Funeral in Berlin [Blu-ray]

Director: Guy Hamilton Guy Hamilton

Overview

Funeral in Berlin was the second of three films based on the Harry Palmer novels by Len Deighton. As he did in The Ipcress File, Michael Caine stars as Palmer, Deighton's bespectacled, somewhat disreputable British secret agent. In the manner of Graham Greene's The Third Man, Palmer is dispatched to Berlin to look into the highly suspicious defection of Soviet colonel Stok (Oscar Homolka). It is giving nothing away to reveal that Stok's death is a sham, and that Palmer is expected to engineer the "corpse"'s defection. To reveal any more, however, would be giving the game away. Michael Caine would portray Harry Palmer a third time in Billion Dollar Brain.

Product Details

Release Date:	05/26/2020
UPC:	0032429339027
Original Release:	1966
Rating:	NR
Source:	ALLIED VAUGHN
Language:	English
Time:	1:42:00
Sales rank:	19,265

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Michael Caine	Oscar Homolka
Eva Renzi	Samantha Steel
Oscar Homolka	Colonel Stok,le colonel Stok
Paul Hubschmid	Johnny Vulkan
Guy Doleman	Ross
Rachel Gurney	Mrs. Ross
Hugh Burden	Hallam
Thomas Holtzmann	Reinhart
Heinz Schubert	Aaron Levine
Wolfgang Volz	Wemer
Klaus Jepsen	Otto Rukel
Herbert Fux	Artur
Rainer Brandt	Benjamin
Ira Hagen	Monika
Marthe Keller	Brigit
Uschi Heyer	Bar Girl
Günter Meisner	Kreutzman
John Abineri	Rukel
Sarah Brackett	Babcock
Edward Meeks	East-German Guard
Freda Bamford	Alice
Patrick Halpin	Commuter
Konrad Elfers	Composer

Technical Credits

Len Deighton

Evan Jones

Guy Hamilton	Director
Charles Kasher	Producer
Harry Saltzman	Producer,Executive Producer
Len Deighton	Screenwriter
Gordon K. McCallum	Sound Effects
Ben Rayner	Sound Effects
Evan Jones	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

Guy Hamilton's Funeral in Berlin (1966) was a groundbreaking thriller in its time. From World War II until the mid-'60s, the nature of politics and paranoia in the West had rendered just about every depiction of the Cold War into a relentlessly grim exercise in entertainment. The James Bond movies got past this by totally ignoring the Cold War in most of its scripts (with the notable exception of From Russia With Love), preferring to deal with villains other than the Soviets. The mere fact that Paramount had made Funeral in Berlin indicated a new feeling in the land. In contrast to the Bond movies, the story here was steeped in the minutiae of the Cold War, and it wasted no time in having fun at the expense of the official seriousness with which it was pursued and prosecuted. Hamilton, photographer Otto Heller, and editor John Bloom all went to town on this production, with quick editing, unusual camera angles, and a subtly wry, sardonic tone throughout the script, making this movie a lot more complex and demanding (and ultimately rewarding) than a film such as Goldfinger. This movie proved to be one of the more underrated thrillers of its period, and though most viewers shied away from its use of such plot devices as unrepentant Nazis and money stolen from Holocaust victims, those same attributes make it a movie not only worth discovering but also seeing again. The extraordinary cinematography with its images of Berlin and London during the '60s also makes this film worth watching (and owning) on that basis alone.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder