Posted on 05/18/2002 6:26:12 PM PDT by dighton
Anger has greeted plans for a new film that will portray Kim Philby, one of Britain's most notorious and damaging traitors, as a romantic husband motivated by idealism.
The £10 million film, A Different Loyalty, will star Rupert Everett as the spy who betrayed secrets to Russia for 30 years, costing the lives of countless British agents. Kim Basinger, the actress who won an Oscar for her role in LA Confidential, will play Philby's third wife, Eleanor.
The film will concentrate on the couple's life together in the late 1950s in Beirut, where Philby had fled in 1955 after arousing suspicions that he was a spy. Despite the scale of Philby's betrayal, however, the film, made by London-based Fresh Media, will present him as a man of unwavering political convictions who inspired great love.
"As this film is seen from the vantage point of the wife, who for a long time is unaware that Philby was even a spy, the effects of what he did are issues that are not part of the story," said Jan Vocke, the film's producer. "We want people to make up their own minds."
Jim Piddock, the script writer, said the deaths caused by Philby's espionage were not mentioned because they are "incidental" to the tack the film is taking.
"I didn't think that anyone would be interested in the whys and wherefores of a British spy 40 years ago," he said. "I don't think anyone is interested in seeing a movie just about that."
The decision to glamorise a British traitor has provoked anger from those with detailed knowledge of the spy's life. Alan Judd, a former Foreign Office official and the author of The Quest for `C' - the Founding of the Secret Service, said: "We are living in a perverted moral universe if we make heroes out of people like this.
"The fact is that Philby did what he did. He was famous because he was a traitor, and the fact is that he was spying for one of the most evil, tyrannical regimes there was."
Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge scholar who wrote Her Majesty's Secret Service, added: "If this film is only carefully selecting parts of the story that appeal to Hollywood, it will not give a very rounded impression. It is unlikely to convey the brutalisation of Philby's personality that his spying caused him."
Philby was one of a group of four spies who met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s: the others were Anthony Blunt, who later became art adviser to the Queen, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby was recruited by the Russians while rescuing Communists from Fascists in Vienna in 1934: in the same year he married an Austrian communist to help her to obtain a passport.
In 1940 he joined MI6 and by 1944 was running the intelligence service's new anti-Soviet section. In 1949 he became chief British intelligence representative in the United States, working with the newly formed CIA.
During the early 1950s both Burgess and Maclean came under suspicion and defected to the USSR. Philby was also suspected: although he was cleared by Harold Macmillan, the foreign secretary, in 1955, he resigned from the intelligence service and went to Beirut. In 1963, soon after the capture of George Blake, the MI6 spy, the service sent Nicholas Elliott, an SIS officer, to confront Philby and return him to London. Instead, Philby fled to Russia.
While the death toll from Philby's work for the Soviet Union will never be known for certain, one of the greatest losses of life came in 1950. Philby, then in Washington, advised the Soviets of a plan to send armed anti-Communist groups into Albania, ensuring that most were captured and killed.
Eleanor Brewer, an American, fell for Philby while he was working in Beirut as a journalist. Although at the time both were married - her husband was the chief correspondent of the New York Times - Eleanor was won over by Philby's "beautiful manners" and "old-fashioned reserve". In 1957 Philby's second wife Aileen, who had borne him five children, died: he and Eleanor were wed three months later.
Five years later, however, Philby disappeared without warning and Eleanor was left to field visits from the intelligence officers on his trail as she tried to piece together what had happened to him. When she discovered that he had fled to Soviet Russia she travelled to live with him in Moscow. Within two years, however, she left him, having tired of the harshness of the Soviet way of life and her husband's wandering eye. She returned to America, leaving him to live in Russia for the remainder of his life. Eleanor died in 1968; three years later Philby married Rufina, who remained with him until his death. The film deals, say the makers, with the "parallel stories of one woman's obsession with a man, and that man's equally passionate adherence to communism".
Phillip Knightley, one of the journalists who exposed Philby in 1967 - and who met him in his Moscow apartment a few months before the spy died in 1988 - said he understood why the film had omitted the key facts of Philby's career. "In a feature film you have just 90 minutes: how are you going to encompass a life of spying that lasted 30 years?"
A Different Loyalty will be directed by Marek Kanievska, who helped to make Everett's name as an actor in the 1984 film adaptation of Another Country, Julian Mitchell's play about a louche public schoolboy - based on Burgess - who is set on the path of treachery, in part by his homosexuality. Paradoxically, the aggressively heterosexual Philby will be played by Everett, who is gay.
"We think Rupert Everett will deliver a strong performance," said Mr Vocke. "Although Rupert in his private life is gay, he is also an actor. This film will definitely be a portrait of Kim Philby as Kim Philby was."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
Burgess and McLean may have had some sympathetic features. But why on earth pick Philby, who I understand was a very cold fish indeed, and as cynical and power-worshipping as they come?
The socialist hell-hole he spied for is now a free-market, neo-Christian delight, while the country which he betrayed is now a socialist hell-hole.
Life is full of surprises.
They could title it "My Heroes Have Always Been Fuhrers".
The socialist hell-hole he spied for is now a free-market, neo-Christian delight, while the country which he betrayed is now a socialist hell-hole.
In at least one respect -- a large one in his life, they say -- he'd still feel right at home.
When Panait Istrati, a Romanian novelist, vagabond, and revolutionary, during his 1927–28 stay in the Soviet Union, expressed his disillusion with things in the land of socialism, he was told, “One can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He retorted: “I can see the broken eggs. [But] where’s this omelette of yours?”-- Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power.
This is like a film about the fencing career of Reinhard Heydrich. Or about the chicken-farming career of Heinrich Himmler.
However, everyone who sees this film will hear about who he was and what he did. There's no reason for it to be about Philby if they don't try to cash in on the name.
I think that it's important for people to see Philby as the people who knew him did: just an ordinary guy. Evil doesn't walk around with a pitchfork and a pointy tail.
Read it if you get a chance.
Second that.
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