In short: Eye of the Needle (1981)

World War II. A highly ruthless and dangerous spy known to British Intelligence only as “The Needle” (Donald Sutherland) has been doing the bad work without being caught for quite some time, leaking important information and leaving a line of dead bodies behind.

The British side – chiefly represented by one Godliman (Ian Bannen) – is getting closer to the Needle just when he manages to make photos that prove that the Allied Invasion can only occur in Normandy. Fortunately for the Allies, for some contrived reason that makes little sense, the German spy must deliver this information directly to Hitler, and so has to catch a ride on a German U-boat. Thanks to a storm, his attempt at reaching his ride via boat is rudely interrupted and he is stranded on a small island, population 4. From here on out, Needle stumbles right into an early D.H. Lawrence novel about the unhappy marriage between Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and the husband who lost his legs and the opportunity to die in the Battle of Britain on their marriage day in a car accident (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy lets herself be seduced by the mysterious stranger before you can even say “why, this is starting to get a bit improbable, old chap!”.

Though things might not end up to happily for our spy once Lucy cops to having been emotionally manipulated, her husband getting murdered and her child threatened.

Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle (based on a Ken Follett novel) is generally highly regarded by mid-brow critics, but I can’t say the film does much for me, independent of today’s eye-brow position. Sure, there’s an obvious high level of technical accomplishment on display, Marquand using old-fashioned and brand new cinematic techniques in tandem to create an artificial yet highly effective sense of time and place, but the film’s emotional content, as well as its slow, slow pacing does not work for me at all. Its tendency to repeat beats that are supposed to convince us how ruthless and shitty Faber/The Needle is, does not help there at all. I really got it the first two times around, so repeating this with a different victim after that just seems like a waste of my time. There’s a lack of subtlety here, as everywhere else in the movie, that just doesn’t connect with me, particularly not in combination with the pomposity of the film’s tone that confuses the pose of having depth with actually having it.

As central as it is, I never found the D.H. Lawrence with more melodrama marriage crisis of the Roses convincing or involving, either. Despite the actors doing their very best (which is considerable), the film replaces believable humanity with melodramatic posturing. Worse, it isn’t actually terribly good at this posturing, forgetting that good melodrama isn’t just meant to perform heightened emotion but also to draw the viewer into these emotional with the characters. Eye of the Needle never does, at least for me.