The Quiller Memorandum

Infobox Film
name = The Quiller Memorandum


image_size =
caption = film poster by Tom Beauvais
director = Michael Anderson
producer = Ivan Foxwell
writer = Trevor Dudley-Smith (as Adam Hall) (novel)
Harold Pinter
narrator =
starring = George Segal
Alec Guinness
Max von Sydow
Senta Berger
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor =
released = December 15 1966 (US)
January 13 1967 (UK)
runtime = 105 minutes
country = UK
language = English
budget =
gross =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0060880

"The Quiller Memorandum" (1966) is a film adaptation of the 1965 spy novel "The Berlin Memorandum", by Trevor Dudley-Smith, screenplay by Harold Pinter, directed by Michael Anderson, featuring George Segal, Max von Sydow, Senta Berger, Alec Guinness, George Sanders, Robert Flemyng. Robert Helpmann, Peter Carsten, Günter Meisner, and Edith Schneider

Plot summary

The film opens with a man walking in the dead of the night through the remoter streets of Berlin. He enters a phone booth, but as he dials a number, he is killed instantly by a single shot from the street.

He is the second British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) operative to be murdered in Berlin by a mysterious and elusive neo-Nazi organization, Phoenix, which exists to re-establish Nazi rule in Germany. Quiller - George Segal - is sent to Berlin by the SIS to investigate, and to discover where the Phoenix HQ is located. There, among the seats of the atmospheric 1936 Olympia Stadium, he has a briefing from his eccentric, lunch-eating controller Pol - Alec Guinness - who explains that "a new generation of Nazis has grown up, difficult to recognise because they don't wear uniforms any more". Pol's own SIS superiors in London, Gibbs (George Sanders) and Rushington (Robert Flemyng), are occasionally encountered in their gentlemen's club, being even more aristocratic and eccentric than Pol, and seeming far more concerned with pursuing their leisure activities than with their job which is to maintain Britain's security.

Back in central West Berlin Quiller suspects that he is being tailed; he shakes off his follower, then himself follows the tail to a pub, confronts him, and discovers that the man, Hengel - Peter Carsten - is his designated full-time SIS minder.

Pretending to be a newspaper reporter researching German neo-Nazism, and with the assumed name of Cooper, Quiller visits a local school where a male teacher had been unmasked as a Pheonix member and secret Nazi. There the headmistress (Edith Scheider) introduces him to the beautiful female replacement teacher named Inge Lindt (Senta Berger), whom he interviews about her colleagues: and - clearly attracted to her - drives her home, where, over a drink, he gently quizzes her as a journalist might. Leaving her flat, he confronts a man who seems to be following him, but the man (and his nearby friends) strenuously deny this is so. Quiller, having pretended in an earlier scene in the pub with Hengel that he understands no German, surprises us by speaking it fluently to these suspicious characters, which indicates that there is more to him than meets the eye. We later see these individuals again in the Phoenix HQ, as neo-Nazi acolytes.

The next morning, as Quiller is leaving his hotel, a porter bumps into his leg with a heavy suitcase. In the car park he is met by an SIS operative, Weng - Robert Helpmann - with the order that Pol wants to see him. However Quiller, with a mind and agenda of his own, drives to and along the Berlin ringroad, managing to shake off his assigned and recognised SIS minder Hengel. But he has clearly been poisoned by the suitcase knock, and at a traffic light becomes semi-comatose. Quiller is now virtually paralysed. A man from another car that has been tailing his, steps into the driving seat, pushes Quiller over, and kidnaps him. This is Phoenix at work.

He wakes up in the huge medieval-like chamber of a palatial old building, seated in a chair, and surrounded by a group of Phoenix members led by a German aristocrat, Oktober - Max von Sydow. Quiller refuses to answer Oktober's questions about the SIS's Berlin operations and how much they know about Phoenix, and then seizes the opportunity to make an escape dash from the room, but after a little violence he is apprehended and returned to his chair to which he is now strapped. A tame doctor injects Quiller with a truth serum, but this also fails to elicit the information desired by Oktober. Quiller, with his training, is able - albeit painfully - to deflect Oktober's questions, though in his delirium he utters a few clues. Oktober impatiently orders Quiller to be killed.

Quiller is not killed - Oktober has just wanted to send a message to SIS that their agents can easily be disposed of - but comes round half-lying in water on the dingy industrial bank of a Berlin river. Looking extremely dishevelled, Quiller drags himself to a taxi rank, climbs in the back of a cab, and offers the suspicious driver money to buy him a pair of shoes to replace his waterlogged footwear. The driver, reluctantly doing as he is bidden, leaves the taxi and starts to complain to some bystanders about this weird fellow in his cab. Now Quiller notices a Mercedes car apparently waiting to tail him, so he rapidly steals the taxi in its driver's absence, drives off very fast, and is pursued by the Mercedes which, after an ill-advised short cut, crashes; this enables Quiller to escape and to book into a shabby but anonymous hotel, where he offers the suspicious but compliant night porter more money to get him a pair of shoes. From the hallway he telephones Inge and asks if he can see her straight away, but she is already in bed and half-asleep; so they arrange to meet the following evening.

