an amazing AirBnB.)

I watched The 39 Steps, which is a Hitchcock movie from 1935. It’s considered one of the classic spy thrillers.

A man in London runs into a woman who claims to be a spy who has uncovered an intelligence network in Scotland. She’s on the run from assassins. Before long, the man is accused of her murder, and he has to flee into Scotland to find whatever she uncovered and prove his innocence.

It’s quite good for its time. The final sequence is really well-done and brings it all together. And I’m no expert on Hitchcock, but there’s a lot of signature style from him in there (including a brief cameo).

I’m not sure if I missed it, but I wasn’t quite sure which side was the bad guys here. This was 1935, so I imagine it must have been the Germans…?

For absolutely no particular reason, I watched the first episode of Scarecrow and Mrs. King the other night.

(I almost said “re-watched” because I can’t imagine I haven’t seen this before, but it’s been 43 years since it aired, so who can remember...)

The show was a moderate success in the 80s, running for four seasons between 1983 and 1987. It was Bruce Boxleitner’s first notable thing after Tron, and Kate Jackson’s first after Charlie’s Angels.

It was… cute. Boxleitner is an agent for “The Agency,” and Jackson is a recently divorced single mom. He runs into her on a train platform and gives her a package before he gets roughed up by some KGB agents. That draws her into a plot involving a cooking show that is secretly communicating orders to kill other agents (shades of Wayne Newton’s character in License to Kill). By the end of the episode, she’s been recruited as his “civilian partner.”

There’s a weird amount of killing (I counted six people in that episode alone, most of it off-screen), and some plot holes and very convenient coincidences that don’t quite make sense. But it otherwise holds up, so long as you remember this was primetime in the early 80s.

Cryptome was always an odd thing. It was (is?) an online archive and document repository which published things that it hinted should not have been published.

I remember Cryptome from back in the 1990s, when I was first getting on the web. It published all sorts of random combintations of government documents, often rolled up into zip file downloads.

All the while, it gave off a very spy-ish vibe. There were various news articles on topics, but also some odd things like fighter jet operating manuals and official reports on how to store nuclear waste.

I never could figure it out, but I was fascinated by it. To me, this was an example of how the internet was a greater leveling system that gave people access to things they would never see otherwise. I always felt like a bit of a secret agent while I was browsing through it.

The Wikipedia page discussed how they were involved in WikiLeaks and other scandals, which fits. One of the founders died last year.

Syriana from 2005 is my favorite kind of movie: it has lots of plot threads that overlap and come together in different ways. I learned that this style has name: hyperlink cinema.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this style is that the film was wildly complex and hard to understand. While I was watching it for the first time, I was only barely understanding the overall plot mechanics and why everyone was doing what they were doing.

Over a decade ago, I found an interactive “plot explorer” tool for the movie that let you visually follow different threads on a digital surface. It’s here, but it was created in Flash, which hasn’t been relevant or supported on the web for years, so it doesn’t work on my browser.

Helpfully, the creator also converted it to a static image. It shows all the different groups and how they intersect, explaining what their individual motivations are which can help you figure out the plot.

(It’s worth mentioning also that Syriana has an awful torture scene which is probably the biggest impediment to me ever re-watching it.)

Chases are all over the place in spy movies, but the second car chase in Ronin is one of the best on film. It’s a BMW and a Peugeot through the streets of Paris.

It’s very realistic (except maybe for a weird amount of sparks). There’s no musical soundtrack for most of it, just more than seven full minutes screaming engines and scraping metal. Robert DeNiro looks like he’s on the verge of a stroke from start to finish.

Here’s a commercial for the Honda Del Sol from 1995.

It’s very Bondian, from the music to the casting to the theme. So much so, that MGM sued Honda and made them pull it off the air.

The lawsuit accuses Honda of copyright infringement and falsely implying that the car is endorsed by MGM and Danjaq.

Back in the mid-90s, there was a very short-lived primetime show called Fortune Hunter. I can’t find a full episode (only five of them actually aired), but here’s a short promo video.

Carlton Dial was a literal fortune hunter — he did jobs for money. I vaguely remember that he was searching for treasure or other valuable items. (There weren’t even enough episodes to totally flesh out the concept.)

