O come all ye faithful: that jolly old fat man with the Fiberglas whiskers is here again. This year his bag is fairly bulging with forged passports, coshed corpses, ballistic cigarettes, transistorized brooches, nitroglycerin earrings, infra-red herrings—all the preposterous technology of terror developed by a movie industry that seems to have eyes only for spies. Three new epics of espionage deck the halls with buckets of blood and hang enough promiscuous mistletoe to give the customers a blue Christmas.
Funeral in Berlin is the sequel though not the equal of The Ipcress File. Where Ip was engagingly shaggy, FIB is insistently slick. But then slick is not a bad thing for a thriller to be.
In the first film, British Agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) was a smalltime crook who took up spying to keep out of jail and eluded his perils as witlessly as spaghetti eludes a fork. In the second, he is a complete professional assigned to prevent his apparat from falling into a Russian trap.
The trap has been baited with a big cheese, a Russian intelligence colonel (Oscar Homolka) who makes a rather dubious offer to defect to the West. Agent Palmer warily makes arrangements for the colonel to enter West Berlin in a coffin. When the coffin is opened, however, Palmer gets the first of several nasty surprises. The nastiest: a luscious Israeli agent (Eva Renzi) who invites Palmer to have conversation on what turns out to be a mattress of life and death.
The plot gets so thick at some points that the script doesn't bother to explain what has happened and why. But at all times the action is shifty, the dialogue pert, the backdrop laid on in a colorful cinemontage of both Berlins. What's more, the film is refreshingly free of Machiavellian machinery—the most sophisticated gizmo these spies employ is a telephone. And as the hero, Caine is able.
The Quiller Memorandum, a movie version of Adam Hall's thriller about neo-Nazism in contemporary Germany, also takes place in Berlin—in modern movies a spy needs Berlin the way a vampire needs Moldavia.
The neos are investigated by a feller named Quiller (George Segal), a British agent who speaks, as moviegoers may observe with some astonishment, in a fearless Brooklyn snarl. When he arrives in Berlin, Agent Quiller is met by his control (Alec Guinness), a twitchy old party who informs him in a ghost-story voice that the fascist underground is far more powerful in Germany than people think.
Quiller is assigned to capture the fascist high command, but with the help of the inevitable under-covers operative (Senta Berger) the high command captures him first. Scratched by a needle concealed in a suitcase, Quiller wakes up in a bomb-shattered mansion to find himself staring at an actor of proven ability (Max von Sydow) who suddenly comes on like the blond beast in a B movie.