Where the Spies Are
Where the Spies Are
NR | 26 January 1966 (USA)
Where the Spies Are Trailers

A local doctor is recruited as a cold war spy to fulfill a very important secret mission in the Middle East, only to experience that his mission is complicated by a sexy female double agent.

Reviews
Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life
CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
JohnHowardReid A bit over-talkative (although some droll humor is artfully concealed in the dialogue) with standard heroics and action brought to more life than it deserves by an especially hardworking cast: David Niven, Francoise Dorleac (her last film! Disappointingly her role is not all that large. She disappears for a long stretch while Niven is partnered by the redoubtable Nigel Davenport). Val Guest's direction too is not as fluent as Wolf Mankowitz's, but it could be the other way around. Both are credited, but who did what has not been officially told to us. As the movie was produced by Guest, my educated guess is that Mankowitz started the movie, but director Guest was unhappy with the rushes, fired Mankowitz and took over the direction himself. It's easy to tell the directors apart as one of them is not as fluent as the other and tends to concentrate and over-do close-ups. Real locations in Beirut, etc. help, but there also some very obvious models and studio scenes, Grant's close-ups of Miss Dorleac are attractive whilst Nascimbene's score is a bit too reliant on mechanical effects to be continually effective.
Troopie I happened across this film whilst channel surfing late at night. At first, I thought it was a parody, a bit like 'Casino Royale' -- which Niven must be a lot more proud of! Sadly, I soon came to the realisation that this was not playing for laughs but wanted to be taken seriously. I will concede that Niven, Davenport & others do their best, but the wooden plot, corny lines & truly terribly dated music ruin any efforts by them. This film came out just a couple of years after "From Russia with Love" & is obviously trying to compete with the Bond series. Sadly, it fails miserably. Watch it if you have trouble sleeping, but only if you tire of watching the paint dry!
Bea Brilliant... Where the Spies are is superb. With outstanding performances by David Niven, Nigel Davenport and John Le Mesurier. Where the spies are will make even the most reluctant of reluctant of audiences nostalgic for the classic secret agent film. When Dr. Love (David Niven) is approached by an old equatence in the secret service (John Le Mesurier) his life is turned upside down.
Penfold-13 Cold War hi-jinks of an implausible nature. David Niven plays the civilian who turns out to have an aptitude for being a secret agent when plunged into the role by accident.The studios were obviously still trying to convince people that David Niven could be a dashing man of action as well as suave and debonair, but unfortunately this line was always doomed, and this picture gives convincing evidence why.The plot is arrant nonsense from beginning to end, played by a puppet theatre of cliched stereotypes.Where The Audiences Are this certainly isn't.