Post by erik on May 13, 2016 22:24:34 GMT -5
Quote from dialogue between James Donovan (Tom Hanks) and Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in BRIDGE OF SPIES:
On his twenty-seventh film, Steven Spielberg, the most successful film maker in the history of Hollywood, took on a subject that his generation had to deal with for most of their lives--the Cold War, and the threat of a Hot War between America and Russia in which life as they knew it could end in a matter of hours, if not minutes. And the story he chose was one that very few, if any, remembered. It was the basis for his 2015 masterpiece BRIDGE OF SPIES
Tom Hanks portrays James Donovan, the real-life a New York City insurance lawyer who, in 1957, was given the unenviable task of defending the KGB spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), even though, despite distinguishing himself on the prosecution team at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, he hadn't practiced criminal law in years. The evidence against Rylance is far too overwhelming for Hanks to overcome, but he does spare Abel a death sentence by admonishing the starchy judge (Dakin Matthews) that, at some point in the future, an American agent or soldier might be captured behind the Iron Curtain, and that we may want to have someone to trade.
Then, in the spring of 1960, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down by a Soviet missile. CIA director Allen Dulles (Peter McRobbie) gives Hanks the task of arranging an exchange between Abel and Powers to take place in a Berlin whose eastern sector is in the process of being walled off by the Soviets to stop refugees from fleeing to the Allied sectors. But while there, he also learns of a Yale student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) who was caught by the East German secret police on the wrong side of the Wall. Against all reasoning by the CIA, and even his own wife (Amy Ryan), Hanks is forced to navigate through the Soviet bureaucracy and the resentment of the officials of the East German government, who are sore (rightly so) that the U.S. refuses to recognize East Germany as a sovereign nation. With an agreement to have Rogers released at Checkpoint Charlie (the border post between the American and Soviet sectors in Berlin), the exchange between Rylance and Stowell takes place early in the morning of February 10, 1962 on the Glienicke Bridge (the actual Bridge Of Spies), which connects Berlin with Potsdam.
Spielberg's own interest in the story stemmed from the fact that his father, who was a computer engineer for IBM, had gone to Russia in 1960 on foreign exchange program, while Russian computer experts were sent to IBM's Phoenix complex, and the fact that Phoenix was in the blast zone of a Soviet ICBM with a 50-megaton device aimed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, only 115 miles away. He was aware of Francis Gary Powers, but not of Rudolf Abel or the mechanics behind the exchange between the two men until he did the research that went into the film. Not surprisingly, Hanks, who is our era's Jimmy Stewart (much as Spielberg is a director influenced by Hitchcock), is outstanding as Donovan, who risked his entire career, and even his life at times, for what he believed in, which was the legitimate American system of law, even as his fellow countrymen were turning against him for defending a Commie. But Rylance, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, is equally astounding and low-key as Abel, a man resigned to his fate, but who is spared because Hanks believes in principle more than in paranoia and passion.
Helped immensely by the screenplay by Matt Charman, and Joel and Ethan Coen, and a very modernistic score by Thomas Newman (subbing for John Williams, whose work on STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, plus a brief illness, precluded his involvement here), BRIDGE OF SPIES is easily one of Spielberg's greatest achievements among all the many that he has had, full of drama, tension, to-the-point dialogue, and a concise understanding of how unstable the world was during the Cold War, always worth watching.
Donovan: I have a mandate to serve you; nobody else does. Quite frankly, everybody else has an interest in sending you to the electric chair.
Abel: All right.
Donovan: You don't seem alarmed.
Abel: Would it help?
Abel: All right.
Donovan: You don't seem alarmed.
Abel: Would it help?
On his twenty-seventh film, Steven Spielberg, the most successful film maker in the history of Hollywood, took on a subject that his generation had to deal with for most of their lives--the Cold War, and the threat of a Hot War between America and Russia in which life as they knew it could end in a matter of hours, if not minutes. And the story he chose was one that very few, if any, remembered. It was the basis for his 2015 masterpiece BRIDGE OF SPIES
Tom Hanks portrays James Donovan, the real-life a New York City insurance lawyer who, in 1957, was given the unenviable task of defending the KGB spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), even though, despite distinguishing himself on the prosecution team at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, he hadn't practiced criminal law in years. The evidence against Rylance is far too overwhelming for Hanks to overcome, but he does spare Abel a death sentence by admonishing the starchy judge (Dakin Matthews) that, at some point in the future, an American agent or soldier might be captured behind the Iron Curtain, and that we may want to have someone to trade.
Then, in the spring of 1960, U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down by a Soviet missile. CIA director Allen Dulles (Peter McRobbie) gives Hanks the task of arranging an exchange between Abel and Powers to take place in a Berlin whose eastern sector is in the process of being walled off by the Soviets to stop refugees from fleeing to the Allied sectors. But while there, he also learns of a Yale student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) who was caught by the East German secret police on the wrong side of the Wall. Against all reasoning by the CIA, and even his own wife (Amy Ryan), Hanks is forced to navigate through the Soviet bureaucracy and the resentment of the officials of the East German government, who are sore (rightly so) that the U.S. refuses to recognize East Germany as a sovereign nation. With an agreement to have Rogers released at Checkpoint Charlie (the border post between the American and Soviet sectors in Berlin), the exchange between Rylance and Stowell takes place early in the morning of February 10, 1962 on the Glienicke Bridge (the actual Bridge Of Spies), which connects Berlin with Potsdam.
Spielberg's own interest in the story stemmed from the fact that his father, who was a computer engineer for IBM, had gone to Russia in 1960 on foreign exchange program, while Russian computer experts were sent to IBM's Phoenix complex, and the fact that Phoenix was in the blast zone of a Soviet ICBM with a 50-megaton device aimed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, only 115 miles away. He was aware of Francis Gary Powers, but not of Rudolf Abel or the mechanics behind the exchange between the two men until he did the research that went into the film. Not surprisingly, Hanks, who is our era's Jimmy Stewart (much as Spielberg is a director influenced by Hitchcock), is outstanding as Donovan, who risked his entire career, and even his life at times, for what he believed in, which was the legitimate American system of law, even as his fellow countrymen were turning against him for defending a Commie. But Rylance, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, is equally astounding and low-key as Abel, a man resigned to his fate, but who is spared because Hanks believes in principle more than in paranoia and passion.
Helped immensely by the screenplay by Matt Charman, and Joel and Ethan Coen, and a very modernistic score by Thomas Newman (subbing for John Williams, whose work on STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, plus a brief illness, precluded his involvement here), BRIDGE OF SPIES is easily one of Spielberg's greatest achievements among all the many that he has had, full of drama, tension, to-the-point dialogue, and a concise understanding of how unstable the world was during the Cold War, always worth watching.