Quiller spends the next day attempting to gather information, including another strange and inconclusive chat with Pol in a pub, and a visit to a public swimming pool to try to interview the manager, Hassler (Günter Meisner), whose activist name Quiller has come across, about neo-Nazism in Germany. But the manager sends him packing on the apparent assumption that Quiller is there only to ogle the young swimmers.

After a passionate night at Inge's flat, she admits under Quiller's gentle questioning that she knows someone (a friend of her father's) who might hint at where Pheonix's HQ is. Inge takes Quiller to meet the man Hassler, the same public indoor swimming pool manager, at his place of work; and he is now much more friendly. He drives Quiller, Inge, and Inge's headmistress - who had originally introduced them to each other at the school - to an old building which seems to be uninhabited and ruined. Quiller wants to investigate the house on his own; the pool manager and the teacher in turn exit the vehicle, offering to leave Quiller the car for when he returns in order to drive Inge home, who has said she prefers to wait for Quiller rather than go with her two friends; and when finally alone together in the car she tells him she loves him. Quiller looks pleased, but does not reply. The street is the same one on which the SIS agent at the start of the film was murdered in the phone booth.

Quiller enters the house which appears to be deserted; but then he notices Oktober's henchmen silently standing in the gloomy corridor. They gesture for Quiller to follow them into a room, which he does because they are armed and he is not; and it is the same room where Quiller has previously been held captive. Oktober awaits him, playing a game of carpet golf, as though Quiller had been expected. Oktober and his minders walk Quiller down to the large cellar, where some removal men are busily organising the move to some new, more secret Phoenix HQ building. In the cellar room, Quiller is horrified to see that Inge has been brought there too, seemingly under restraint. Oktober offers Quiller an ultimatum: either he reveals the SIS details that Phoenix needs to have, or Inge dies. Quiller is given till dawn to consider the matter, and he is released onto the dark, sinister streets to walk and ponder. But he is surrounded by Oktober's armed men, who - while they keep their silent distance - make it impossible for him to escape (though he does try to make a failed dash for the nearest Berlin U-Bahn station), nor use any public telephone to call his controller Pol.

He returns to his dingy hotel for a wash and a think, while Oktober's men stand guard outside in the street, and he sees that the corridor phone has already been destroyed to prevent him using it. But he also spots a way to escape via the hotel's back door into a courtyard of lock-up garages. He breaks into one of the inter-connected garages to seek a get-away car, but (noticing a piece of wire on the ground) suspects that the car has had a bomb attached to its chassis (Phoenix having rightly deduced that Quiller would attempt this method of escape). On discovering the expected bomb, he detaches it and places it on the bonnet - with the car engine running - so that when it finally edges to the ground and explodes, Oktober's men will conclude that he has indeed been killed.

It is now dawn, and Quiller makes his escape amid the chaos of a virtual fire-ball, finding his way to the SIS offices, housed in a yet-uncompleted open-plan office on the upper floor of West Berlin's tallest downtown skyscraper, to tell Pol where Phoenix can be located. Quiller is exhausted, while Pol appears cheerfully indifferent, even ungracious, as he arranges by phone with the Berlin authorities for the gang to be rounded up; yet Inge turns out not to be among them, to Quiller's immediate concern.

Next day, properly groomed and elegantly dressed, Quiller walks into Inge's school and classroom. He has worked out the truth. Inge and her passing headmistress are astonished to see him, thinking him dead (but how, realises Quiller, could they know of that possibility?). Inge explains that she was lucky to escape, but Quiller now recognizes that she has been one of the Phoenix circle all along. She hints as much, in a very subtle way. Feeling for her as he still does, and as she does for him, he probably will not inform the authorities about her, but says that if ever he comes to Berlin again he will call her. One doubts that he will. Mission accomplished, he strides away purposefully down the school's path, and from her classroom window she wistfully watches him depart before going outside to round up the children at the end of their playtime.

Quiller never carries a gun and his approach is somewhat unorthodox; he is a world-weary, cynical and insubordinate loner, but he shows himself ultimately to be a superb - if enigmatic - secret agent and thus a good man to have on your side.←

Cast

*George Segal as Quiller
*Alec Guinness as Pol
*Max von Sydow as Oktober
*Senta Berger as Inge Lindt
*George Sanders as Gibbs
*Robert Helpmann as Weng
*Robert Flemyng as Rushington
*Peter Carsten as Hengel
*Edith Schneider as Headmistress
*Günter Meisner as Hassler
*Ernst Walder as Grauber

External links

*tcmdb title|id=87505