Brilliant and touching

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I Led Three Lives was shown in Akron, Ohio, on now defunct WAKR channel 49 as reruns in the late 70's-early 80's, and thank goodness for it. I remember gathering around the television at my father's insistence as a family, as if the news were coming on, during its original broadcasting. Don't believe a word of the nonsense posted here that this was more of a documentary and true story premise. Yes, this kind of paranoia reigned supreme, but Senator Joe McCarthy was and will always be a proved fraud, the HUAC Hearings were a national disgrace, and whatever the KGB spent on agents here, and no matter the intent, it was all absurdly harmless. pc-privconfounder has the only realistic review here, and just as an aside, one I personally remember watching was about the lead character, Herbert Philbrick, noticing what appeared to be single men buying large carts of groceries, reporting this to his FBI connection, and then discovering that commies were actually buying more groceries than they could eat! Why? Because they were deliberately driving the prices up, causing inflation. Common sense would tell anyone the KGB would need millions of shoppers every week buying hundreds of carts full of groceries each (that they threw away into a nearby dumpster in the show) to actually have any noticeable result like claimed, but that didn't stop many millions (some posting here) from truly believing inflation and higher milk and bread costs were a commie plot to disrupt normalcy in the United States. Yeah, right, sure, sure; that's the ticket. Yeah. Well, it was the '50's; what else can one say? Its not about liberal or conservative viewpoints; its about perception and intelligence. This was one of the funniest unintentionally-so shows ever created, and SHOULD be watched by every American just to see what truly was paralyzing intelligent growth in America for several decades. Unfortunately, the newest suspicion involving the show is that it also unintentionally promotes marijuana use. Watch it, and see if you don't light up for a more profound appreciation of its hilarious plot lines.

I watched this show at first out of curiosity and I laughed just as many of my generation probably have . . .or will. Then I started researching that era and now I know they were deadly serious when they made that series! This was the sort of thing that Americans were truly fearful of, a Communist takeover. This was just as serious in the 50's as a Chinese invasion was in the late 1930's. Okay so maybe they dramatised things but they did that in "Dragnet" too, right? This was American propaganda made to make Mr and Mrs. Average American believe that Commies were around every conner trying to subvert the mentality of Post (Korean) War America. This could have been what led to people building fallout shelters instead of swimming pools and schools teaching kids to "duck and cover".Okay, so maybe I got a little heavy handed in that last paragraph but watching the adventures of Mr. Philbrick led me to wonder just how much of it was Hollywood and how much was real? A certain Mr. Kruschev did promise "We will bury you without firing a shot!" so I really began to wonder and started watching the episodes with a less cynical eye. The one about vacuum cleaners that were really missile launchers smacked of the gadgetry that proliferated the James Bond movies of the 1960's but then, where did they get that idea? The one about taking over an American newsreel company and making propaganda movies seems unreal too but then, remember wasn't the US Government doing the same thing at the same time too?Today watching "I Led Three Lives" gives me a chill. Everything they were talking about might really have happened. Perhaps all that paranoia was not unfounded. Mr. Herbert Philbrick, wherever you are, thank you.

I recall the series very well and always tried to watch it. The series portrayed Mr. Hoover and his bureau as a professional, passionate, serious operation. I was a believer then. However, after Hoover's death, quite a bit was focused on how his bureau was run during the '50's and '60's, and his own hatred for Communists. A PBS program even depicted him as a power-hungry tyrant and a homosexual. Taking my own limited knowledge of the 1950 decade while growing up as a child, this TV series was very good. And, as far as Hoover is concerned, he knew how to handle the bunch of politicians in Washington probably better than anyone else. It would seem that this series is on some form of blacklist, as it never appears on cable, satellite, or independent TV channels running old shows. Why this is, I don't know. But, maybe after Mr. Khruschev's speech at the UN in 1960; "We Will Bury You", the country is in the form of being buried!

This was a good series while it lasted. It pretty much showed what was gong on during this period in our history and the efforts to keep it in check. The left doesn't like the series because it shined a light on communist activities in the U.S. We don't track "commies" anymore because the cold war is over and they lost. Today people can be openly against the U.S. without any fear. They are in academia, the media,Hollywood, the judiciary and at all levels of local and national politics. Their still is, however, resentment among many that there is no longer a U.S.S.R. It would be great to have an updated series like this today. McCarthy was a little over-zealous in his time, but not far off the mark.