What are some good spy/Cold War/Assassin movies (NON-BOND)

No James Bond allowed, since there are already threads about them. (See The James Bond Film Festival (1954) for links to each of the films.)

I have The Hunt for Red October playing on the DVD now. I really like the genre. I can think of some other espionage/Cold War films I like:

The Eiger Sanction
The Boys From Brazil
(I figure a hunt for Nazi war criminals counts)
Three Days of the Condor
The Falcon and the Snowman
The Bedford Incident
Fail Safe
Dr. Strangelove (or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb”)
Leon: The Professional
La Femme Nikita
(the real one – I haven’t seen the remake)
The Long Kiss Goodnight
The Mechanic
Telefon

I think you get the idea. What other films are worth a look?

The Day of the Jackal
Seven Days in May
Fail-Safe
The Fourth Protocol

Ronin is fantastic, stars Robert DeNiro, and Jean Reno and directed by Frankenheimer. It’s one of the finest films in the genre, IMHO.

On the “cloak & dagger”/intrigue side of things, John le Carre’s Smiley’s People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy are both out on DVD. Although they were made for TV, the production values and acting are first-rate. Alec Guinness absolutely owns the lead role in both productions.

I quite liked The Assignment.

I don’t know what you think about foreign films, but I have two French suggestions.
I enjoyed Le Serpent (The Serpent/Night Flight from Moscow.)

Another interesting film by the same director, Henri Verneuil, in a slightly differnt genre is I… comme Icare (I as in Icarus.) It depicts the work of a member of an investigation commitee after an assassination.

The Manchurian Candidate (the original by John Frankenheimer, starring Frank Sinatra) is a creepy Cold War classic. The remake with Denzel Washington is pretty damn good too, surprisingly.

For a good assassin film, try The Killer by John Woo, starring the great Chow Yun Fat. And I actually prefer Point Of No Return, the American remake of La Femme Nikita, to the original. Finally, try Nick Of Time, an underrated thriller with Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken.

The Parallax View

Another good Le Carre` adaptation is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with an excellent lead performance by Richard Burton that shows he could act if he wanted to. Also noteworthy is the most recent version of The Quiet American.

The Man Who Never Was
No Way Out
Stalag 17 (had a spy element)
Enemy of the State
The Conversation
The Bourne Identity (only seen the Damon version)
The Assassin (American remake of La Femme Nikita)
The Presidio (if only because of Sean Connery)
Gotcha (saw it as a little kid. Might even be a crap story but Linda Fiorentino was hot)
Christopher Lee was in an EXCELLENT telemovie about the Iraqi supergun project. I was incredibly pissed off that I missed the last half hour due to a business brekkie the next morning. Imdb has nothing on it though.
The Fourth Protocol is so good that I’ll have to second it.
Firefox

Heaps more partly because you cast such a wide net.

For the comedic/satric version how 'bout “Our Man in Havana”?
Written by Graham Greene, starring Alec Guinness…got Noel Coward in it too…what’s not to love?

Sniper with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane was pretty good. There was a TV movie, Aldrich Ames: The Traitor Within that was excellent, starring Timothy Hutton and Joan Plowright.

I thought that was Point of No Return.

I quite enjoyed Spy Game with Robert Redford.

The Recruit isn’t bad. Surprisingly, Al Pacino gives a loud, ranting monologue at the end.

The Saint (Val Kilmer, Elizabeth Shue) - not so good.

Folkkes - 80s Roger Moore film where he’s not James Bond but he might as well be.

Gest - I looked for Christopher Lees movie (I think it was called ‘Supergun’ or somthing) and didn’t find squat. I did learn that Lee played Scaramonga in The Man With the Golden Gun. Never recognized him.

Ahh, so you know it? Fascinating wasn’t it? I used ‘gun’ for my term and turned up zip too. Weird because I’ve never known imdb to miss important stuff. Even weirder is that you didn’t recognise Lee as Scaramanga. Was it the superfluous third nipple? :smiley:

We’re both right it seems. I didn’t catch Big Bad Voodoo Lou’s mention because I was looking for the title it was released under in Australia. Australia often uses different titles for some reason. Airplane became Flying High, possibly because we spell it aeroplane, and Mad Max became The Road Warrior. There are lots of such examples though.

I forgot Sneakers (surprised we didn’t rename it runners). Its major component is (industrial) espionage.

There are none.

It was an ugly time, an ugly era.

Let it die, & be forgot.

Some seconds:

Spy Game. For some reason its linked with The Recruit in my mind. SG is much better.

And **The Spy Who Came in From the Cold[b/]. The best Le Carre adaptation, IMHO. But I haven’t seen it in like 10 years. I read it a couple times and I’m not sure how the movie plays without knowing the story because its a confusing plot.

**Spartan[b/] is recently out on DVD. Not Cold War, per se, but something you might want to check out nonetheless. Mamet movie.

The President’s Analyst
No Way Out

are older movies but both capture Cold War paranoia nicely and are terrific entertaINMENT.

Well, this whole thread has people who disagree.

Past eras were just as ugly without even as much of the beauty.

I don’t know about letting it die but forgetting would be bad. Doomed to repeat and all that. Hopefully we’ve learnt the enemy of my enemy nonsense is just tha… d’oh. :smack:

Well, some people have learnt it.

I actually believe the only good to come from Bush being elected will be good music and independent cinema because the best art thrives under authoritarian regimes. Utopia would be comfy and nice but very bland and Western culture would consist only of the likes of American Idol and vehicles for the Olsen twins.

There’s no great art without some pain and adversity.

It’s already been mentioned, but to my mind the best by far is The Day of the Jackal, directed by Fred Zinneman, based on Frederck Forsyth’s thriller. The other movies based on Forsyth’s books are also verey good (the Fourth Protocal has already been mentioned), but I’m not sure if The Odessa File or The Dogs of War fit your requirements.

The thrillers written by Peter stone are also excellent, and date from the period you’re interested in, but I’m not sure if they fit your definition, either – Charade is as suiperb mystery/thriller/romantic comedy. Mirage is a darker thriller, with some of the same cast and the same director, Stanley Donen. When Donen did another thriller in the same mold, but without Stone to write the script, the result was awful (Arabesque).