TV Reviews : ‘Endless Game’ Is a Devious Spy Tale

“The past is a foreign country,” says Albert Finney as a haunted British M16 agent in Showtime’s labyrinthine “The Endless Game” (Sunday at 8 p.m.).

The line is a revealing touch by writer-director Bryan Forbes, who juggles the past and the present in this arabesque of international espionage that co-stars George Segal as a CIA operative whose obsessions are both kinky and self-serving.

Finney’s intelligence agent draws up memories of Richard Burton’s grainy portrayal in arguably the best spy movie ever made, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1965). TV has rarely presented a spy tale this devious.

But beware: Forbes’ Muse here isn’t so much John le Carre as the game Scrabble. Fitting the pieces together will keep your head spinning for the length of this 120-minute movie. Even when it’s over, ending in Moscow, you can’t make sense of everything you saw.

But the European co-production (shot in London, Austria and Finland) is lush and well-acted. Segal seems to relish his corrupt role, and the supporting cast is particularly flavorful, with sharp vignettes from Anthony Quayle as a desolate retired agent and the alluring Monica Guerritore, whose seductions could turn Captain Midnight into a mole.

In short, don’t worry about analyzing every subplot. This is the kind of treachery where the sweep of the double-dealing will carry you back to the glory days of the East-West war.

Events have rushed by this movie to make it almost quaint and a little pretentious. On the other hand, defectors haven’t gone out of style. This is not a careening car crash caper. The KGB aren’t thugs. If you were in the intelligence business (and British film maker Forbes once was), you could attach real-life counterparts to these characters.