The Quiller Memorabilia

Here’s John Barry, the composer, and George Segal, the star, on The Quiller Memorandum, the film made from my friend and mentor’s Elleston Trevor's novel (written under his pen name, Adam Hall). Elleston never liked the movie much, but I certainly did, and we would argue about it in a friendly way. Here’s Matt Monro singing John Barry’s haunting theme. And below is a chance meeting of spies in June 1966. Michael Caine bumped into George Segal on location in Berlin when Caine was reprising his Harry Palmer role in Funeral in Berlin while Segal was shooting The Quiller Memorandum.

The Shadow Executive in Berlin

“The Quiller Memorandum” (1966) is an excellent, low-key spy film.

Morally ironic, almost eerie at times, this film’s protagonist splits the difference between James Bond and Alec Leamus. Quiller is the ultimate professional, a “shadow executive” featured in a series of top-rank thrillers by Elleston Trevor (a/k/a Adam Hall).

George Segal plays an Americanized Quiller here, with Max von Sydow as his perfectly chilling neo-Nazi “German gentleman” adversary. Alec Guinness didn’t think much of the film, but he’s good in it as Quiller's sinister contact Pol (watch the scene in which he uses a raisin to describe Quiller’s ambiguous position, and then pops it in his mouth). The John Barry score is icing on the thrill cake.

Elleston himself, who was my late friend and mentor, didn’t like the film, and we argued about that. He said George Segal was “for the girls and comedies and so on,” and that screenwriter Harold Pinter was “obviously a very fine writer” but “hadn’t got the knack of adapting.” Specifically, Elleston thought Pinter had changed the character of the main female character too much.

I argued that the movie retained much of the book’s suspense and innovation, including the fact that Quiller is presented as a secret agent who thinks carrying a gun is a mistake. Seeing Quiller invade the enemy headquarters unarmed impressed me with his courage, even when I was 12.

I always thought that the box office had something to do with Elleston’s opinion of the film. He had a much higher opinion of the 1965 film adaptation of his novel “The Flight of the Phoenix,” which was a hit.

However, the star of “Quiller Memorandum,” George Segal, noted that the film had been lavishly praised by director Quentin Tarantino as one of the best spy films of the era.

Scenes from 'The Quiller Memorandum' (1966)

Audio Novel 6: The Scheherazade Sound of Dr. No

In his 1958 novel "Dr. No," the veteran gambler Ian Fleming finally tipped his hand.
Prior to this, his sixth James Bond thriller, Fleming had been pretending, perhaps even to himself, that his novels were about espionage, a field with which he'd become familiar as a naval intelligence officer during World War II. But Bond was made for sunnier wars than John Le Carre's "Cold" one, and Fleming revealed that when he sent escapist hero 007 to his own favorite destination for escape, Jamaica.
Here, the novel is dramatized as a BBC radio play, complete with John Barry music.
This is the novel in which Fleming finally makes it clear that Bond's adventures are mythic, iconic on a Joseph Campbell scale. Literally, Bond faces a Fu Manchu villain, a naked damsel in distress and a fire-breathing dragon. And the way Fleming effectively fogs over the obvious fairy tale with brand-name verisimilitude is part of what gives this story its persistent charm...

And She Sings Like Thunderball

Here's the title theme to Thunderball you never heard. The producers replaced Shirley Bassey’s song at the last minute with the Tom Jones Thunderball theme, so John Barry's excellent "Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is heard only as an instrumental piece during the film.

Although not the best James Bond film, Thunderball remains my favorite. The fourth 007 adventure was a smooth blend of all the elements that made Bond immensely popular in the 1960s, plus an assured, debonair performance by Sean Connery, a big and thrilling underwater battle scene and a nuclear blackmail plot that was then fresh and original (such a good idea for a plot, as a matter of fact, that it has since become a movie cliché).