Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin was the second of three films based on the Harry Palmer novels by Len Deighton. As he did in The Ipcress File, Michael Caine stars as Palmer, Deighton's bespectacled, somewhat disreputable British secret agent. In the manner of Graham Greene's The Third Man, Palmer is dispatched to ...more

Guy Hamilton's Funeral in Berlin (1966) was a groundbreaking thriller in its time. From World War II until the mid-'60s, the nature of politics and paranoia in the West had rendered just about every depiction of the Cold War into a relentlessly grim exercise in entertainment. The James Bond movies got past this by totally ignoring the Cold War in most of its scripts (with the notable exception of From Russia With Love), preferring to deal with villains other than the Soviets. The mere fact that ...more