MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WHISTLE BLOWER’: TAUT SPY THRILLER

“The Whistle Blower” (scheduled to open in Orange County on Aug. 21 at Lido Cinema in Newport Beach) has all the trappings of a handsome, traditional-style British spy thriller, but it evolves into a powerful protest drama with striking parallels to Costa-Gavras’ “Missing.” It also offers a tender relationship between a father and son, beautifully portrayed by Michael Caine and Nigel Havers, and it emerges as one of the bitterest expressions of Britain’s decline of empire and of the helplessness of the individual when confronted with an implacable, monolithic government agency.

Directed in taut fashion by Simon Langton, who directed “Smiley’s People” for TV, it marks yet another distinguished collaboration between producer Geoffrey Reeve and writer Julian Bond, whose last joint effort was “The Shooting Party.” “The Whistle Blower” moves swiftly yet bristles with the well-wrought dialogue so characteristic of English films.

(The print for the press screening was a little late in arriving from Washington, where it was shown at the White House. You can’t help but wonder what the President, assuming he saw it, thought of the film, which has undeniable implications for Irangate.)

In deceptively conventional style, “The Whistle Blower,” which Bond adapted from the John Hale novel, has a dizzyingly convoluted plot designed to make us suspicious of everyone. Havers, who was the aristocratic high hurdler, Lord Lindsey in “Chariots of Fire,” plays Bob Jones, a 28-year-old translator in the Russian section of General Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, the British government’s information-gathering service.

A lover of Russian literature, Bob is increasingly dissatisfied with his work, becoming convinced that British intelligence has created a dark world of its own, unaccountable to no one and just as dangerous as the KGB. His father Frank (Caine) was a Korean War hero who loused up a promising career in the military in a fit of temper and is now the struggling, widowed proprietor of a London typewriter and word-processor store. A patriot in his quiet way, Frank thinks his son should stick with it.

You know right off that in his idealism and naivete Bob is surely headed for some kind of trouble, perhaps also because he’s involved in a serious romance with the wife of one of his colleagues. The wife, Cynthia (Felicity Dean), is terribly tense. Is it because she’s having an affair or is she a Soviet spy, instructed to recruit Bob? We hardly have time to ponder this--and many other suspicions--when events thrust Frank to the fore and shift the film onto an unpredictable and thoroughly engrossing tack.

Caine’s portrait of a loving father, forced to reevaluate his perceptions and values in the face of what happens to his son, may be even stronger than that of Jack Lemmon’s in “Missing.” In recent years Caine has come into such full flower as the compleat screen actor that it’s almost meaningless to call this one of his best performances, but it is.

The observation applies with equal force to John Gielgud, who has a long, wonderful scene as an upper-class Sir Anthony Blunt-like traitor. Caine and Gielgud have that gift of immediately and selflessly inhabiting anyone they happen to be playing. Havers too has that same kind of believability, which in this instance is essential, since Bob must be totally convincing as an intellectual innocent if the film is to work. Barry Foster, so memorable as the personable strangler of Hitchcock’s “Frenzy,” also has a terrific scene as one of Frank’s war buddies, a genial man not quite what he seems. In contrast with the others, James Fox and Gordon Jackson have little to say as ranking government agents but supply plenty of silent menace.

“The Whistle Blower” (rated PG for some violence) is the kind of film you don’t want to reveal too much about. Suffice to say that it is admirably sure-footed as it proceeds through a thicket of treachery, ruthlessness, wounded national pride and outright paranoia. Caine, Langton and their writers deserve full honors for the precisely calibrated ambiguity of the film’s finish, which may be read as either ending on a note of brave optimism or bleak irony. In any event, Caine’s Frank, by this time has become no less than a symbol for his country.

“Whistle Blower” opens today at Laemmle’s Grande in downtown Los Angeles and the Esquire in Pasadena.