There was also a weird plot device where he had cameras in his contact lenses linking back to a computer geek at home base… or something (I might be foggy on that). And, of course, Dial’s gun shot tranquilizer darts, because this was primetime and he was a good guy.

The show did not succeed, but I remember it being mildly interesting, and borrowing heavily from the Bond canon (see the video: “…Dial. Carlton Dial.”). This was right in the middle of Bond’s legal turmoil and exile from the theaters, so the time was right to fill the gap.

The show was so fleeting that I couldn’t even find a decent image for this post. And tragically, the star, Mark Frankel, died in a traffic accident just a couple years after the show aired.

In a prior post, I mentioned the scene from Casino Royale where Vesper Lynd says, “I’m the money” and Bond responds, “…every penny of it.”

I suddenly started wondering why Bond would say the word “penny,” given that it’s a name for a unit of American currency. Shouldn’t he of said… “pence” or “quid” or something?

Well, it turns out I’m pathetically uncultured and American-centric. AI set me straight:

Your instinct has it backwards — "penny" is about as British as currency words get. It's Old English (penig), it's the name of an actual British coin (pre-decimal pence, and the 1p piece since 1971), and it's woven through the idiom: in for a penny, in for a pound; a penny for your thoughts; the penny dropped; penny-pinching; spend a penny. Americans use "penny" too, but only colloquially — the US coin is officially a cent. So if anything, "penny" reads as the Anglophone-original and the American usage as the borrowing.

I’ve embarrassed myself.

A few days ago, I posted about M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye. Go watch that again: at a certain point, she quickly presses some buttons to reveal a TV and a ….PowerPoint (?) about General Orumov.

This is what I call “spy briefing room PowerPoint magic.” No matter what happens, someone always has these presentations ready to go. What buttons did M press? Did she have this queued up already?

It’s is a trope in spy movies that has always fascinated me. They always seem to have these ready-made presentations about the bad guys, complete with pictures, videos, and detailed stat sheets. They then immediately start talking over them, reciting statistics and detailed histories, or they have someone else in the room do it, as if it was rehearsed. They must prep these in advance because no one is ever seen fumbling for the information or trying to share their desktop — it’s always one button and voila!

In my other life, I work in the field of content management and enterprise software. I can tell you that I’ve never seen things go as smoothly as this.

Some guy is compiling all examples on screen of the “photographs connected by red string” trope. Some other guy wrote an entire book about how science fiction interfaces can be used to learn about how we should design for today.

I feel like there are lessons to be learned about how well fictional spy agencies manage their PowerPoints.

6 Underground is a guilty pleasure. It combines Michael Bay with Ryan Reynolds — maybe the two most un-subtle people in Hollywood.

The movie is unapologetically ridiculous, but I always thought it did a great job with exposition. There’s a lot of backstory to get through, and it nicely weaves that through a set of flashbacks.

The plot isn’t terrible, but it’s essentially just a framework to hang 4-5 action set pieces on.

This is a not a “good” movie, in the traditional sense, but it’s wildly entertaining. Every shot is visually stunning and the action is well-choreographed.

I shut my brain off and re-watch it a couple of times a year. I just don’t tell people about it.

Back in 1979, Timothy Dalton guest-starred on Charlie’s Angels as cat burglar Damien Roth, described as “a man with James Bondian tastes, means, and charm.”

Someone has helpfully compiled all of his scenes in this YouTube video.

Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role.

Then, towards the end, you see and hear the scene they’re doing — it’s the “I’m the money” scene between Vesper and Bond (”…every penny of it”) that was on the train in the film but is being done on a hotel room set for the screen test.

Vesper is played by someone other than Eva Green. I’m not sure who is playing Craig’s haircut.

M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest.

I especially love it when Bond says “point taken,” thinking that would defuse the situation, but M just goes right on to tell him how she’d be perfectly happy to “send a man out to die.” And this was after she deliver the now-classic, “sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And let’s not forget the symbolism of when M summarily dismisses Bond’s suggestion about the bottle her “predecessor” kept in the office.

Bond’s responses are key to the exchange too. Beyond the dialog, he has some facial expressions and pauses that really sell the idea that he’s dealing with something completely new.

