Funeral In Berlin [HD]

The Real Cold War
I served as an army intelligence officer in Berlin and in West Germany during the Cold War. Whenever I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to time-travel back to the Cold War 1960's, I turn on Funeral In Berlin. The film has wonderful shots of the Berlin Wall and West Berlin during this time. Michael Caine's Harry Palmer is a mirror image of thousands of intelligence personnel who have had to battle incompetent bureacracy while still trying to accomplish the mission at hand. Watch this one!

Harry Palmer: The Spy Who Went Into the Cold
Each of these films is a self-contained story but having seen the previous entries does give the central character more depth. "The Ipcress File" introduced Len Deighton's spy with no name as "Harry Palmer" -- a gritty, workaday operative for the British Secret Service -- the polar opposite from James Bond.

(This is even more interesting when you realize the producer of the two series is Harry Saltzman. And the director here is Guy Hamilton who helmed "Goldfinger".)

Michael Caine returns in this excellent second installment of the "Harry Palmer" series. The scene is Berlin in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was a recent division. The tension between the US and the CCCP caused global anxiety. To see this film is to get something of a feel for the place and the time. The espionage here is thick and the tension is palpable. A series of double crosses lands Palmer in serious trouble. Whereas "Ipcress" had psychological underpinnings,...

Specs,sex,and the Berlin Wall
Len Deighton's working class spy Harry Palmer returns to DVD in the second installment of the series,"Funeral in Berlin".Palmer was created by Deighton as a sort of anti-Bond in a series of books with plots more coplicated than the wiring on a British sports car,Palmer was insolent,insubordinant,and only survived by his wits and intelligence,with nary a gadget in sight."Funeral in Berlin" was the second in the series,and most spy fans consider it the best of them,pretty much neck and neck with the outstanding "Ipcress File".The DVD looks pretty good,the picture and sound are certainly watchable considering the age of the movies,It's also nice to see the movies in their OAR,both movies used the widescreen format pretty creatively,and suffered from being "panned and scanned".Unfortuneatly,"Funeral" doesn't have the excellent extra's "Ipcress" did,the only extra is the trailer.Still,it's an entertaining DVD,both Michael...

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