Critic's Grade: A+

They say that if you let a bunch of monkeys loose on some typewriters they would eventually produce Shakespeare.
The monkeys just came through:it is called The Company.
The Company is showing on TNT in 3 installments and will be distributed by Sony Pictures as a blueray DVD.THe first installment deals with the Angleton-Philby affair in CIA history and is so much better than The Good Shepherd that one should demand a refund.
If you want to see something really scary,type "The Company TNT 2007 " into Google and you will get 300 TV stations issuing verbatim reviews,all pretending to be original.They all start:" Dont get lost in the wilderness of mirrors,Kim Philby warns..."
As is public and notorious knowledge the terminology was coined by James Angleton,not Philby.The standard biography on Angleton is titled: Wilderness of Mirrors.
I use to work with a movie producer who did not own a TV set.Whenever any TV version of the Philby affair appeared on TV he would get a TV and have a party to watch and discuss.
A young actress was watching an earlier version of the Philby story and her reaction was less reverential"Old men in a dark room".
When KIm Philby defected I was living in Switzerland and read about it in newspapers available at the British Council Library in Zurich.While the American press demonized Philby,the British treated it as if he had merely picked the wrong wine.Even after MI5 found the spy who had recruited Philby,he was not arrested and was kept on as curator of the Queen's Art Gallery.
The Company is Directed by Ridley Scott who takes the typical British attitute toward Philby,he is the best spy and the most interesting person in the story.
Michael Keaton plays James Angleton in a bravura performance that will revive his career.Keaton looks no more like Angleton than Matt Damon but he nails the character,especially in a scene filmed in his greenhouse,where he compares the patience needed in cultivating orchids with the running of spies.
Chris O'Donnell is a neophite spy working for William Harvey in 1950's Berlin.Harvey,played by Alfred Molina,is a bull in a china shop-drunk,profane,and waving a gun.Harvey,despite being CIA Station Chief was more of a cop than an intelligence officer.Nevertheless,it is Harvey who finally gets the goods on Philby and his friends in this version.
Sometimes spiritual truth is better than literal.It is true that Angleton and other upper class twits at CIA all wanted to be British twits,and that this envy blinded them to Philby,but it is not true that Harvey is the one who got Philby.Unpretentious people like Harvey in MI5 got Philby.
There is a wonderful homage to Lawrence of Arabia at the end of Part 1 where Philby's KGB controller tells him he has to go home."HOME" Philby repeats,like Peter O'Tool as Lawrence,knowing that for them there is no home.

One troubling recurring theme is that the Bay of Pigs failed because of the betrayal of a Communist spy inside the CIA.Everyone in Miami knew all about the planned Bay of Pigs landing-it was a military operation involving thousands of Cubans.Cubans are more talkative than Woody Allen on speed. Three Cubans couldnt keep a secret,let alone thousands.And what is this secret?That they are finally going to liberate Cuba?
What created the Nazi movement was the idea that German soldiers were stabbed in the back in WWl.The excuse that Bay of Pigs failed because the CIA was stabbed in the back is a nutty,Nazi idea.THe close relative is that the Tet Offensive was also the fault of some US Communist and that Vietnam could have been won had not the Military been stabbed in the back by US pacifists.These ideas surface in THe Company and The Military Channel.
In the 3rd installment,all the paranoid fantasies of Angleton are vindicated,there is a Soviet mole in the CIA.The problem is that there were in fact several,that none of the real life moles were the ones Angleton fingered,and the only reason they were not caught earlier was because of the turbulence created by Angleton.

All Reviews by Fred Landis
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