The scene is utterly brilliant, and it launched one of the greatest character portrayals in the Bond movie canon. I’d never say GoldenEye was one of the top-tier Bond films, but it was exactly the film that the series needed at the time it came it out, and Dench was exactly the supporting actor that Brosnan needed to land on his feet.

Did you know you can get an advanced degree in actual intelligence? Here are some options:

• Master's in Global Security Studies at Johns Hopkins
• Master of Arts in Counterintelligence Studies at the Institute of World Politics
• Master of Arts in Intelligence Studies at American Military University
• Master’s in National Security and Intelligence at Northeastern University
• Master's in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown

Just before starting in on the James Bond theme, the Danish Symphony Orchestra had their conductor “assassinated” live on stage. That visual, followed immediately by the opening bars of the Bond theme is just legendary.

This NY Times article about how Trump was spirited out of Turkey reads like a real-life spy novel in places:

President Trump hid in an airport catering container and was taken to a military jet for a secret flight out of country after the NATO summit last month.

Reminds me a bit of Georgi Koskov leaving Czechoslovakia in the oil pipeline in The Living Daylights (…which was one of the few plot points of that movie which I clearly understood).

I was reminded of this great rap by Chris Parnell back in 2003 when Jennifer Garner was hosting SNL at the height of her Alias fame. It tells a globe-hopping story about how they're spies and lovers, doing missions for the CIA.

The joke at the very end is worth waiting for.

I was previously unaware of The Moneypenny Diaries which is a short book series that tells James Bond adventures from the perspective of Miss Moneypenny (did anyone know her first name is apparently “Jane”?).

It doesn't seem like the series got too far, but there some short stories published in British magazine. One of them is entitled For Your Eyes Only, James which sounds vaguely like Bond and Moneypenny might have consummated their flirtation.

(I did some looking, but that particular installment seems to be hard to find. Several people are trying to find reprints of it.)

A clue in today's New York Times Crossword was “Bond between Lazenby and Dalton.”

The answer was “MOORE”.

Seen in downtown Montreal.

Found this short Reddit video of a “briefcase gun” from the 1970s.

I read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one.

It was…okay. I've never loved Gardner's work. Here’s my review.

The NY Times released The Top 50 Thrillers of the 21st Century. Slow Horses is #9. I enjoyed that — here’s my review from a few years back.

Reading Maps visually plots the geographic travels of various novels. As you can imagine, the James Bond novels are pretty active, in terms of globe-hopping. Here’s the entry for Casino Royale (the movie).

Chief of Station was a bit of a miss. It’s well-filmed, on-location in Budapest, and even has a bit part for a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko was Camilla Montes in Quantum of Solace). It opens with a nice scene of tradecraft, which makes up for a particularly uncomfortable torture scene later on (a la Syriana, but worse).

However, I just don’t think Aaron Eckhart is that great of an actor, and a lot of the story depends on him (apparently, Alec Baldwin was originally cast in the role). Plus, the writing was just kind of tired. Nothing interesting to see here, honestly.

Doug DeMuro reviews the Jaguar XKR from Die Another Day, currently on display in the Petersen Museum. Better yet, he drives it on Los Angeles city streets, complete with a mounted gatling gun in the back. (Spoiler: other than the body shell, it’s not a Jaguar at all…)

Though not technically a “spy,” The Thomas Crown Affair does lurk on the periphery. I loved the Pierce Brosnan version from 1999, and it looks like we’re getting a new one from Michael B. Jordan.

Supposedly, Radiohead’s “Man of War” was submitted to be a James Bond theme, but since it wasn’t written just for the movie, it wouldn’t have been eligible to win an Oscar, so it was declined. I get it though — it has the right vibe.

British author Jeffrey Archer supplied recommendations for “The Best Heist and Con Artist Books” novels over on Five Books named Goldfinger as the best heist novel. I find this interesting because, while the film version is wildly popular, I thought the novel was weaker.

(Speaking of Jeffrey Archer, I loved his novel “The Fourth Estate.”)

Letterboxd has published its Top 100 Spy Films. It’s a pretty good list. Happy to see two of Daniel Craig’s Bond films quite high (before any Connery film, notably), along with Rogue One (if it included TV, then Andor would no-doubt be up there too).

Thunderbolts seems like a really odd choice, but No Way Out is an absolute favorite of mine.

