Word: telefon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TELEFON...
...light of all this, there is something brave, if conceivably self-destructive about Telefon, which might have been subtitled 'The Last Spy Picture Show." Its creators do not attempt to palm off their Manchurian Candidate plot as something ripped from today's flaming headlines. The gimmick- a group of Russian deep-cover agents in the U.S. are mind-conditioned to sabotage military targets when they get a phone call repeating a triggering phrase- is seen from the start as a forgotten pre-détente plot that an unreconstructed cold warrior (Donald Pleasence) manages...
...generate much pace or suspense. There is nothing very interesting about the major characters either, a condition that leads Bronson to increase -if that's possible- his normal stolidity, while Remick succumbs to an attack of perkiness. Instead of winding tighter and tighter, as a suspense story should, Telefon just winds down, rather like - come to think of it- a phone call between two people who don't really have much to say to each other...
...without love came a biting film critique in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. The plot is "pretty naive and banal," and the purpose of the film is to "arouse a psychosis against the Soviet Union in the Western countries -the evil atmosphere of days long since gone." The offending movie: Telefon, a U.S. spy flick now being filmed in Helsinki. Cast as a brainy KGB agent who goes to the U.S. on a mission, Charles Bronson is denounced by Izvestia as "the stereotype immutable hero of thriller-type movies." Is Bronson crushed? Nyet. "They must like that," he says. "I understand...