Best cold war spy films ?

Here's a few of MY favorite cold war era movies.

Boris and Natasha
Stripes
Spies Like US
Dr. Strangelove

 

At the top of the list of Cold War spy thrillers has to be "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy".
It is a splendid adaption of Le Carre's novel.

Most of the films mentioned above are drek. Apparently those who commented
didn't understand the request was for Best Cold War spy films.


Dave

 

Drek, how so? Boris and Natasha was about Soviet spies during the cold war. In Stripes, both Zitsky and Winger (the two protaganists) were suspected of being Soviet spies when they took the EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle out for a spin with the MP girls, and that their probable destination was East Berlin. This movie came out in 1980, during the cold war. Spies like us were about two CIA agent wannabees during set in the cold war. And Dr. Strangelove was a cold war thriller, in which the Soviet Ambassador was a Soviet spy, taking pictures of the big map in the war room. Just because they are comedies doesn't make them drek. Everyone has their preferences.

 

Hi Falcon/ I never really thought about The Eiger Sanction as a CW movie but, it certainly fits in and I think should be considered as one.

Id completely forgotten about the cassic CW movie: Dr Strangelove. This is certainly a DOH, moment ;-))

 

Dr. Strangelove was the best cold war era film in my opinion. Funny and scarey at the same time to be exact. It came out at about the same time as "Fail Safe" did. Dang it, now I got to get both of them back from Netflix and have a cold war film fest at the hacienda.

John Wayne was originally tapped to play Major "King" Kong, but turned it down claiming it to be disrespectful to servicemen, and that the subject matter was not comic-worthy. Slim Pickens sure did a dynomite job in that part, so I'm glad the Duke passed on that particular one.

 

Id loved to have seen Duke in sucha role as he was good with Comedy as well.

 

Sam Peckinpah's final film, the plot twisting spy film The Osterman Weekend (1983), was based on Robert Ludlum's best-selling novel and starred John Hurt as creepy CIA agent-spy Lawrence Fassett........

 

Hopscotch with Walter Matthau

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4146135833/

 

I second:

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Dr. Strangelove
The Manchurian Candidate
Funeral in Berlin
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
The Third Man
The Company
Gorky Park

 

Dr.Strangelove...Cold war...and there was a fat Russian....spying in the war room....And the RAF....Peter Sellers...What more could you want...RAF looking in at a mad world....Its what we do...

 

Peter Sellers trying to get a dime for a pay phone from Keenan Wynn.

And the famous quote from Pres. Sellers, "This is the war room, we can't have any fighting here!" Or something to that effect.

"The Lives of Others", German subtitles but well worth the effort. There is another film, I forget the name of - about a famous tunnel escape in East Berlin with a sports (Soccer or Swimming) star involved.

 

Damnation Alley and Gulag are the best spy movies for me.

 

Three days of the condor.

 

Damnation Alley was not a spy movie. It was a post-apocalypse survival piece of sh1t from the 70s, that's all. With Jan Michael Vincent too. And a bunch of nuclear cockroaches as well.

 

The Tunnel, 2001, Germany. About Harry Melchior's escape from East Germany and his plan to get his sister out.

 

The early Cold War, Vienna, 1949, Harry Lime is The Third Man. They don't write scripts like this anymore. Courtesy IMDB.
Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime.
Great street scenes showing the state of post war Europe.

[h=4]Director: Carol Reed[/h]
[h=4]Writers: Graham Greene (by), Graham Greene (screenplay), and 3 more credits »[/h]
[h=4]Stars: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli[/h]Music: Great, famous Zither tune played by a guy Carol Reed bumped into in the street.

 

I would mention The Good Shepherd but it's not exactly WWII...but close!!

 

When I think of spies.........and cold war films......although it was a fictional story.......the moves and ways of our nuclear submarine movements were realistic in this movie ........and the secrecy of these moves and grids we policed with our subs......had been compromised by spies amongst us providing the Soviets with the secrets.....however that was not the subject covered by the fictional story "The Hunt For Red October", but I am always mindful that our submarine movements had been sadly compromised and that is something I have to think of when talking about cold war spying and this film that so vividly portrayed our submarines abilities. So it gets associated with this story for me. I respect the service of my brother and other cold war patriots that served on the submarines of that era not knowing how badly they had been compromised until later.

 

Oh absolutely.
Another one for cold war comic relief was The President's Analyst with James Coburn.

 

Loved this one when I was a kid. But haven't seen it for years. That line from Robert Frost haunts me!

Richard Burton is absolutely brilliant in The Spy Who Come In From The Cold.

Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin are great. Things went a bit awry with Billion Dollar Brain.