Funeral in Berlin (film)
| Funeral in Berlin | |
|---|---|
UK theatrical release poster
|
|
| Directed by | Guy Hamilton |
| Produced by | Charles D. Kasher |
| Written by |
Len Deighton (novel) Evan Jones (screenplay) |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Konrad Elfers |
| Cinematography | Otto Heller |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
|
Release date
|
|
|
Running time
|
102 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Funeral in Berlin is a 1966 British spy film directed by Guy Hamilton and based on the novel of the same name by Len Deighton. It is the second of three 1960s films starring Michael Caine as the character Harry Palmer that followed the characters from the initial film, The Ipcress File (1965). The third film was Billion Dollar Brain (1967).
Caine would reprise the role of Harry Palmer in Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1996).
British secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is sent to Berlin by his superior Colonel Ross to arrange the defection of Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), a prominent Soviet intelligence officer. Palmer is sceptical but links up with Johnny Vulkan (Paul Hubschmid), an old German friend and former criminal associate, who now runs the Berlin station for British intelligence.
Palmer makes a rendezvous with Stok in the Soviet zone of the divided city and finds him eccentric and likeable. Stok asks for the defection to be managed by Otto Kreutzman, a West German criminal who has organised a number of recent escapes. When Palmer returns to the western sector he meets a model who calls herself Samantha Steel (Eva Renzi), with whom he spends the night. Suspicious at the forward manner in which she approached him, he has his police contacts establish her identity the following day and arranges for a criminal to burgle her apartment, where several different false passports are discovered.
Meanwhile, Palmer arranges a deal with Kreutzman to bring Stok across the wall for £20,000. Palmer then returns to London to report. Ross is convinced that Stok's defection is genuine and dismisses Palmer's suspicions that the model he met in Berlin was a spy. Ross gives full authorisation for Palmer to return to Berlin to complete the deal, with documents and money provided by a man at Intelligence headquarters named Hallam (Hugh Burden).
The plan devised by Kreutzman is to arrange a burial and bring the Colonel across the border in a coffin. When Palmer again meets Samantha, she confesses to being a Mossad spy and that she is in Berlin to hunt down a war criminal named Paul Louis Broum - now operating under an alias - who stole millions of pounds of gold during the Second World War.
...
Wikipedia