Really Surprised!

People are voting emotionally.

Boring

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Pretty standard Left - Wing anti - American propaganda that would have delighted the Wimmin of Greenham Common as they rested between throwing condoms full of urine at the police and hanging used tampons on the fences.Borstal absconder escaping from Old Bill(so its all their fault) enters USAF base and gets squashed by a plane carrying nuclear weapons. Nearly a nasty accident then,and it's kept secret from those guardians of all that's decent and proper - the newspapers. Whilst spying on a philandering M.P.,those self - same guardians etc, etc, etc,stumble upon a possible scandal involving the aforementioned non - event. Screaming with self - righteous indignation,the gentlemen of the press proceed to ignore "D" notices (an event which could have put the editor in prison)and carry out an investigation, careless of its affect,concerned only about increased circulation("We've sold an extra 200,000 copies" smiles odious Newspaper owner Fulton Mckay). It all ends in tears - obviously - and the S.I.S. is shown to be the running dog of the Imperialist Americans,equally obviously. Only Denholm Elliott rings true as the veteran reporter who,to his indignation,is "outed" as a former communist by one of his colleagues "I left The Party in 1956!",he seethes.(For many British Communists,the Russian suppression of Hungary in that year marked a loss of faith). Mr Elliott as the only sympathetic character in the whole movie is clearly marked for an early departure and he is seen off with almost indecent haste after his room is broken into by the S.I.S. running dogs. Gabriel Byrne seems to have settled for "faintly worried" when "seriously concerned" or "raving mad" might have done better. "Defence of the Realm" appears to have been written by the sort of people who spent most Sundays in the early 80s shuffling along the embankment shouting "Maggie,Maggie,Maggie out,out,out!"In spite of all their efforts the Tories stayed in power until 1997 and then Tony Blair came along and proved to be even more of an Imperialist running dog,a poodle of the Great Satan.Life's a bitch eh guys?

This is very much the Mixture As Before which wheels out the Usual Suspects, Bannen, Elliott, Calder, etc, and lets them meander through ten reels of Is He, Isn't He, Was He, Wasn't He, Will He, Won't he til it figures the punters have had it up to here at which time it throws in an ambiguous ending. It was a good twenty years since the 'Profumo' affair so the Producers were fairly safe in recycling the idea of a Government Minister and a KGB Officer sharing the sexual favours of the same hooker as the tip of an increasingly larger iceberg. Gabriel Byrne is the 'investigative' journo who discovers, surprise, surprise, that there's more to the story than romps in the hay and minor cover-ups and the whole thing is fairly undemanding for Multiplex regulars who can swallow it whole without missing a beat of their popcorn mastication.

If ever any one was in doubt that democratic governments may not be averse to using the occasional dirty tricks then this film is an eye opener. Based around a busy news paper office this is the story of one mans crusade to make sure a scandal involving a cabinet minister is not pushed under the carpet. The story is full of twists and turns as our intrepid hero gets the bit between his teeth but the powers that be haul in him and judge for yourself the meaning of their words. A must for any one into political thrillers.

This taut, underrated little thriller might be called a British version of "The Parallax View". Ian Bannen plays a Profumo-like MP targeted by the security services because he knows too much. His career is ruined by muck-raking reporter Gabriel Byrne but the latter's determination to get to the bottom of the story, and his guilt at the death of a colleague (the superb Denholm Elliott), lead him down unexpected political byways..."Defence of the Realm" can boast excellent location work and a convincing recreation of the vanished world of the "old" hard-drinking Fleet Street. The tone becomes darker and more claustrophobic as the film goes on and the apolitical Byrne enters a paranoid world of car headlights in the rearview mirror, bugged telephones and rifled apartments. The film taps into many of the issues that concerned the British Left in the mid-eighties (secrecy, American missiles on UK soil, the unaccountability of the security services, newspaper obsession with sexual gossip to the exclusion of harder material) and builds to a clever, if shocking, double-twist climax. Well worth locating and viewing.