Review of Eye of the Needle (1981) by Paul Z — 27 Jul 2009

From a distance, an everyday moviegoer might doubt the production value of this movie. A 1982 Ken Follett adaptation that's hardly available on DVD? Well, it's made by the same director as Return of the Jedi. Yet when it begins and unfolds, it's reminiscent of nothing so much as one of those unsentimental, persevering, discreetly disturbing, and, on a few occasions, blackly hilarious war movies that used to be made by the former British film industry. Donald Sutherland plays the kind of reserved sociopath who should ideally thrive in black-and-white movies, yet the color here is sometimes funereal enough to avail. This unaffected thriller is made with humble potency.

It is about a German spy, Die Naadel, who dropped out of sight in Germany in 1938 and now inhabits a series of drab bed-sitting-rooms in England while he spies on the British war effort. He is known as the Needle because of his signature means of dispatch. He kills with an exceptional absence of feeling. As played by Sutherland with a rather stand-offish, cool, and even critical manner, the Needle is a man no one knows. We are given inklings to account for his rationale: He was raised by parents who did not love him, he was shipped off to boarding schools, he spent parts of his childhood in America, where he learned English. None of the account altogether clears up his viciousness, but then I suppose it is no more than a secret agent's business to be vicious. Perhaps it's no one's fault someone is ruthless.

Ken Follett's deftly communicated thread is by inches both undercover operations and mystery. The Needle unravels a hoax to evade the Germans. His task is to be the very one to confront Die Fuhrer with the information of the actual Allied invasion plans. This he means to do with every tissue of his being, and yet we never get the sense that this man is a nationalist. He is more of an existentially decisive, unbending envoy. In his endeavors to convene with a Nazi submarine, he's shipwrecked on a remote island populated merely by a lighthouse keeper and a goat-farming family comprised of a woman played by the emotionally receptive Kate Nelligan, her legless husband and their son.

The last third of the movie turns into a blood-spattered drama in which the action is more pertinent than the characterization. But before that, he poses as just a shipwrecked seafarer. And Nelligan, her appearance fittingly preceded by her co-star being adrift at sea, is disheartened by her husband's drunkenness and unwillingness to love, and becomes endeared to the stranger. Does he become enamored of her? We can never be certain, though he tells her things he has told to no one else.

It is compelling to build a plot like this at a studious tread, rather than rushing head on through it. It gives us time to weigh the character of the Needle, and to contemplate his exceptionally scant, mysterious allusions to what he feels versus what he thinks. Instead of an unambiguously good and evil clash, despite the melodrama of the last act, we have by then learned things about him that he may not even know about himself, and that is why the film's final scene is so much more intricate than it appears.