Really enjoyed the rest of The Agency, season 1. Good story, never slowed down.

It’s very heavy on tradecraft, which I liked. Lots of moral ambiguity in there too.

Interestingly, there’s a plot thread all through season one that essentially just sets up what will likely be a bigger thing in season two. Essentially, a character — unrelated to the main plot of season one — spends the entire season positioning herself for a larger plot thread. It would be boring except that you’re assuming it pays off in the future episodes.

The Agency is in its second season, but I don’t remember seeing it before. I saw ads for it in the Dallas airport, then it was recommended to me by Prime.

I watched the first episode. It’s a slow burn — very random and confusing for the first 30 minutes, but then it starts to clear up.

Michael Fassbender is “Martian,” a CIA spy recruiter recalled to London very suddenly after six years in Ethiopia. Richard Gere (in his first TV role) and Jeffrey Wright are his higher-ups, and skullduggery is in the air

He leaves a romantic entanglement in Africa that he can’t get out of his head. Additionally, an asset in Minsk gets arrested, which creates a problem.

It’s very realistic (I presume; how would I know?). Lots of tradecraft porn and political machinations.

I liked it. I’ll keep watching.

The Trap is the third installment of the Emma Makepeace series. It was fun and lightweight, like the first two — here’s my review. I did notice that the author has since written a novel outside that series, which I hope doesn’t mean she’s abandoned it.

I’d never heard of Intelligence before. It’s a British sitcom that I caught a few episodes on a flight.

It stars Nick Mohammed (one of the coaches from Ted Lasso; he's also the creator) as a hapless, low-level GCHQ employee, and David Schwimmer (Ross from Friends) as an equally hapless — but arrogant and self-important — NSA liaison.

It is genuinely very funny. Schwimmer is essentially playing an overboard version of Ross, which was nice to see again. It’s workplace comedy set against an espionage theme, which is a fun background juxtaposition in the first place.

It only ran for two short seasons totaling 13 episodes.

Haywire is fully 15 years old, back when Gina Carano was known only for MMA , hadn’t done Star Wars, and hadn’t made the tweets that got her canceled.

It’s not a bad movie at all. It’s directed by Steven Soderberg, and it shows. It’s very moody, very stylized. And the soundtrack is by the same guy who did Out of Sight and the Oceans series. It’s very much got the same vibe.

What’s amazing is the cast. It’s got some heavy hitters in supporting — and some very small — roles: Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor.

All throughout, I knew what was happening on a small scale, but I didn’t understand why. Carano was running, fighting, and shooting a lot, but… why, exactly? Turns out, I wasn’t just dumb, because the plot isn’t clearly explained until the last five minutes of the movie.

As for Carano, this was her first “real” movie, and I alternated thinking she was pretty stiff one minute, and thinking she wasn’t half bad the next. Well, it turns out a bunch of her lines were dubbed (by Laura San Giacomo, no less), so that might explain the uneven-ness of her performance.

Still, not a bad movie. Worth watching.

The Spy Lounge is a YouTube channel that publishes AI generated “spy music.” It’s exactly what the title promises: jazzy tunes with a classic espionage vibe. I can’t really explain it too well, so just listen to it. It’s good background music while you’re working.

Plus, I love what they do with the artwork and especially the titles. Every title is equal parts random and perfectly fitting, and just as inexplicably appropriate as the music itself.

Argylle was not a “good” film, but it was inventive and amusing. It’s basically a big spy parody, with a pretty decent twist in the middle that I didn’t see coming. But it’s way, way too long, at two-and-a-half hours.

Also, it absolutely bombed at the box office. Made less than $100 million when it had to make about $500 million to be considered successful. We were supposed to get a crossover/shared universe with Kingsman, but that’s certainly not going to happen now.

Honestly, I like Henry Cavill in about anything spy related. He should of been Bond.

Jack Ryan, Ghost War was very paint-by-numbers. I enjoy John Krasinski in the role, but there was nothing in this film that was interesting. Even the action sequences were tired.

I liked the prior series format, because a plot could develop over eight full hours of story. This is only about 90 minutes, and the plot is about an inch deep. Even with that, honestly, I had a hard time figuring out what was shooting at who and why.

Not great.