The Espionage Filmography

From Sean Connery to Roy Rogers, from comedy to political satire, films that include espionage as a plot device run the gamut of actors and styles. More than just “spy movies,” espionage films have evolved over the history of cinema and American culture, from stereotypical foreign spy themes, to patriotic star features, to the Cold War plotlines of the sixties, and most recently to the sexy, slick films of the nineties. This filmography comprehensively catalogs movies involving elements of espionage. Each entry includes release date, running time, alternate titles, cast and crew, a brief synopsis, and commentary. An introduction analyzes the development of these films and their reflection of the changing culture that spawned them.

Spyscreen is a genre study of English-language spy fiction film and television between the 1930s and 1960s. Taking as his focus many well-known films and television series, Toby Miller uses a wide range of critical approaches - from textual interpretation, audience studies, and culturalhistory, through auteurism, imperial history, class, and governmentality, to genre, cultural imperialism, and gender.Beginning with an overview of the social and political background to the history, production, and analysis of spy fiction, topics discussed include the first canonical espionage movie, The 39 Steps, key film noir texts such as Gilda and The Third Man, the figure of popular spies, including JamesBond, and the importance of women to the genre. The result is not just an insightful new study of key texts in this popular genre; it is an important intervention in the methodology and practice of Screen Studies.

Sean Connery began the sixties spy movie boom playing James Bond in Dr. No and From Russia with Love. Their success inspired every studio in Hollywood and Europe to release everything from serious knockoffs to spoofs on the genre featuring debonair men, futuristic gadgets, exotic locales, and some of the world's most beautiful actresses whose roles ranged from the innocent caught up in a nefarious plot to the femme fatale. Profiled herein are 107 dazzling women, well-known and unknown, who had film and television appearances in the spy genre. They include superstars Doris Day in Caprice, Raquel Welch in Fathom, and Ann-Margret in Murderer's Row; international sex symbols Ursula Andress in Dr. No and Casino Royale, Elke Sommer in Deadlier Than the Male, and Senta Berger in The Spy with My Face; and forgotten lovelies Greta Chi in Fathom, Alizia Gur in From Russia with Love, and Maggie Thrett in Out of Sight. Each profile includes a filmography that lists the actresses' more notable films. Some include the actresses' candid comments and anecdotes about their films and television shows, the people they worked with, and their feelings about acting in the spy genre are offered throughout. A list of websites that provide further information on women in spy films and television is also included.

Film historian James Chapman has mined Hitchcock's own papers to investigate fully for the first time the spy thrillers of the world's most famous filmmaker. Hitchcock made his name as director of the spy movie. He returned repeatedly to the genre from the British classics of the 1930s, including The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, through wartime Hollywood films Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur to the Cold War tracts North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and his unmade film The Short Night. Chapman's close reading of these films demonstrates the development of Hitchcock's own style as well as how the spy genre as a whole responded to changing political and cultural contexts from the threat of Nazism in the 1930s and 40s to the atom spies and double agents of the post-war world.

This book won the Canadian Crime Writers' Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Genre Criticism/Reference book of 1991. This collection of essays is an attempt to explore the history of spy fiction and spy films and investigate the significance of the ideas they contain. The volume offers new insights into the development and symbolism of British spy fiction.

This book won the Canadian Crime Writers' Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Genre Criticism/Reference book of 1991. This collection of essays is an attempt to explore the history of spy fiction and spy films and investigate the significance of the ideas they contain. The volume offers new insights into the development and symbolism of British spy fiction.

"The eight essays collected in this volume make the case that Hitchcock's spy films of the 1950s and 1960s are among his most important achievements because they contain his most salient political views and fully reveal the complexity of his moral compass"--

As plans got under way for the Allied invasion of Sicily in June 1943, British counter-intelligence agent Ewen Montagu masterminded a scheme to mislead the Germans into thinking the next landing would occur in Greece. The innovative plot was so successful that the Germans moved some of their forces away from Sicily, and two weeks into the real invasion still expected an attack in Greece. This extraordinary operation called for a dead body, dressed as a Royal Marine officer and carrying false information about a pending Allied invasion of Greece, to wash up on a Spanish shore near the town of a known Nazi agent...