1966 - FUNERAL IN BERLIN, spy vs spy vs spy vs spy etc

Amazingly convoluted 60's spy film.  This is the top of the mountain for a plot so confusing it literally took me many viewings over many years to finally understand what the hell was going on.

Secret agent Harry Palmer is supposed to help a high ranking Russian colonel defect to the west in divided Berlin.  Throw into the mix, Israeli agents hunting for former Nazi's, a secret network dedicated to smuggling people out of East Berlin, and enough double crosses to make the dream within a dream within a dream sequences in Inception seem perfectly understandable and everyone's awake in this film.

The film's got good photography of Berlin, and is worth having around as a historic record of the Cold War especially in the scenes shot near the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the East vs West face.

The Harry Palmer spy series was produced by Harry Saltzman one of the James Bond producers and was clearly supposed to be an alternative to the larger than life Bond series.  However this series never really caught on with the public and deliberately bewildering films like Funeral in Berlin probably helped to kill it off.

Directed by Guy Hamilton who made a lot of James Bond films, but this ain't no Bond film.

102 minutes, screenplay by Evan Jones.